Information Design I – Growing Up Digital
This week we are reading more background material in preparation for developing our prototypes.
Below you will find a link to the PDF of this article by John Seely Brown. Google his name if you want to read more of his work. He is the president of Xerox and created Xerox Parc which is a legendary experimental research center for technology located in Palo Alto. For instance, laser printers were first developed out of Xerox Parc. I have visited the complex, and it is totally awesome and mind-boggling with some of the products that are being developed.
The direct link for the pdf is: Brown: Growing Up Digital
Browse around his site if you want to read more of what he has to say. Most doctoral programs in education use his work when discussing learning, and constructing meaning for today’s students.
ASSIGNMENT: Now that you have read the three pieces on the 21st Century Learner, please write about what strikes you (either positive or negative) as well as any “aha” statements or concepts.
The focus I want us to really discuss is the implications of how learners put information together – what constructivism is all about. And how as designers of learning experiences, we keep in mind these learning principles in order to help students make meaning to the content we are teaching.
The concept of how we learn and how we communicate knowledge is the centerpiece of good teaching. And, it strengthens our argument for continuing to push forward the integration of technology tools in our classrooms.
In article “Growing Up Digital” the author explained four positive methods learners use to obtain information. These are navigation, discovery-based learning, judgment, and action. Learners add the new found information to their stored knowledge base and prior experiences to come up with a self constructed meaning that is understandable to them. 21st century learners are multiprocessors and will not make use of concepts and ideas unless they use them interactively in activities of interest.
Constructivism theory states that learning is an active process of creating meaning from different experiences. Constructivists place the learner at the center of the equation; the idea is that the learner constructs knowledge rather than passively absorbs it. Meaning is constructed by the learners, each in their own way.
There are several concepts on how we learn; they are attention, habituation, imprinting, memory, perception, problem-solving and reasoning. Reasoning can include a combination of these concepts to find a more coherent view of an issue.
We communicate knowledge through stories, video taping, forming study groups, blogs/podcasting, video conferencing, IM conferencing, and collaboration. These are all tools that can be used to enhance learning in the classroom.
I enjoed reading this article. I agree with the author that the internet is the first medium to address the multiple intelligences- it is kinesethic, visual… I think that was a huge “aha” because I had never thought about it in that way before but I was able to connect his thoughts to my previous knowledge to construct the meaning of his words. I agree that students need to be engaged in discovery based learning. Think of your memorable learning expereinces. I am sure they did not come from a textbook. Students need to know how to use the internet and its vast mindfield of resources to help them solve problems “know hows” and to glean information “know whats.” I think it is our job as educators to help show them how to become constructivist learners in the age of technology. We must show them that they cannot take everything at face value and that they must exercise their God given ability to analze and judge material.
This article was very insightful. An “aha” for me was the use of video tapes for students to learn more than they would from just attending a lecture. The reason is that it was more interactive, as students stopped the video to discuss what was being presented. This seems to be the major point of this article–that learning needs to be interactive.
I was really taken aback by the immense success gained by using anthropologists to find out how employees worked, and then use 2 way radios to enhance their ability to interact to solve problems. I think our school needs to somehow do more of this thing. It would be great if teachers had access to a forums for their specific grade levels, and for specific aspects of the curriculum. I have made this suggestion before, but will have to wait for it to be valued by my school district. Perhaps a blog can be used for this type of interactivity.
For my students, I can see that the opportunity to be interactive is what causes students to take ownership of what they learn. I must look for more ways to make their learning an interactive experience.
I enjoyed the new perspective this article gave me on the role of the Web in today’s students learning experiences but that is not what struck me the most. I was more struck by how much the article reminded me of the teachings of one of my education professors. He focused a lot of his teaching on this idea of “social learning”. He used the same techniques on us that he used in his classroom. For example during a test if his students were struggling with a question they were allowed to step outside the room to discuss the question with others who also had questions and had gone outside. The test had to stay inside the quiet room and students had to mark down the questions that they had gotten help on. He told us he would go back and ask the student the question later to see if they had learned the material and he always found great results. In general people are social and learn best when they have people to ask questions and discuss with. In educational settings we separate children and ask them to perform independently without talking, without their peers. Yet in the real world we are always able to ask for help and use other resources like the Web to solve our problems. The idea of social learning is what is asked of us as teachers but it is not expected that we use this method with our students. The message that is being sent out is that adults can learn this way but not kids. To me that seems wrong. I am excited and hopeful that the use of technology will bring about a shift to social learning in the classroom. Students should be allowed to use any means possible to learn because that is the goal, right?
The big ah ha moment for me is the section on students that learn and function in an environment that is multi processing. It clicked when I watched my son…21 years old…sit down at the computer, he was writing a paper for his “Old English” class. He had about 4 windows opened: my space, lime wire, Google and word. He also had his sidekick out and was texting a friend that he had been talking to on my space. Between downloading music to his ipod and searching for a friend on my space, he was googling a topic to write about one of the authors they had been reading about in class, and actually writing paragraphs in the middle of all that. It was incredible that after an hour he was in the kitchen asking me what I had been cooking, especially since it had taken him the same amount of time to do his homework and all the additional non educational activities that he was working on than it took me to cook dinner. I was fussing the entire time of focusing and told him how I thought he needed to pay attention to his paper and then do all those other things later. Really and truly we need to be looking at our kids as incredible given the knowledge and understanding of technology that they have. I know that as teachers, Lance does it with music and the tech base structure; we have to tap into this ability as another learning modality. I love this program because I am hoping that when I am ready I will have the skills and tools I need to give my students the freedom to explore their strengths and succeed in this world of technology.
I was very interested in how storytelling was used to assist in learning. I found his story very revealing when the copy repair men used stories to help solve problems and learn how to make complicated repairs. I completely related. I have always learned better in groups. Learn on my own seems to be one short, narrow path but a conversation with another opens all kinds of doors and thoughts and conclusions that do not seem to be there independently. I want to remember this in my teaching by stopping and asking the class for clarification and reteaching. The class is very excited by sitting in the teacher’s chair. Currently, the class is only allowed to sit in the teacher’s chair to read their journal but why not ask a student to clarify and reteach more often. Watching a peer in my chair definitely gets their attention and quiets them for the opportunity to have a turn.
I was very impressed and intrigued by the article, Growing Up Digital. I liked that it was presented in a journalistic style and not in academic form. It presented the content in afriendly manner, I am sure intentional, and more like a story.
The ideas encased are interesting and contain implicit humor. For instance, if students were considered sponges than it is equally fair to analogize teachers as the mess that needs to be cleaned up. For me this is an Ah ha! Hahaha moment. The pedagogies of the past certainly do not work today; and may not have worked well then. Onward and foreword the students go and the teachers must follow…better if they lead but follow if they can (for now).
Then vs. now is a fair comparison. The now is not a static mark but a fast track to the future. We are seeing technology leap on a week to week basis and the classroom is changing. For example, the free flow (push pull) of information and collaboration are now very easy and at all time high. This is the ideal environment for constructivism. The historic application of constructivism is to take parts and create something different, new, and improved. Students today are constructing their learning environments along with their worlds. They are capable of seeing a problem on a board, glancing at the book, and finding a way to understand and use the information using the txt msg, e-mail, internet search, web pages blogs, and chat. The collaboration allows for the combined efforts of many to solve simple and complex problems. But, this is not the real boon. That is the refinement of problem solving skills in the 21st century.