Profondo Teacho

So we come to the end of this exciting blogging adventure and I have to ask my self what have I learned?

The main issue that has struck me about the literature in general is that, for most intents and purposes, we are really talking theoretically. A good deal of these theories and concepts, while perfectly possible are not always practical to implement. Even as more and more members of the digital generation move into the profession of teaching there will still be a number of older and less technologically proficient teachers in schools. There will need to be significant paradigm shifts from that generation in order to facilitate the growth of technology based teaching.

It is strange also that, with the vast potential to demonstrate our technical skills and know how, most of we young, creative, digital native student teachers, myself included, haven’t gone far beyond the text and images that would be indicative of a chalk and talk teacher, which none of us are. I know after this experience that I will take every opportunity available to engage with media in my presentation of content in the classroom. I’ll teach that way, even if I don’t blog that way.

If have found some interesting launching pads from where to go towards creating a classroom for the digital generation. Jonassen et al’s idea of the potential for computers to be used as “mind tools” in education was a particularly interesting idea. If we use them effectively, content can be adapted to suit the new ways that people think and process information. Use of databases, hypertext and wikis can be an effective way of promoting non-linear and critical evaluation of information by students. This fits in with the culture of multi tasking that is prevalent amongst children of the digital generation.

Multi-tasking is one of the common themes that runs trough much of the literature on teen digital culture. John Seely Brown, in his article Growing Up Digital, suggests that one of the most common misconceptions about teen multi-tasking is that if they are performing more than one operation at the time, they are unable to fully concentrate on any one particular task. Brown suggests that the level of concentration on each task is fairly high, when young people perform parallel activities, and that the attention span of the average member of the digital generation is commensurate to that of the average corporate manager. As teachers, we need to adapt our lesson content to cater for the multi-tasking and parallel processing of our students. To this end, content and concepts should not be logically or sequentially, but taught tangentially and laterally creating meaningful links between the parcels of information that are being presented. This would be far more compatible with the new way of thinking that digital culture has manifested.

The Horizon Report 2008 dealing with “collective intelligence” was of particular interest because of its direct correlation with my ethos of the historical imagination. That is, that as a critical historian, the student must be able to draw upon their knowledge of key trends, political ideas, populist sentiments, et cetera to facilitate the creation of their unique view of the past. Collective intelligence encompasses works that are formed by some for of community interaction, such as wikis, along with statistical information and cultural artifacts. This model allows student to form opinions and knowledge on a given topic area based on the intelligence gathered. This process would be invaluable to teaching the skills of critical thinking.

References

The 2008 Horizen Report (2008). The New Media Consortium

Brown, J. S., (2002). Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn. Change, Growing Up Digital, March/April 2000, pp 10-20.

Jonassen, D., Carr, C. & Yueh, H. (1998) Computers as Mindtools for Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking. TechTrends, 43 (2), 24-32

In response to Cody’s reaction to Reville’s theory on the nature of fear of digital technology. I had never thought that the fear that some people have of digital tech could be a manifestation of the fact that this technology is an extension of human intelligence.

There is a certain amount of irrationality to people’s fear of technology. We all know the Hollywood horror stories of a computer that develops a will of its own or some form of governement surveilence using technology. I can’t help but suspect that some of this is generated by people watching movies and reading conspiracy theories on the net. I mean no-one was scared of sharks before 1975. 

Dom has drawn out an important point that relates to most of the literature that I have looked at while working on this project. A good deal of this literature is all about giving us a bright and pretty future of the classroom without giving any way to practically implement these ideas. It is easy to become somewhat pessemistic about this. Education system has perpetuated for so long because it works for the people that provide the education. Not for the people who are receiving it. It will take a revolution of strong-willed, focused and determined innovative professional teachers in order to create the scaffolding for implementation of these ideas let alone actually putting them into action.

Jonassen has presented a number of arguments for using technology as a means for the construction of knowledge rather than didactic instruction. His suggests that traditionally technology has been used to store information and that the only interaction that the student had was to learn from the information being presented and possibly to move on to the next part. The use of technology as the basis of knowledge construction shuld be a more effective use of technology in education particularly in the area of developing critical thinking.

The specific examples that Jonassen uses are computer “Mindtools” which are a variety of tools that allow students to organise different information and discourses into linear, parallel, randoma access or visual representations. Mind/concept mapping, databases, microworlds and hyper media are a number of the concepts that he covers.

Some of these areas, particularly the knowledge construction tools have relevance to the English and History KLA. Hypermedia is an extremely important way for students to construct and organise their knowledge. A good example of how this could be effectively used in the History classroom would be a class project to create a wiki on the units of study for the year. All students would need to contribiute and students would have access to assess, correct and modify the work. They would be able to challenge sources, use multimedia, develop links to outside portals and create a random access platform for which to share there collective knowledge. It would also be a tangible resource that could be shared with the outside world.

