One of the questions that we should be considering is “What are we doing here?” After the first week’s technology flood and the running start, I suspect not too many people have had a chance to actually consider it.
There’s actually a method in my madness. Go read that article for a short explanation of what I think we’re doing here.
One of the axioms of teaching is that teachers teach the way they were taught. The goal in this class is not to teach you how change classroom teaching into online teaching, but rather to show you teaching online as a discipline in itself. You need to learn how to learn using the tools that aren’t available in the classroom and combined in ways that classrooms cannot support. You need to learn how to learn using these tools so that when it comes time for you to teach others using them, you’ll have the insight you need to be more effective in your practice.
That’s not a trivial step because most teachers know how to be students. Students know that a course is finite, that the information flows from point A to point B. They know there’ll be a test at the end and that success is measured in grade points.
You need to get over that.
Learners learn. They don’t worry about grade points. They don’t think about the test. They learn. They follow leads and think about ideas. They are active in their learning and one of the things they do is tell themselves explicitly what it is they’ve learned. They participate in the communities of practice that hold the knowledge that they pursue. That’s why you’re writing in your blogs. That’s why you’re building a network in your aggregators. And the thing about learners? When they operate alongside students in educational environments, and they’re a little careful about their focus, they inevitably out-perform students.
Learn to be learners. Learn to learn with these tools and stop periodically to think about how that learning is being accomplished for you. Observe it in your fellow travelers.
And there will be a test over this material, but the test will come long after the course is over, and I won’t be grading it.
August 25th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I think fogetting what we’ve learned about how to be a student in order to become a learner is one of the hardest tasks we face in life. We spend 13+ years (pre-school/kindergarten-senior year or college for some people) learning to be students, just to find out in a college class we need to forget about being students and learn be learners. Our minds have years of training in performing tasks for a grade and then suddenly we are asked simply to learn something new and we nearly go crazy because we aren’t given a rubric telling us exactly what we have to do to get the grade we want. However, this is the way things are in the “real” world. We aren’t given a study guide and rubric telling us what we have to do.
As you stated, “there will be a test over this material, but the test will come long after the course is over.” We will be tested over the material we learn in this class based on how we use what we’ve learned in the future in our own classrooms. How we use what we learned in this class will be evaluated by our students, peers, coworkers, employers, and ourselves.
August 25th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
You know…I am really bad about giving a rubric for everything, but you are right, there should be a time when students choose to do an assignment not to complete to expectation necessarily, but to learn something. I have to say, because of the manner is which this course is presented, it makes you strive to work harder, and think harder… #1 because the expectation is there, #2 because it was explicitly stated that just checking our lists off was not good enough, #3 because there is so much self-directed learning without specific directions for what to do. My question now is ….how do I get my students to produce quality thinking without giving them specific expectations as to the type of product I want??? I’m going to have to think about this for a few days.
August 25th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I agree with Deborah in that it is a practice that we have been taught. We have had so many years responding to grades earned through meeting expectations and completing tasks that it has limited us as students to think for ourselves. Now, we as teachers, are to develop rubrics on what the grading criteria is for each assignment or project. It cannot be vague so that the students will know what grades to expect for the effort they give. I have found that many students want you to spell out what “shows details, detailed explanation, and uses descriptive language” means in the rubrics. It has almost come to the point that they expect you to do the work for them and they have become lazy. We are raising a generation of followers, not explorers. If this continues, then there will be no engineers without guidance to help them use their resources, experiences, and imaginations to adventure into that vast unknown called the “future”.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:34 am
This is an interesting string of posts and really serves to underscore one of the goals of the course.
Deborah points out that you’ve all been taught to foster the kinds of thinking that Joanie points out has created a situation where you’re teaching “a generation of followers.”
I hope that I’m offering a different view of what learning might look like by putting you into situations that are unfamiliar and asking you to engage in practices that are largely foreign.
We’ll see how well it works
August 27th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
What are we doing here?
We need to break the mold? The teachers have a typical pattern of laziness that I have observed. Most teachers start out strong and then slowly die down and will flatten out and settle out at efficient enough. Learning to be Learners is engraved into our student notebooks in every class, every semester, until the day we graduate. I noticed at graduation though, my first exposure into the education environment (truly, beyond student teaching), that teachers as learners depreciates with seniority. The younger/newer hired individuals hit all the PDs and are at all the extra “stuff” they can fill into their calendar; whereas the senior teachers are making golfing T-times for the weekends. At lunch time I would even observe it as common practice for seniority to joke around about all the work and say they will just pass it off to the newbs. It was all for a few good laughs at lunch, but in reality, there was a true resistance to learning from the educators themselves.
In 685 Dist. Learning. we, the students, are learning how to use multiple resources to keep ourselves educated and to also keep those around us informed. We are not “settling” but going beyond what is needed to skip by and equipping ourselves, our students, and our colleagues with the resources for tomorrow’s future. If we stay on top of everything, we are doing what were supposed to be doing as a teacher; we are learning in order to educate others.
As for blogging, I look at it the same way as the article does. It’s not a final word and should never be viewed in that manner. My blog is written in a thought process that slowly develops over time. I may write something today and tomorrow, it will eventually morph into another logic. I learn through my blog. That in itself shows one reason why blogs should also be used in schools, we assess and analyze continuously through them. Blogs are a safe way to think out loud and find solutions to situations. It kind of reminds me all this studying/thought I’m doing for Action Research, but it’s put in words for the world to see. A teacher’s or student’s blog would allow for self evaluation.
Self evaluation in today’s time is not taken as seriously as need be. Technology can be an additive to this problem, but it can also be the solution.)
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