I had only recently in the last few years started to hear some buzz about Wikipedia's surprising level of reliability when I started to assimilate into the education community through music education conferences and workshops. I had no idea about the rating system or the coordination that goes into maintaining pages on the site though, and I was quite shocked at first! Now I almost feel compelled to go out and start looking for pages to supplement, although I probably won't go that far until I have more free time on my hands. This in itself goes to show that education and learning are collaborative because complete strangers around the world are coming together to provide anyone with an internet connection easy access to knowledge for free. I think it’s important to keep the love of learning alive in students and providing such easy access to knowledge will help fuel this love, but it is important that we teach students to evaluate the credibility of their sources and teach them how to research properly.
I think it’s extremely valuable to have such a massive database of knowledge on pretty much anything you can think of in a digital and changeable format. Information changes constantly as new things are being discovered, and as those discoveries happen the documentation can change with it in real-time, and we will never lose that access as long as technology still survives. There has been so much documentation, culture, and knowledge lost to age or deliberate destruction over time, more than we could even fathom. I often think about the Library of Alexandria and wonder what information we could have still had access to if it hadn’t been devastated. I find it comforting that there is so much information stored on the internet that will never be destroyed.
What is Connectivism? Connectivism is, "a learning theory that explains how Internet technologies have created for people to learn and share information across the World Wide Web"(Siemens, Downes). Connectivism has redefined classroom learning. Bringing technology into the classroom has allowed students to ask questions and learn more than ever before, because they have so much knowledge and resources at their fingertips. Bringing technology into the classroom and teaching students how to use it is allowing students to be life long learners. When they are done in the classroom and move on to the next grade or graduate, students still have the skill to conduct research and be a digital citizen and an empowered learner. information up way beyond the classroom walls.
Having technology in the classroom is improving student learning in tremendous ways! These students are able to connect and interact with real world issues IN REAL TIME. To include when educators use Skype or some sort of chat to speak with people from all over the world on a topic that the students themselves are not living first-hand, but can connect with someone who is. This is allowing our students to become global collaborators. Or another example used in class today was, having 5th graders write to a state representative on an issue that they themselves could not vote on, but would be impacted by ( making cursive mandatory ). They were able to write an essay on if they should or should not have to learn cursive and send it to their state representative. This is impactful, because not only are the children improving their writing skills, but they are learning how to use their voice in a positive way.
An iconic lie by three high school teachers and four college professors. This line was about as believable to us students as,
"It'll be obvious if you don't read the book, SparkNotes isn't a good idea."
Let's be real, most people have never actually made it past the third chapter of Lord of the Flies and have flocked to sources like Quizlet and SparkNotes.
Anyone that was born before or in this generational gap we are in would probably say utilizing those sites mentioned above is cheating. How?
We are engaging our students in the Internet of Things, they are learning valuable research skills, and at the end of the day, if they the assignment is constructed in a way that encourages critical thinking rather than simple fact-based answers, the origin of the knowledge of the book is insignificant.
The bottom line is that these resources are here and they aren't going anywhere. in fact, there will always be even a better and more efficient option taking their places in a blink of an eye. Instead of shunning them and kids taking extreme measures to cover up their inevitable usage. Utilize those incredible sites and take advantage of the wealth of knowledge (and even the occasional radically off base ideas) and have the kids make an impact and engage them in much bigger ideas.
I love the idea of teaching kids credibility online by using the "World's Rubric" in Wikipedia. I think using that and having students edit those low graded pages is an incredible way to validate student work.
There are a lot of benefits to having parents that are much older than those of my peers. For example, we we had a lot of financial freedom and were able to embark on really spectacular trips and my parents really saw no need in being strict with me. They had been teachers for 20 years, after all.
There are also a lot of quirks.
For example, my dad still believes seat belt laws are an intrusion of his civil rights and my mom has no retention of how to attach a file to an email.
(FYI :
The cell phone situation has always been a battle with me and my parents. In 5th grade I made a powerpoint presentation of why I should be allowed 1. for more than an hour of TV a week and 2. to have a cell phone.
