digital literacy

I was so pleased and interested to see all the course readings assigned that dealt with digital literacy. Learning and thinking in the 21st Century will have so much to do with technology and all the changes that it brings to knowledge creation, access, and dissemination that I think we absolutely must be familiar with the issues and challenges associated with this educational reform movement. Being literate in a digital era means understanding technologically-induced changes, as well as having the knowledge and skills to make sense of the world around you. Especially for young learners, having so much information and knowledge available at a mouseclick has the dangerous potential to make learners so conditioned to ideas that they forget how to question pieces of knowledge that are new to them or that they don't understand. Underlying the communication and tech skills that learners must possess to succeed in the 21st Century, is the ability to ask questions and the desire to be curious. Without these ways of thinking about knowledge and information, the possibility for nonstop access to it isn't of much use.

drinking the Connectivism koolaid

In reading about Connectivism, I felt enthusiastic about the future of learning, communication, and information access. Although we debated the potential for Connectivism to be the next great learning theory, I am persuaded to believe that it could be a powerful influence on the way we teach and learn in a our rapidly evolving world of information. This approach seems to take into account the things we know about learners (we are social beings, our language gives birth to our thoughts, etc.), as well as the networks that connect us and our knowledge/experience. I think we are ready to move beyond learning theories that focus inward and embrace a way of thinking about learning that is more external, more open. As Siemens tells us, we do not live in isolation, nor should we learn in isolation. It is through the networks we establish that we will make sense of our own thinking and establish a mechanism for ongoing learning for a lifetime. With connections becoming the primary focus of learning, the traditional hierarchies of learning will be broken down even further, thus bringing into question the role of instructor. In viewing learning as a networked phenomenon, knowledge does not reside with just one individual, as it commonly has in the past, but within communities and in a distributed manner. 

Google & more skepticism

While skimming my google alerts this morning, I recognized the name of a former colleague and friend who had recently posted on the ACRLog about Google's crawlers picking up a news story that contained misinformation (this was also mentioned in today's Chronicle). The results of this oversight on the part of the media was a small, although not insignificant, trading war with related stock prices dropping dramatically. Wow! This illustrates the power of Google to bring information to the masses quickly (even though it may be misinformation), but it also reinforces what I was trying to point out in my previous post: that it's okay to use these online tools to enhance learning and information-seeking, as long as we don't eliminate the human element (especially the thought process that we bring). Because that's what will get us into trouble.  

Vannevar Bush: paranoid kook or brilliant visionary?

Reading As We May Think for class really tickled my librarian sensibilities (memex, anyone?), but also made me consider the combination of skepticism and hope that comes with the prediction of new technologies and their impact on culture and society. While skepticism can limit the potential of new ideas and new ways of thinking, it is a key ingredient to questioning and curiousity in times of uncertainty. As long as it we do not allow it to squash innovation and invention, skepticism can be an ideal companion to hope. 

Dr. Bonk says "Plato was the first distance educator" for his use of writing and books in his teaching. I can imagine that there were many doomsayers of these technologies in Plato's day, as well, in addition to people who were skeptical of the printing press and other such wonders. What's interesting to me is that there are many people who predict the bad things, but not so many that are willing to consider the good that can come from these new ways of seeing/thinking/doing/knowing. 

That's why I was so happy to see another Atlantic article on our readingwhich  list: Is Google Making us Stupid? which discusses the almost blind adoption of the web as our primary means for communicating knowledge and information. The article makes us review the decline of our readerly selves who once indulged in long periods of learning, imagining, and enjoying through the written word into a society of info addicts feeding on the glut of online data through bites that we either self-select or that are fed to us without much conscious choice on our part. Although it is true we are reading fewer books each year, we are adapting to an information environment in which knowledge can be communicated and retrieved quickly and easily. This means we are more agile in our own thinking and reading. This flexibility brought about by new technologies can definitely be considered a good thing, unless we let it change the way we think and read permanently. 

We're still in a time of uncertainty. This, along with the importance of engaging/questioning the skeptics, is what I wanted to illustrate with the video I showed in class on 9/8/08: Epic 2014. It seems to me like these two articles from the Atlantic, one published in 1945 and the other in 2008, are excellent bookends for the video. I think all three pieces can help us come to terms with the way we predict the possibilities and question the potential of technology, especially its impact on the publication and dissemination of knowledge and information. 

my biggest worry

Here is what I don't want to happen as a result of reading all this cool stuff and learning about all these e-learning strategies with the read/write web: 

2.0 for 2.0's sake. 

What I learned from Immersion and try to bring to every instructional opportunity that I'm designing or implementing is to keep the learner's needs and my hopes for them as the driving force of everything. That means not letting zippy technologies or online enhancements determine learning outcomes. Right. But the more I learn about e-learning, the trickier I'm finding it to be steadfast in this. All things considered, I'd say this is a glorious problem to have. 

And if I don't let my worries get in the way, I may just leave this course with a bag of blended learning tricks that allow me to understand teaching and learning in a new light. In my environment (high education), we are embued in traditionalism when it comes to ways of organizing, measuring, and rewarding teaching and learning. Traditional formats, timelines, and assessments can limit the possibilities for learning as it moves from heirarchical to participatory, from face-to-face to online, from static to blended, from closed to open. 

So, you think you're blended?

Readings for our first (un)official class had me reconsidering my notions of blended learning. As a long-time believer in the teachings/research of Steven Bell, the original Blended Librarian, I imagined that I would find little in the readings that would be surprising to me. However, I soon discovered that, for the purposes of this course (and possibly IST, in general?), blended learning is not the convergence of instructional strategies, but the junction of instructional environments: face-to-face and online. Although this may seem like a simple definition, it brings with it all sorts of questions about what it means to combine these formats at the activity, course, program, and instituation level. The beauty of this is, there is not only one way to blend. Of course, this results in somewhat of a conundrum for instructors who wonder how (sychronous or asynchronous?), when (as bookends, in the middle, all throughout?), and why (learning is available on demand!) to blend. Fortunately, Dr. Bonk offered some guidelines for this:

• Enabling blends: learners can do something because of the web
• Enhancing blends: learners can do something better because of the web
• Transforming blends: learning changes completely because of the web

One of my favorite examples from the class lecture involved an example of blended learning in which students in a course were asked to interact with primary documents online found through the British Library. How exciting! This is one of the ways in which libraries are making themselves more relevant to online researchers and, by digitizing rare resources, they can bring their unique collections to the masses and enhance teaching/learning. 

one of the good ones

The first day of a new class usually sets me into a tailspin of excitement, anxiety, dread, and hope. During this rare semester in which I am taking a class, I have tried to reacquaint myself with what that means: be on time, be prepared, read assignments, make interesting comments, etc. As luck would have it, I have found myself in a class where thought, expression, and creativity are encouraged. I can't think of a time when I last had a class that grabbed my attention so immediately and, from the first class meeting, had me thinking about what I would do to satisfy course assignments, readings, and presentations -- all of which come with a myriad of options! This blog is intended as the record of my Weekly 2.0 Reflections for R685: The Web 2.0 and Participatory E-learning. As someone who is very concerned with how learning is measured, I hope the reflections I record in this blog will demonstrate my progress in this course, as well as the new ways of thinking/knowing that I adopt because of it.