Charting a Way through Chaos, Part 1
“With the proliferation of information and the convenience of access to this vast ocean of information, it is the primary responsibility of the teacher to chart a way through this chaos, to provide order and create the conditions to encourage a deep approach to learning.” (Garrison & Anderson, 2003, location 580)
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This quote from E-Learning in the 21st Century comes in a broader context that there are three domains that influence student’s perception of what it takes for them to succeed in a course – assessment, curriculum, and teaching (Ramsden, 1988, as cited by Garrison & Anderson, 2003, location 561.) The manner in which facilitators put themselves forward in these domains sends the one of two messages to students: be superficial with rote memorization, or be deep thinkers.
I am a child of technology. As the third generation in my family whose employment is/was based on their computer skills, technology as part of learning is like ducks and water. The WWW and a search engine is no different to me than a yellow pad, a copy machine, and the Dewey Decimal system. They are all tools used in the same process that I’ve always known for learning – you have a question, you look for an answer.
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The author’s point is about creating an environment where students create meaning from their knowledge, rather than just regurgitate lecture notes. How a teacher creates this environment in the Information Age apparently seems scary to some, but it just isn’t for me. As a learner, I am no different in this Age than my grandfather was before me. I must learn to evaluate sources of information on their merits. That, for me, is the essence of critical thinking. This is the role that I feel a facilitator should take.
And, from my perspective, there is no better lesson plan that experience. There is nothing a mother could say to her child about safe sex that isn’t learned the second he’s been told his girlfriend is pregnant. When I cite an unreliable source is the moment in which I learn not to trust everything I find on the WWW. I don’t want a facilitator to tell me the source is unreliable; I want the facilitator to show me that the meaning I created from that information was invalid, irrelevant, etc.
Garrison & Anderson’s statement above, however, doesn’t come close to delivering the message about learning in the Information Age that screams from these two videos from Dr. Michael Welch at the Digital Ethnography Project at Kansas State University.
A Vision of Students Today
The problem, for educators, is not just access to information from a library on steroids. The problem is being relevant to our students lives in the Information Age. I’ve often thought about whether there have been previous generations of educators who have endured such a dramatic change in the educational environment as those of this generation. After viewing this video, I think the reality of life as an educator (which I long ago decided wasn’t really my cuppa tea) just overrode everything I thought I’d learned about teaching from this program. I may be a working adult, in an online program, but I am still in an ivory tower. How can a modern educator even begin to touch the lives of these students ????
The Machine is Us/ing Us
I love this video – a history lesson, a ‘technology’ lesson, a sociology lesson, an anthropology lesson – all wrapped up in an excellent demonstration of what “Web 2.0″ means. Web 2.0 certainly offers many options for a collaborative, constructivist classroom, either online or F2F. Forward-thinking companies such as Google, Facebook, etc. are both creating a problem and solving it for us. They contribute to the WWW, which is changing the way our brains are wired, while at the same time showing us how to connect with our student’s lives. The challenge is for educators to not fear the technology monster, but to tame it.
References:
Garrison, R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-Learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice. Taylor & Francis e-Library. NY, NY.
