As today’s wired learners become increasingly alienated from an education system that is 50 years out of date, innovative teachers are exploring ways to make learning more relevant to learner’s social and cultural identities.
In addition to making learning more meaningful, these explorations have the potential to revolutionize education and transform it into something that equips learners for the social, cultural, political and professional realities of a globalised world.
But there may be a downside. Ironically, the promise of social and participatory technologies may also lead to even greater alienation when approached without pedagogical reflexivity, responsibility and transparency.
The problem of coercion and inequity must be addressed if educators plan to engage in the use of social and participatory tools in a context of institutional power and assessment. Some have called this problem the “creepy treehouse.”
Behold On The Danforth Magazine! Just launched yesterday!
The magazine above was created by my (recently graduated) students as the final project for my Magazine 2.0 course, which is the web component of the post-graduate Book and Magazine Publishing program at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications.
While I cannot take credit for their hard work and inspirations, this magazine is everything I had envisioned when I developed this course (and advocated for the use of Wordpress as a CMS).
All of the content on the site was the product of their other courses in the Magazine and Publishing program. My course was simply a means of showcasing what they had learned via the creation of a dynamic web2.0 magazine website. I can only take credit for the provision of tools, philosophies and examples. The rest was up to them.
In his latest vlog post, Howard Rheingold addresses an increasingly difficult problem for educators: Attention in a hypermediated age. Rheingold takes things beyond the usual “let’s debate multitasking - good or bad?” to the real heart of the matter: How to focus the wired mind?
“To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not learn and reject the stranger’s world.”
- Herbert Kohl, from “I Won’t Learn from You”
American educator Herbert Kohl’s “I Won’t Learn from You” is a compelling essay about the complex relationship between a learner’s social context and their motivation to learn. This piece was one of the first, and most important, texts of critical pedagogy I read for my Bachelors of Education and I’ve come to believe it has far reaching application far beyond the classroom. I thought I’d share something of an introduction to Kohl and the enigmatic reasons why we sometimes choose not to learn.
recent comments