The now famous litany against fear from Frank Herbert’s Dune isn’t a bad anodyne for the anxiety some of you may be feeling:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
I bring this up because Colby made an excellent point about worry and I had a nice IM exchange with another of you last night about a similar subject. It might be useful for you to know that you’re not alone. It’s happened in every single instance of this course that I’ve taught. I responded to my previous classes with this breakdown of “Thinking Like a Learner”
Thinking Like a Learner
This course is about learning. Paying attention to fulfilling the letter of the syllabus and grading rubric is not thinking. That’s gaming. Gaming is possible but the pay off isn’t as great.
One of the problems with trying to teach this class is that, as teachers, you’re all indoctrinated to focus on Education and a lot of what you know instinctively about learning has been subsumed. Before we can talk about how to use some of these exotic technologies to deliver instruction, we first need to get back to a basic understanding of learning. The challenge for me is to help you acquire the skills to use the tools as learners, to help you become as fluent in blogs, feeds, gators, IMs, and chats as you are with textbooks, whiteboards, syllabi, and lecture. You need to master these tools before you can expect to understand how to use them in your art. The key to that mastery is understanding how to use them to *learn* with before you try to use them to teach.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
To be completely honest IMs, chats, and gators, are completely new to me, but it is forcing me to get out of my comfort zone and try things I never thought I could. Some of this stuff is like a foreign language to me, but it gives me a better perspective of what my students go through when I introduce something completely new . Each day I am getting a little more comfortable with these tools. I am excited about getting proficient with these tools, so in return I can incorporate them into my teaching.
August 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Some of the technology we have been using is new to me. However, I love to learn new things (even if at first I feel frustrated that I will never get the hang of it). If we do not learn these things how will we ever be able to teach our students about them??? We need to be able to keep up with the new technologies of the world today–it will be very beneficial to us as teachers.