למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

כתיבה לאינטרנט היא מקצוע. למה? כי אנשים קוראים ברשת בצורה שונה לחלוטין ממה שהם קוראים כל מדיה אחרת ולכן יש לכתוב בצורה המתאימה לקריאה הזו. כשאנחנו גולשים באינטרנט אנחנו חשים צורך ללחוץ על קישורים, להגיע למקומות אחרים, לעבור הלאה, לצאת מהאתר בו אנו נמצאים, לגלוש בעוד מקומות, לא לשקוט ולא לנוח. כשאנו קוראים חומר באינטרנט אנחנו לא קוראים, אנחנו מרפרפים. כשאנחנו קוראים חומר באינטרנט אנחנו רוצים שיתנו לנו מידע פשוט, קצר ושימושי – בקיצור, כל מאפייני הקריאה שלנו (קפה, סנדוויץ', נחת, עיתון בארוחת הבוקר) משתנים מהקצה אל הקצה, במיוחד אם אנחנו ישראלים ומראש לא מצוידים באורך רוח משובח וביכולת לשבת יותר מחמש דקות ברציפות.

Every opening paragraph is the beginning of a delicate and transient relationship between reader and writer. This relationship begins quietly, usually without much fanfare - and if it’s properly initiated, the reader doesn’t even know it’s happening. Yet the success of this relationship is an important factor in creating an enjoyable, engaging experience for the reader. This is especially true on the web where author credibility can be difficult to establish, and where, increasingly, readers have so many choices that separating the chaff from the wheat can be a daunting process.

תוויות: כתיבה

Young people trust adults to be smart enough to realize that it is plain rude to go snooping on children’s websites without their permission. As public as their postings may be, it is ‘bad form’ and an invasion of privacy to visit a personal site that you know was not intended for your eyes.

How will young people learn to be trustworthy if no one will trust them?

תוויות: גלישה בטוחה

So we used our laptops today to practice our multiplication facts online. Later we used them to work on our poems and journals that we began after our recent trip - we’ve been learning to illustrate them by accessing and inserting our own photos from our Flickr account. We are learning about analogies so we went to an interactive site about analogies and students came up and used our interactive whiteboard to run the site. Next we used our laptops to use more interactive sites about analogies (here and here) to practice on our own.

We were in the middle of that activity when we had to put the laptops away for the day so we could go to “computers” in the computer lab for our usual 30 minute once a week session. Does anyone else see irony here?

You control the information age.

In contrast to this particular issue of Time, the previous week’s cover story was on how to bring education out of the 20th century. You might think that one article might inform the other and examine how Web 2.0 might be revolutionizing education, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The education cover story explores a range of problems and potential solutions, but the Web 2.0 universe lauded in the Person of the Year issue is barely mentioned.

There's informal learning happening inside my blog reader. All these bloggers I subscribe to appear to be learning without formal instruction. No one is showing signs of rote learning, acquiring books smarts without street smarts, or regurgitating a repository of useless facts. All these bloggers are self directing their own learning proceses, motivating their own progress, synthesizing their own meaning and constructing idiosyncratic mental models.

Brain 2.0 isn't coming anytime soon. And we're all feeling the enormous weight of not being able to keep up. We can't keep up with work. We can't keep up with our social life. We can't keep up with the industry, our hobbies, our families. We can't keep up with current events. We'll never read a fraction of those books on our list. And we are hurting.

Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given to Deborah Stipek's daughter Meredith in school, and her mom, who's dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. "That's silly," Stipek told her daughter. "Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google."

If you want to know what’s going on in a field, the static and credentialed sources generally aren’t where you want to go. The credentialed sources are great for certain types of information—the solid and stolid facts, the commoditized information, the boring truth - but the real intellectual action is usually occurring in the blogs, newsletters, and forums. Confining students to the credentialed sites is likely to kill their interest and enthusiasm.

However, if I were going to think about what I teach in my courses, much of the valuable information I rely on comes from blogs, and not only from academic blogs. If I want to know what teachers in new media were doing a year. ago, I guess I could read a journal. If I want to know what people are doing now, what new developments are emerging, what is working and what isn't, I would look at blogs. Wouldn't you?

Sharing the idea of the campaign with students is an ultimate information fluency activity. Our students should know how the world’s favorite search tool operates and how all types of people “work” it.

While this particular response to neoNazi activity appears democratic, and noble, something about it leaves me cold and frightened. I can easily see Google bombing used in damaging ways. What happens when our writings, our ideas, our professions, our friends are on the other side of the bomb? How does that lesson play out? What should we teach about ethics and citizenship and reason?

... I sought out the Charlotte’s Web entry. As soon as I saw the lousy plot summary I knew I had a very cool lesson to do.

And so yesterday I asked my class what they knew about wikipedia. One child immediately told us his mother had recently used it to find an article for a conference talk she was giving. She’s a physician so presumably she found what she wanted - an example of wikipedia working. However, another child admitted that it hadn’t helped him the year before when researching the Middle Ages

Your class wrote great cover copy. Any paperback publisher in New York would be pleased with that text on the back of a book.

Unfortunately, an encyclopedia entry is a different literary genre.

With every new piece of technology, to make this technology work, you have to change your teaching practices. Part of it is (thinking about) how to go from sage on the stage to being a real mentor.

The evolution of the Internet can facilitate this approach. Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, make information sharing and content creation easier.

Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities.