It happens again, and again, and again, and again …
John Pederson is a fellow twitterer – one of the almost 700 people I follow on Twitter – but I had to go to Remote Access to find a comment he left on one of Clarence’s posts, which brought me to THIS post on his blog.
It’s a learning project. It’s not a social networking project. It’s not a Web 2.0 project. It’s not an online community or a virtual world. Teachers need to experience and learn online learning. It’s built through a collaborative model of online learning and teaching. We aren’t building virtual schools or training more teachers. Leave that to others. This new collaborative model becomes the network around the network.
It’s eerily similar to what *I* said just the other day about teachers and learning. An idea that’s been brewing here for a few weeks surfaced in a completely different form from a completely different vector.
This synchronicity is endemic and it’s one of the ways you know you’ve got a network.
For me, the really fascinating meta-moment here was when I remembered a post I made about a year ago about having different people pop up with the same idea almost at the exact same time.
Ironically, just a few weeks later, Will and I were talking about the same things at the same time again.
This is what we mean when we talk about having a personal learning network. It’s having ideas, and seeing them validated (or occasionally invalidated) through the serendipitous application of the network. Note that neither John nor I are saying anything radically different here than Will Richardson and I and many others were saying last March.
What’s different is that we’re refining the ideas over time. We’re constructing a common belief structure — distilling it out of experience into some stronger spirit than simple practice.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:50 PM
I think being part of a personal learning community is an interesting experience. You are right that ideas are expressed and validated! This something that we all need, but seldom get in a regular classroom learning environment. I will admit that I was a questioner and always ready to discuss and debate topics during my undergrad classes. I soon became known as the overachiever or “that girl who made class go too long.” There was little true idea development or validation in that particular environment and it was often frustrating.
March 1st, 2009 at 5:46 PM
I agree that we rarely get this in a regular classroom learning environment. I think the online environment opens up so many doors. Not only are you communicating ideas with others in your class, but you are also communicating with people all over the world.
March 6th, 2009 at 11:16 AM
I think that having a personal learning environment does open the door for different ideas. It also opens the door for people who probably share the same ideas. I really don’t find that all surprising. I sometimes find contentment when somebody agrees with me on the same issues. I feel that I have been validated and that I am probably right. If somebody has a different view, then sometimes I question my opinion and think that “maybe I’m wrong”. Either way, it keeps you thinking and keeps you on your toes. It broadens the thought process and sometimes makes you think, “wow, I didn’t think of that!”
March 17th, 2009 at 9:51 AM
I agree with the video. The teachers that are older do not know how to use technology to teach their children especially in school. I am 35 and I have a MySpace account. I have done a search for people that I went to school with and have found very few people that I know that went to school with me or younger. Most people that are my age don’t have a clue how to use computers or technology. My son’s and his friends are totally different. I have about 50 of their friends on my MySpace page.
I know when I taught my first online course last semester it was the best experience that I had ever had because I went in over my head. I didn’t think about the homework that I had to grade when I started teaching but I know next time I am going to make changes. I had 30 students and they had 4 assignments one week and 3 assignments the next plus a test. That was 120 assignments a week that I was grading. I was swamped. It didn’t dawn on me at the time when assigning the work that they would be swamped with homework as well as me.
Children these days know more about technology than what their teachers know and they know where go to find information. One thing that bugs me about teachers giving my children an assignment is that they find the information and copy and paste it and take it to school and turn in the work. The teacher has never said anything about plagiarizing the work. I don’t know if teachers don’t know that there are programs out there that can check to see if the work has been plagiarized or they just don’t care.
I think in order for students to get the best out of technology that teachers need to learn how to use it and enjoy it instead of thinking that it is a pain to have in the classroom.