They were so impressed with my tech savvy ways that I got the screen time and the little flip phone where I was allowed to send AND RECEIVE 25 text messages a A MONTH.
(For reference of how ridiculous this is, I have sent and received 17 messages in the last four minutes.)
Recently I took myself off of our phone plan because they could not wrap their head around the fact that 2 GB of data was not going to work for me.
Today when we were discussing the different generations, all my parents' annoyance with my phone habits made complete sense. They really did not get me. They are Boomers and I'm a Millennial that is REAL close to being a spime, delta, a doom, or whatever those little nuggets want to be called.
They have no comprehension of what my life is like in terms of my social media presence and how my relationships are constructed because when my dad was my age he didn't even have a landline and my mom was off in Europe backpacking with stationary in her bag.
My mother does try to understand, though. In her own classroom in Newport, WA she was extremely passionate about her document camera and the Apple TV where she could connect the HD version of the 1960's version of Romeo and Juliet and easily cut the boobie scene.
My dad, on the other hand, keeps his technology presence slimmed down to Facebook, texting, the DVR and the laptop IF his email stayed logged in. He nearly had a conniption when I tried to show him how to work our Kindle Stick.
I'm so excited to slowly start to incorporate more tech into their lives and watch the smoke flow from their ears.
In the mid-twentieth century, the communications theorist and philosopher Marshall MacLuhan predicted the rise of the Global Village, that moment in human history when a singular, collective human identity will overcome the variety of dispersed nationalistic and ethnic identities that fragment the human race. As people become more inter-connected, the differences between us that cause conflict will--in theory, at least--begin to dissolve, leading to a human race that can accomplish incredible things as a collective. This idea, it seems, lies at the heart of the Connectivist philosophy of education.
That "in theory" part is important, however. The Global Village that MacLuhan envisioned is possible, but as anyone who has spent a little bit of time on the internet has probably learned, global inter-connectivity has its dark side. Internet trolls harass people from behind a veil of anonymity. Political parties (both domestic and abroad) spread misinformation, or at the very least focus discourse to suit their agenda, and their propaganda is reblogged, retweeted, and shared on Facebook into channels of information that we increasingly narrow to suit our biases.
As educators, we need to prepare our students to best utilize the enormous wealth of information available to them online, and also to navigate the minefield of misinformation and trolling that exists on the internet. Digital citizenship is also a key skill. They need to understand that the people they interact with online are real people with real feelings, and that they shouldn't do anything online that they wouldn't do in person, both because they might hurt someone and because their behavior online constitutes a very real and very public permanent record.
The ISTE standards represent a good set of guidelines for teachers and for student learning goals to help us integrate these vital Global Village skills. Ideally, every classroom would have a 1-to-1 connected device to student ratio, and the OSPI would implement standards that more clearly align with the way students best learn in the twenty-first century. Project based learning in a flipped classroom environment in which students pursue independent research using skills taught by a teacher, before coming together for teacher-guided discussion, seems like the most effective way to help students learn how to learn in the 21st century.
I was primarily homeschooled until I entered high school, and I remember the whiplash of going from a largely self-directed learning environment at home to the more rigid, teacher-centered learning environment in the school system. I want to cultivate my students' own curiosity and interests, and help them use the brilliant new tools available to them (like Wikipedia, Google "site: " search, etc.) to learn those things.
Further, I am thrilled by the idea of helping my students to connect directly with other teachers and other classrooms all over the world. My experiences traveling to China and Taiwan during and just after college helped broaden my horizons exponentially. International travel was such a formative experience that I came to believe that it should, ideally, be a requirement for college graduation. Unfortunately, many people do not have the resources to travel--at least not physically. The internet makes international communication cheaper and easier than it has ever been. If your students are learning about another country, why not try to connect in-person to someone from that country?
I am more than ready to embrace connectivism. It might be tricky if I'm not in a school district that has intentionally tried to create space for it, but hopefully all our school districts will be like Enumclaw in the next decade.
