Found the readings variable. For this post I am looking at the pre-readings, the week #1 readings and some of my own.
Really enjoyed CISCO’s Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century, Challenges of Participatory Culture and the New Structures and Spaces of Learning. Each of these allowed me to grapple with some of the concepts related to Connectivism, while mapping the ideas to the big picture changes which are impacting on my area of Vocational Education and Training in NSW (Australia). Our legislators and financial controllers are asking us to be more flexible in our delivery and assessment of our courses whilst at the same time ensuring we incorporate Workforce Capability development, Recognition of Prior learning (RPL) and Workplace Delivery and Assessment. Each of these articles resonated for me in these areas and have helped me to give an educational framework for these principles. i will pursue this theme through the course.
Another emerging theme for me is the concept of the technologies versus the required paradigm shift in our teaching and learning practices. Stephen in his course blog post of Sept 10 said of the connectivism critics: “These arguments, it seems to me, are circular. They defend the current practice by the current practice.” All of the web 2.0 and other Internet based tools available to us as teachers can become either tools to augment our current practices or a means to seriously change the way we do things. We need to get over the operational aspects of the technology first eg look and feel, functionality, etc.
The paradigm shift requires us to ensure we explicitly teach the life long and work based learning skills mentioned by CISCO, Jenkins and Siemens in the readings. Building these into our facilitated delivery and assessment will be an important part of this shift. At the same time that delivery and assessment to incorporate the key aspects of connections, collaboration, creation and employability skills.
I suspect Wellman’s piece on Little Boxes, Glocalisation and Networked Individualism will resonate more as the course progresses. One of the ironies for me will be how this mass participation course with no f2f contact will create a meaningful network or “Affinity Space” (Clinton et al) rather than a convenience.
September 14, 2008 at 4:04 pm
In the Moodle Forum I noted a post from Jenni Parker who posed the question re “good informants”.
I replied “… The problem will be deciding which are “good” informants. For me the issue from a teacher/facilitator perspective is how to explicitly “teach” the key employability skill of discernment, where we all receive huge amounts of information from our connections and need to sort them into sensible meaning.
For many of our students, it’s also about recognising what is “valid’ to meet the needs of the standards based curriculum. George mentions in his “New Structures” article the challenges of “validating information accuracy and determining quality” (page 4), albeit these challenges are somewhat further down the track after the connections have been made. “
September 14, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Also in the Forum is Geoff Cain’s post about the impact of networks on knowledge. I responded with “… is the issue the tools and gee whiz of what I can do with this iPhone or Twitter account eg collect more information and collect more opinions.
Or, as teachers, do we help our students to sift, incorporate a range of ideas and then somehow validate what they’ve “learnt” against some set of criteria?
September 17, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Hi Grant – you make an important point: “Internet based tools available to us as teachers can become either tools to augment our current practices or a means to seriously change the way we do things.”
I suspect you’ll be addressing this more in your posts over the next few weeks…but I’d like to hear more about your views on how you see it. Are tools leading to a change in how we do things? Or, in your own experience, are the tools more focused on augmentation? I’d also like to hear more from you in terms of your views of how things ought to be. In a perfect world of control, how would you like to arrange things?
George
September 18, 2008 at 11:35 am
Hi Grant
George has asked you to think about whether tools lead the change or augment things. On first reflection, and thinking about the way the technology has been used in South Western Sydney, you can use tools to engage staff in changing. for a long time the augmentation argument has been used, especially in the Vocational Training and Education area, as our teaching and learning often revolves around practical “spanners and hammers” areas, and there is a very large element of social interaction for part-time learners.
This is ahard one that I’d like to come back to
September 21, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Hi Grant
I am enjoying your posts. The argument about tools for augmentation or tools for change really reasonates for me. At the moment in my corner of the organisation its still about tools as toys. The focus is really on augmenting our delivery. I believe that for technology to bring about changed practices we need to providing collaborative support in which teachers are encouraged to research, develop, and create
teaching/learning resources that do something different. To me there is just a trinkering at the edges of change.
At SWSI we have yet to begin to talk about the tension between compliance and creative at an organisational level. There are pockets of significant innnovation and change which are not being supported to flourish.
There are some very creative people who are like ‘beacon nodes’ but it is tricky to connect however with optimism overtaking me courses like this one really can direct our thoughts and actions in rich and diverse ways and show us one way to the future of education.