The New Face of Learning
Will Richardson (who is single-handedly responsible for nudging me into this world of blogs, wikis, and podcasts) has an article in the October issue of Edutopia. It is called “The New Face of Learning,” and in it does a terrific job explicating the possibilities and challenges for educators of the web as we now know and use it.
Here are some quotes from the piece. First, on learning:
In this new interactive Webworld, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. I have become, at long last, that lifelong learner my teachers always hoped I would become. Unfortunately, it’s about thirty years too late for them to see it.The good news for all of us is that today, anyone can become a lifelong learner. (Yes, even you.) These technologies are user friendly in a way that technologies have not been in the past. You can be up and bloggingin minutes, editing wikis in seconds, making podcasts in, well, less time than you’d think. It’s not difficult at all to be an active contributor in this society of authorship we are building.
Second, on educators using these technologies in their classrooms:
When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus. And so they might never learn to podcast like the third and fourth graders creating the podcasts in Bob Sprankle’s class at Wells Elementary School, in Wells, Maine. They might therefore never publish a local museum tour, an interview with a local celebrity, or an oral history about their town that a billion people could listen to. Nor will they ever get the chance to collaborate in a blog with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, like April Chamberlain’s students at Paine Intermediate School, in Trussville, Alabama, and learn firsthand what it’s like to be a Screaming Eagle. Or share stories about the places they live at Wikiville.org.uk, where hundreds of kids from around the world have started writing and connecting. Or teach calculus to thousands of interested readers from around the world, as do the Canadian students in Darren Kuropatwa’s math class at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
And, lastly, for the big picture:
But I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won’t be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners? Or did we cling to old ideas, old models, and old habits and drift more fully into irrelevance in our students’ eyes?
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