Think about how the Internet has impacted your own personal learning, communication, and sense of community. Write a new post that includes a screenshot
showing your participation in a social or professional network, and a summary of how you use that network for personal or professional connections or for new learning. In your post reflect on:- When does the Internet help your learning? When does it distract from good learning for you?
- How might your answers to these questions be similar to or different from the answers your students might give?
- How might you support your students in using the Internet as their own personal learning space?
The Internet can be a huge help to my personal learning in a hundred ways. I do online research, read about current events, get answers to quick questions (just last weekend, I used my phone to Google the scientific name for lapis-lazuli when my daughter asked if the gems we were looking at were also lapis). I looked to youtube for information about using skitch and a couple of other apps while deciding which one to present in our group project. Of course, I also watched a few other videos that were suggested in this ad-intensive business, including a REALLY funny analysis of the worst music of 2012 before I reminded myself that I was supposed to be doing something productive with my time. There are so many different personal and professional possibilities: facebook and email/newletters to stay in touch with my friends and family. I have porfessional resources on RSS feeds through my Google Reader account, and scoop.it and diigo for more related articles, and memberships for an ERWC group and haiku and CTAP and groupfusion etc for ways to incorporate more information into professional practice, and linkedin for professional networking and so many more that I don't even check into often enough because I still have to do the job - which is the reason I'm looking at all of these resources. It can be overwhelming.
It seems like all knowledge is somewhere on the Internet. And so much misinformation! To use a personal example, a few years ago, someone made a wikipedia entry about my site along with blurbs about the teachers. Then someone logged in and changed some of the blurbs and, as it turned out, I was actually not myself but Antonio Banderas in disguise. Hey, at least the hacker made me sound awesome!
But just last Friday, one of my colleagues read a report to her class about how Gerry Ford traveled through time to shoot Abe Lincoln in an effort to show students that not all info on the Internet is true or useful. In an era when I have at least one student ask every year if The Odyssey was a true story, it's a little alarming that the Internet makes it even more difficult to tell fact from fiction at times. Students are unwilling to distrust the main source of their entertainment - they insist constantly that their high-volume headphones don't distract anyone (even when I'm telling them that the irregular beat I hear from across the room is distracting to me). They insist that Family Guy is the epitome of story-telling and that their time is better spent watching a cartoon in which a mentally deficient, overweight man-child fist fights a chicken-mutant-thing than doing any rational thinking of their own. Refusing, even, to explain why that scene might be so appealing to an audience when it has nothing to do with the rest of the story in the episode. Most of my students think that stopping every twelve seconds to check or respond to a text message is somehow helping them to concentrate on the task at hand until the next exchange. Maybe it's a particularly long week talking here, but a lot of younger people today seem to see technology as a teat rather than a tool. I sincerely hope that using more technology to drive education changes this; and it reinforces for me the need to make sure students who choose a fully online option have the conceptual view that technology is a tool and not an easy way to simply be somewhere else.
How to help students see that distinction? I'm struggling with that even with my own kids. At home and at school I find myself repeating things like, "We're doing work right now," or, "How is that ________ going to help you in real life?" It helps to keep students task oriented. There is a specific job to do, with specific time frames. We use the Internet to do things, not merely to be kept from being bored. I'd hate to limit students to particular links because that negates the kind of authentic research that students should be able to do. Maybe a personal dashboard or portfolio - like when we had to keep our personal dictionaries in 2nd grade, or show a collection of sites used for research like an annotated bibliography for a report. Tools like diigo or scoop.it and evernote would come in handy for this. And these are shareable, so students can access research sites from their peers and/or teachers on their quest to find more/more relevant information. I think I convinced myself here: task orientation along with a way for students to keep track of info and share relevant (annotated) research places would help students see the Internet as a tool rather than a toy. Maybe it's something that needs grow from the students - I have my personal self and my professional self, and the overlap is carefully controlled and has been since I was very young. My students rarely have that - maybe they are more integrated, or maybe it's a lack of maturity, but most people need to delineate what is private and personal from their job.
scoop.it is an online curatorial tool that allows members to "scoop" info or articles into a sort of online magazine; it also trolls through other members' magazines to find other articles of possible interest. I have a practice one with some resources to share with classes:
diigo is a bookmarking tool that allows members to tag and annotate links to websites and share lists with other people:
Google Reader is a tool that collects RSS feeds from bloggers and websites so that users are updated on changes and additions as they happen from the sites that are selected or "followed":
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