Most teachers never think about the classroom. While it may seem odd in a course about distance education, we need to acknowledge some realities about that box we call the “classroom.” Please read On the Classroom and tell me what you think about it.
Many members have not yet posted much and at least a few are still struggling with the technology. As I indicated in a previous post, there is a method in my madness. The EduBuzzword is “Learner Centered.”
Learner centered is one of those oxymoronic phrases that educators use when they mean one thing but want to make it sound better than it is. There really is such a concept as “Learner Centered” but it can’t really be applied to schools where the teacher (or the school) gets to decide what the learner will learn. There’s something amusingly wrong about any program that declares itself to be learner centered and then requires the students to attend class at a given day and time for a prescribed number of hours.
For this class, we’re incorporating tools which you can use to create a learner centered environment of your own and will, perhaps, provide some insight into how some of these learner-controlled technologies can be put to use in online courses.
They fall into three categories — blogs/gators, community, direct message.
Blogs/Gators: I spend some time on this subject earlier in the week so I won’t belabor the point now. The key issue here is that blogs and aggregators provide a mechanism for reading and writing. You automatically become a participant in the professional discourse on Distance Education. These writings — your postings and your responses to others — provide the fodder for my assessment activities. Most of you have noticed that there are no tests in this course. You’ll have to do a final project to demonstrate mastery, but I don’t believe in tests as an assessment tool. Your blogs demonstrate your performance mastery each and every week. For those of you who maintain that online students must be more self motivated, this is one mechanism where I can help those who maybe aren’t quite so motivated on their own. You must write every week. You must read every week. If you want the best grade, you’ll do it almost every day and not wait until Sunday morning to post the minimum amount.
Community: TappedIn provides a community of educators. It’s kind of like a campus. In many ways, it’s what I’d like to see Blackboard become, but don’t get me started on the short comings of Blackboard. It’s too early in the semester. TappedIn gives us a place to hang out, meet people who aren’t in the class, and find people who may have similar goals and interests. Where the blogosphere provides one kind of community, TappedIn provides another — one that includes chat, repositories, and other features that are under your direct control.
Direct Message: IMs provide us with the ability to “see who else is here” in a real time basis. One of the things that we do in a school is look around at the other people while we’re there. In the typical Bboard course, you can’t see who else may be there with you. IM gives you a window into the shared online space that represents each of us as we participate in course activities. Some people will appear a lot. Some won’t appear at all. It’s a way for us to share, not only with me, but with each other.
Later in the course, we’ll be looking at a basic theory called “Equivalency Theory” that provides the theoretic framework for these tools but for now, we’ll just use them as a given and, once you’ve had a chance to become acclimated, we’ll be discussing their use from a meta-cognitive perspective.
There’s an interesting event going on over on Supercool today. The following is from the 5am PST post:
Breaking the Chains…
I always enjoy reading the articles that talk about what kind of students that we need to create for our future, and I feel strongly that this is where I head in my own classroom. However, as I talk to many friends in education, they feel that they are educating industrial age workers, largely because the system is itself a product of the industrial age.
They’re planning on a about a post per hour thru the day from some of the more active and interesting people active in the EduBlogosphere.
Will Richardson has been one of the front runners in the educational blogosphere. This post on scaring kids reports a phenomenon that’s just way too common.
Weblogg-ed » Let’s Just Scare the #$%& Out of Them, Ok?
Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.
Think about what your administrations might do if presented with the notion that teachers need to know about tools like My@pace and Facebook.
Yesterday we thought about the concept of “Distance.” (Well, I did anyway. Your voices were conspicuously absent from that consideration.) Today I want to take up the idea of “Education.” See Considering Education.
What ARE we trying to accomplish?
Is it a good idea? Not? Why?
Do we talk the talk and walk the walk?
I’ve already seen a couple of the “I’m too old” comments come thru and this post from CogDogBlog showed up:
“I Can’t” is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy » CogDogBlog
But I am tuned in now when I hear people recite thing things they “Can’t” do. Don’t tell me the things you “Can’t” do and tell me the things you are trying to do.
Good advice.
A couple years ago, Jenova Chen began working on some “different” kinds of games. One of those games is FlOw. It can be played online but needs a flash player. The game play is simple, the graphics are almost geometric, and the soundscape is almost mesmerizing.
There’s a link to Chen’s site at the bottom of the wikipedia entry. A fascinating place to visit.
As we consider the idea of “distance education” it might be useful to break down the idea into its component parts.
See Considering Distance for some additional questions you might fold into your thinking about distance education.
There’s often some confusion about what we’re doing with all this stuff. There is a method in the madness. The challenge we all face in the networked World 2.0 is trying to keep track and make sense of it all. A key tool for that is the feed aggregator.
See Why a Feed Reader for an explanation.
This has always fascinated me.
One of the big rationales I hear about school sports is that “it teaches the kids so many great lessons like teamwork, and discipline, and dedication.”
Yea, ok. And I’m not interested in buying that particular bridge. I’ve seen the real one in Brooklyn and I’m pretty sure it’s not for sale.
But if we REALLY believe that sports teach, then what about games? Chess? Sodoku? Crossword puzzles?
I’m not talking about the lame “educational crossword puzzles” here with the 25 vocabulary words floating in a sea of black. I’m talking real crossword puzzles with words like “alae” and “engender” … but we don’t use those. And there’s a reason.
Education gets in the way.
As a teacher you have a curriculum to cover. You need to teach the kids THOSE words. It’s not important that the kids learn MORE words, because as a teacher, you’re responsible for teaching a specific set. They’re the words they’ll be tested on. That’s what you’re supposed to teach. I understand.
But that’s also why most “educational games” suck.
Sports — if they can be said to teach lessons — teach big lessons. Kids don’t learn how to play basketball there. They have to KNOW basketball before they can get on the team. They learn teamwork, not traveling. They learn discipline, not dribbling. They learn lessons that aren’t spelled out in detail in a syllabus approved by a certified blue ribbon panel of educators. Kids learn these lessons through engagement, sweat, performance, and repetition. They see the people who have the teamwork, the discipline, and the dedication and they see what those lessons mean — how they get played out in real life. They’re relevant. They’re meaningful. To the kids.
They’re not isolated words, stripped of context, artificially constructed to be a “fun activity to achieve a meaningful educational end.”
Over the course of this semester, I’d like to explore some of these ideas:
- Why educational games suck
- How to get education out of the way so learning can happen
- What is it about “fun games” that makes them fun
- Would it be possible to use a “fun game” to teach a lesson when the game isn’t based on the content of that lesson
