From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able @ ELI

This presentation is given by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The description states “It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after speech, thousands more before the printing press was invented, and a few hundred more for the telegraph to arrive. Today, new ways of relating are constantly created and a new communication medium emerges every time someone creates a web application—a Flickr here, a Twitter there. How can we use new media to foster the kinds of communication and community we desire in education? This presentation will discuss both successful and unsuccessful attempts to integrate emerging technologies into the classroom to create a rich virtual learning environment.”

This kind of classroom of today is saying “to learn” is to acquire information, information is scarce and hard to find, trust authority for good information, authorized information is beyond discussion, and obey authority. Some of the people criticizing the  “back to basics” critique of new media literacy are saying we are pandering to students, neglecting basic literacy skills and it is difficult to implement. The response to this is that the critical folks of back to basics are the ones pandering to students, neglecting basic literacy skills (b/c basic skills are now including being digitally literate) and difficult to implement.

“Back to Basics” includes asking good questions (or one big question) instead of questions like, how many points is this worth?, how long does this paper need to be?, what do we need to know for this test?, etc. This new media scape all around us is challenging these assumptions. Information is everywhere, its not about authority its about good discussions, authority needs to be transparent, and learning is dependent upon participation and discussion (not just obeying authority). To learn is to share information, discussing, critiquing and ultimately creating new information. The old notion of your mind is container that needs to be “filled up”, it is creating meaningful connections of significance. So as educators, how do we create significance? How can we create students that can create meaningful connections?

1. Engage real problems (that matter to students)
2. Engage with students in this process

He is arguing that there is a lot of talk about Digital Natives, but there are no natives here. With the exception of Google, most of these new Web 2.0 technologies are less than 4 years old. So in essence, we (students & teachers) are all learning together. He suggests utilizing portals (looks like a combination of Wetpaint and Netvibes) with RSS feeds (from scholars all over the world engaging in the same subject matter), collaborative video (see his Youtube video for Library of Congress and his Twitter and World Simulation video), diigo (share links, highlight any page anywhere and add sticky notes), feed from wiki (logs edits, immediate feedback who is editing what, photos on left with pictures that get bigger with more participation), students share lecture notes, and discussion sections. His focus is on different ways of creating learning communities in his classroom through exploiting some of these technologies.

“Nobody is as smart as everybody”-Kevin Kelly

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, web 2.0

Educause Learning Initiative: U.S. 2009 Horizon Report

I am at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) for a couple of days. My current session is debriefing the technologies, trends and challenges of the 2009 Horizon Report (also see the workspace Wiki for the Horizon Project). The report has been downloaded over 45,000 times so far. The following is from a handout they gave out during the session (2009, The New Media Consortium):

Technologies:

• Mobiles
• Cloud Computing
• Geo-Everything
• The Personal Web
• Semantic-Aware Applications
• Smart Objects

Trends:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

Challenges:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content and media to mobile devices.

You can watch the session in full online.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, web 2.0 , eli