Now that my first online course is coming to a close, I have thought about what technology means to me personally, and what learning means to me. I wish above all that I could inspire my students to think of learning as I do.
I am not as purely constructivist as I imagined myself to be. I love to make connections, of course. In fact, at my son’s Back to School Night this week, his Computer I teacher shared a video which covered technological evolution and its impact on society. The video was probably less than five minutes long, but it relates to some of what this course has made me think about. Two things stood out for me in light of this course: the amount of original production and information that was published on the web between 2006 and 2008 exceeded the amount of recorded information for the last 5,000 years of civilization, and the students of 2006 are being asked to solve problems in technologically related careers that did not exist when they were students (and the video is already two years old). It made me think about the difference between how people are typically educated, and what is actually required to navigate society and find a ‘good’ job. We have to teach them the up and coming technology, but also how to problem solve. And it’s sometimes difficult to motivate students to solve problems whether or not they relate to their lives because so many of the students in my experience refuse to think for themselves when they can connect to the web and find readymade answers on Ask.com and the like. I still don’t have answers for some of my questions – such as how can we possibly motivate a person who desires to “fit in with” a culture where participating in any academic area is practically taboo? Is the relative isolation of the online environment the best option for these students? Or is the behavior so ingrained(habit) that no amount of incentive can overcome the conditioning (until perhaps they experience a lifestyle change and become adept adult learners)?
These questions nag at me because I am at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy: I consider myself to be a thinker and a writer and a teacher (and so a learner), therefore, I learn. I learn actively. I search out new information in a dozen ways – watching Chasing Mummies on television this evening, listening occasionally to MPR (though I rarely have five minutes of quiet to engage in those reports), reviewing math with my Jr. High Student off of (gulp) paper, and finding healthier no-salt and no-cholesterol recipes online for an ailing relative online. I also see connections between the food we eat and health and how the Ancient Egyptians were also quite aware of the effects of various foods and herbs. It’s fascinating. Learning is enjoyable. The door is wide open. This course has brought my own metacognition into working memory insofar as I am very aware of what I’m doing as I’m learning and integrating what I know with these new tidbits of information. Maybe it’s not that working memory is so freakishly long as it is that I’m pretty adept at organizing new schema and transferring between organizational methods. Whichever it is, I have been very aware this month of how ridiculously active my mind is even while watching television, and I see why some of my students in the past have been a little annoyed when I force them to analyze a media they are used to passively absorbing. Once those synapses form, it’s really hard to make them stop firing. Yet I wonder why anyone would want to stop them.
Understanding how learning occurs is interesting in so many ways as well. I think one striking realization for me was that learning on purpose is as much a behavior as it is a cognitive process of connections through a variety of experiences and social/environment lenses. Students with cognitive abilities sit in a social environment to construct new knowledge into meaningful learning. It’s all happening, and extremely complex, but successful learners make it a habit to learn. Last week, I asked my youngest daughter what she had done during her second day of school. She answered, “I don’t know.” When I asked her why she did not know, she told me, “Because I didn’t try to remember, so my brain just forgot it.” She’s only six, but she is already aware that it takes a conscious decision to learn. Based on the course and experiences as a learner and teacher (and partly on my insightful six-year-old’s revelation), I know that motivation is a huge factor in whether information ever finds a home in a person’s brain. A motivated learner will find a way to encode and learn to some extent; passive learners may or may not. Accommodating all learning styles is likely to help, but with the world changing so exponentially fast, I know I would perform a better service to give students the tools to solve problems, to make different styles of delivery work for them, than to cater to every changing preference. Giving students the tools, getting them to encode, is how we can make sure that they are able to successfully navigate the adult world.
Technology is an incredible tool to provide a variety of experiences and touch on several modalities in each lesson. I was surprised – and a little relieved – to see our readings take into account that the same technology can be as much an obstacle as a path. It’s easy to forget, sitting in that computer classroom at my son’s junior high school, that not every person has the kind of privileged access to technology as so many of us enjoy and take for granted. So seeing ways to help scaffold and support the less technologically savvy is well appreciated. Even as I’ve become much more comfortable in this online environment, I still feel like I have only touched the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much more out there to learn, and there’s going to be even more tomorrow.
I learned a lot about teaching theories in my teacher-prep program. Connectivism is new and, while I’m still not completely sold on the idea that it is a new stand-alone theory, it did make me think about how much technology is changing what we do and how we do it. In two years the world (only the world connected online) produced more information than the past 5,000 years. That says a lot, but more importantly – how can we possibly learn enough? It makes sense that some of our knowledge has to be stored away, like recipes in a cookbook, for those occasions when we need them. I have a vast repertoire of recipes, but only a few dozen are ingrained enough that I don’t have to stop and review my cookbook on occasion.
Specifically for my teaching career, I know that I will have to model more, expose students to more than one or two activity types to make sure information finds a home in their own varied schema. I am inspired to do more with experiential learning, and to continue with the constructivist approaches. This course has opened my eyes to the many ways in which students might need support as they deal with technology, and I really want to learn more about making online animations and interactive applications that will engage students – even if some of their motivation is from the novelty of the presentation. Introducing complicated reading with a cartoon-scenario would be a fun way to make students familiar with the plot of, for example Hamlet, instead of summaries – or having students make their own storyboard presentations where their talents could be published might get kids a little more excited about reading something that is practically in a foreign language to them. I want to make tutorials on how to do this for students. I want to incorporate blogs and wikis in my class; I want to make information as interesting and readily available to students outside of the classroom as inside. (I know I can be entertaining in person, but that does not always come across so well in text format). It’s exciting, and I feel fired up to continue learning!
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