Historically when a new technology comes along the trend is to initially use new medium in the same way, with the same content as what already exists, in education the example is to use the internet to post papers, or to make lectures available outside of the lecture theatre. This is fine, but it doesn’t aid learning, in a lot of cases it can have a negative affect. Making available a set of lectures that were recorded one year isn’t a replacement for giving the lectures again the next year. The challenge is to use the new technology in a new way that makes use of its potential, a good analogy might be using teletext just to present a newspaper review of a football match; later it was used to present real time scores and match summaries.
One thing the internet is very capable of is storing information and making it available to you. It is very easy to make your own information available to everyone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by putting information on the net you are helping people to learn about whatever topic it is. Sharing information isn’t the same as sharing knowledge.
For a learner what is important is finding the right information and then constructing some sort of understanding of it. This understanding can come out of discourse the learner engages in - with their peers, their lecturer/teacher, themselves. This is what needs to happen with the internet, it is what is happening in the places where it is being used well. Face to face discourse shouldn’t be disregarded though - very little comes close to that - but it can be complemented with blogs/wikis/podcasts/VoIP…
This is a post that I’ve had in draft for a while, then over the last few days there has been discussion about Blended Learning with a comment on why there will probably never be such a thing as a ‘Glow lesson’, and a presentation from BarCampScotland has been made available to listen to on why lecturers shouldn’t record their lectures. All this has prompted me into finishing this post off.
So what is it that I actually have to say? Well, my main point I suppose is that it is going to be interesting to see how Glow develops and what use teachers make of it, I personally don’t know enough about what is going to be possible for me to do (I don’t know what school I’ll be in, what subjects I’ll be teaching, what access I’ll have to computers; I also don’t know enough about how Glow will actually operate) but I will have to keep in mind that what I am doing with Glow has to be something worth doing with Glow, if it can be done as effectively without it then I need to change what I’m doing, or do it another way.
Another point I wanted to make is the importance of teaching not just certain subjects from the curriculum, but also teaching people how to make use of the information available to them and how to select the useful bits from the useless bits. With such a wealth of information available we need to know how to cherry pick the good bits - this is a more important skill than ever before.
And one final thing was the importance of making the most of new technology and not just using it in the same old ways, and also making other people realise this too. It is all to easy to just share resources that enable pupils to complete course related work (don’t get me wrong this is enormously useful - you shouldn’t expect every teacher to create a great resource for every topic, and often it is good to see things from another person’s perspective), but the best part comes when you can take the resources and create new activities around them that maybe weren’t possible before.
[tags]learning, glow, web2.0, education, collaboration[/tags]
Monday the 14th of April sees the publication of the draft outcomes for Technologies. I’m really looking forward to seeing what is in them and where we may be going, Technologies is such a broad name and it could cover anything we wanted it to, hopefully there won’t be a trap of covering everything - and in the end nothing to a reasonable depth. At the same time I hope we will not be sticking too closely to the ‘traditional’ view of technical where all we teach is how to make sawdust and filings, and instead we are able to position ourselves so we can teach at the forefront of advancing technologies and keep up with the demands of industry - whichever industry that may be at the time.