Reading: Learning in the Digital Age by John Seely Brown
- Information: gained independently
- Knowledge: transferred by a knower
With these two ideas in mind, I had to re-think what the educational goals for my students be at this time in history where technology is flooding our lives.
When I first started teaching, I thought technology is a cool tool to help the students learn, share, practice, and apply their learnings. And technology did help my students and I achieved all that.
As I gained additional experience using technology in my teaching, and with the fast growth of various Web applications available for educational use, I started noticing that the teaching has gone beyond just curriculum.
As much as we think the students are tech savvy, it is not true for all of them. The only thing I can say is that they are not afraid of technology. However, students lack web literacy skills, such as navigating, researching, and filtering. They also lack etiquette, or Netiquette. This is especially evident when I asked them to give constructive comments. Students tend to use shorthands/slangs in their comments, and the comments are usually very superficial, such as "very good," "I like it," "interesting," etc.
So teaching literacy skills and netiquette became part of the curriculum in order for the web tools to be effective.
As more Web 2.0 applications become available or even designed specifically for educational use, it also demands a great amount of time for the teachers to try out the application, think about whether it can benefit the students (and in what way), how to integrate the technology into the classroom (teaching how to use the technology to achieve curriculum goals). It is not an easy task for the teachers.
Anyway, coming back to "Educational Goals for learners in the digital age". Well, it really depends, doesn't it? Who is the learner? What is the aim of the instruction? I don't know if this is a question that can be answered easily. Then again, nothing in life ever is.
I really like this statement: "The only thing I can say is that they are not afraid of technology. However, students lack web literacy skills, such as navigating, researching, and filtering. They also lack etiquette, or Netiquette."
ReplyDeleteI think it's absolutely true. To assume that any learner has a grasp of the depth of their information by nature of their comfort with the internet is like saying that someone has an understanding of the depth of information just because they know how to read and are comfortable with books (or magazines).
Excellent point.
Keeping in mind who the learner is and what the goal of instruction is makes a difference, ato