Bit By Bit

Notes from
Professor Angela McFarlane: Online Communities of Learning: Power, Disruption, Technologies

Technorati Tags: angelamcfarlane, BLC07

The tension between people and technologies is very powerful.

The Rhetoric of the Knowledge Society:

• Assumptions that everything has/will change
• “Techno-romatiticism” (can’t just give the technology to students and get out of the way… most of us are here today because somebody helped us)
• 20 years of a future which was a disappointment
• Tensions between views of learning

• knowledge as ‘deliverable’
• knowledge as ‘constructable’

• you can not do it for somebody else… they have to do it themselves

Direct Impact Model (DIM)
-same old practice being done with new technology… no improved attainment.

2 Camps:

• We just haven’t crossed the “threshold”… haven’t used enough technology yet.
• Or… the kids are learning things that aren’t showing up in the tests

Socially Contextualised Impact Model
There is Institutional Learning and Self-directed Learning

In Western culture, we give our kids a lot of autonomy… which then changes when they get to school.

How much of the tech time (in self-directed learning) is banal and trivial? Just how many are having enriching and productive experiences of digital media, and online communities?

Most don’t have the communities.
When you sit and play a game by yourself… most kids aren’t advancing…

Meaningful Learning Disrupts
if you empower people, they become “antsy” and that’s disruptive

• Teacher roles
• Learner behaviours
• Ideas about learning
• Models of knowledge

What we’re trying to do is complicated… we’re trying to bring together media/tools to everyone… bring content… and bring them together in some meaningful task.. most people can do this quite well… but most leave out the Pedagogical Model… what Alan was talking about… a plan to be able to solve anything

If you left your school tomorrow, how long would your innovative whatever stay…? Tough question… Darren K. was talking about this the other day… sustainability…

What are kids actually doing?

• Lots of access at home… we should be leveraging that to use for community connections/using it meaningfully
• Schools are not good at connecting with communities… in terms of leveraging learning… for what kids are doing at home

Use of ICT is not well managed for learning

Fan Production

• Web 2.0 development
• Sites host a range of user generated content inspired by other cultural forms eg books, TV, film, games
• eg: PAL Union, established by fans in 2001… fan fiction… reader input helps direct the writer

Potential of Blogs… or sites where people come together

• Efficient
• Exchange of ideas
• Multiple contributors
• Rich content type

Community… must interact in a common problem or interest space (Plant 2004:54)

Social blogging-

• ex. Group Blog at San Diego State University

Must move away from privileging the act of the individual over that of the team

We’ve lost sight of formal education as a process of personal enrichment

We don’t educate kids anymore… we train them.

We need to teach kids to ask good questions

What’s happening in successful online communities:

• Problem solving
• Requests for information
• Seeking experience
• Reusing assets
• Discussing Developments
• Making Contact

Site: BEEP (BioEthics Education Project)

Teachers’ view of some of the brightest and best Students (UK study):

• Lack skills in information filtering and quality assessment
• Don’t question the authority of information sources
• Have a diminished vocabulary compared to the past (teachers’ opinion)
• Don’t like to think
• Are too overloaded to care
• Cut and paste without engaging (too focused on what’s on the exam… only want to know that)

We are turning out generations of people who can take tests but can’t learn

Assessment Reform Group