As I said earlier, I am a digital native. I grew up with a digital culture. The popular culture has been one of remaking and remodelling for as long as I can remember. I remeber some of my best written work at school were adaptations. I got a prize in Year 10 when I wrote a particluarly gory version of “The Hound of the Baskerville’s” from the hound’s perspective. I grew up reading old horror comics which utilised decades and centuries old sories as their basis, and the video classics of the 80s and 90s where adaptations -the western, based on the eastern, based on Greek mythology. Life isn’t a story. Its a story cycle. An  series of archetypes.

Its because of this that I find it difficult to teach anything in a linear fashion. I think, as all digital natives should, tangentially and sometime latterally. I have a big picture and a whole lot of other little details, some important, some not, that make me interested in the subject and relate it to other subjects. No lists of causes and effects. Everything is a series of interalated actions, reactions, trends, philosophies, movements, ideas and expressions.

It is difficult to approach teaching the way I would like to under the current constraints of the curriculum as they stand. Curriculum gives us a certain amount of freedom in the junior years to create and choose our own content. The English curriculum allows us to teach any content as long as we meet sertain outcomes and cover certain text types. The History syllabus allows us some room to create content while presenting some statutory requirements of Australian History.

Why do we need these restrictions? Why can’t we teach important concepts and the historical way of thinking? Or the tools of a critical historian? I aggree with the idea of outcomes based learning, but I think the real problem here is centralised testing. The expense of the SC and HSC are to me the direct cause of prescribed content. Hopefully as a new generation of Digital Native teachers take policy positions withing education we may see a move towards a curriculum system that is more compatible with the way people think, learn and teach.

The article Growing Up Digital presents some interesting ideas to ponder. The most important issue is that, by growing up surrounded by multimedia and digital technology, the current generation are multi-taskers. Young people today are able to perfrom paralell operations. This has long been considered a sign of poor concentration. ie that if a person is not concentrating on one operation fully they are not concentrating at all. The article suggests that the levele of concentration on each task is fairly high and the attention span of youths today is no less that that of the average successfull working adult.

Any fears about the multi tasking generation being unable to concentrate attentively are unfounded. What we need to do as teachers is to redisign the content so that we are active, fast paced and paralell learning experieces. Tangential learning rather than logical learning processes should be the main focus. By this I mean that each subject should be taught with the content pieces related to each other to give a meaningful big picture but not necessarily in a chronological or logical order. Lessons should be multimedia whereever possible and students should have the opportunity to use the media stimulus to draw their own meaning using their subject skills and knowledge.

The Horizon Report 2008 discusses the possibility of using collective intelligence in the classroom within the next 4-5 years. This was a surprise to me because in the History discipline we already use collective intelligence on a fairly complex scale. Whenever we are looking at a collective source such as a web document or a wikipedia article for issue of reliability we a drawing on analysis of collective intelligence. It is the same for text books, which are often written by committee.

The are so many applications of collective intellience that we already use in History: documentary films, oral histories, newpapers, online resources, sociological and statistical data, world history and so many others. These looks at the general trends in society and the ways that popular sentiment has manifested into action over the historical period in question. So, in short, history teacher will only be developing their use of creative intelligence over the next few years. This is something that we already do, whether we are using tech or not.

I agree with Elyse’s comments on the nature of Digital Immigrants as outline in Prensky’s article. The concept that all people who are immigrants to the digital world have some foot placed in past is problematic for me too. I believe the concept tha people who were born in a period where digital technology had already taken a firm hold could be native speakers of the digital language. Language like all cultural constructions is learned. There are people in the teaching profession who have been using computer technology for longer than there students have been alive and are just as connected through networking and technology as their students. This seems to be dismissed in Presnky’s thesis.

I agree with your comments about the potenital for digital native teachers in changing the face of teaching and learning using digital technology. We are the vanguard. Fricken sweet.

Papert suggests that the implementation of computer technology in schools can be analogised to a number of different advances in technology throughout history. I particularly like his movie metaphor. In some regards the metaphor is simplistic in that it doesn’t take into account the limtations of the technology. The tendency to recreated the existing task with the addition of the technology may not neccessarily be a choice. Just like electricity, film required a number of other technological inventions in order to move from the basic filmed play to modern cinema. A single camera set up with a play acted out, usually out doors, was a direct result of the limited technology. There were no high powered studio lights, no in camera effects, no zoom or fade. In order to develop a language the cinema pioneers had to develop technologies.

It is much the same with education. Simply introducing computers to the classroom is nothing more than adding technology to the pre-existing play of education. It is what we do with the technology and how we develop the way we educate around the technology that is of the most importance. And we need to develop and adapt new technologies to support our digital classroom.

I like the movie metaphor because it can be so easily related to using technology in the classroom. haveing a single camera set up to capture a student role play may be an effective way of deconstructing the way that a class’ performance worked but it hardly effective use of technology. To fully intergrate DV into an English classroom would require the use of short projects where the students use the technology to create works from beginning to end. They would write, shoot, edit and present their work using technology. That would be integrated use of technology.