Digital Citizenship - Week Two

When I started this week I was very excited and I thought I had the Personal Learning Environment and Network figured out until I tried to create my own. As a person who went through an apprenticeship I totally understood exactly what Steve Wheeler showed us in the slide show "Bridge in the cloud" when he indicated that the start of the education was an apprenticeship which was created just for me and is now working back towards that. My advancement as a trades person was totally mine. Even though there were three apprentices hired in our shop on the exact same day, the other two served totally different apprenticeships and had different skills when we were finished. The journey is totally dependent on the individual as they learn. The questions, discussions and answers were mine. The reflection, in some cases if any at all, was totally up to me. I choose what information I got very personal with and what actually started to become part of me. I have seen other apprentices finish their time and be no closer to being a trades person then they were the day they walked into the shop. If you stop and think about it this is true in every field. The credential does not make you a skilled person, the knowledge and who you are makes you the skilled person.

Below is my current Personal Learning Environment (PLE). It will be very interesting as this educational journey continues into Digital Citizenship how this will change. I have owned a computer for years but would never download form the internet. This of course has changed quite a bit over the past several weeks as a requirement to particapate. My PLE is very basic with just four main sections but I think captures very well what my actual PLE looks like now.

Murrell J. (CC) 2013

As I continue to grow as an educator I want to ensure that I have become an educational change agent. I want to foster and improve on the education of each individual student that walks down the halls whether that is literally or figuratively. I think Micheal Wesch captured it perfectly when he said that students of today will transition from being knowledgeable to knowledge - able. The graduate of the future will not need to know all the information, they will just need to know where to get it and understand what to do with it. Through helping students understand and then create meaningful, constructive, personal networks and environments for learning while they are part of our institutions will not only achieve this but will generate all kinds of knowledge well after they have achieved their degrees as the learning will continue. Especially in areas of real interest. The thing to keep in mind is that  the young mind might not be interested at all in a subject that is presented but when given the opportunity to explore from the center of self, they will be totally engaged. At this point, in my mind, real learning will occur.

Allowing the student to have control of the learning is not a new idea. Sugata Mitra took this concept to the edge with great success. I have provided a link to his presentation at the end of this blog and I encourage you to visit it yourself. Sugata felt that in areas of the world were education, a liberator if you will, was so badly needed, there was no teachers. He experimented with supplying these children with certain levels of technology that they had never been exposed to before and then watched what happened. He actually witnessed what Graham Attwell (2007) describes as the technology "offers the opportunity for narrowing the divide between producers(teachers) and consumers (learners). Consumers (learners) become themselves producers (teachers)." I think that this is the piece where the educational magic will all start to happen. The learners become owners of the process and start to learn through personal interaction and meaningful critical reflection causing the subject to become part of them, forever.

Horses are meant to run, birds to fly, dogs to bark and people to learn. The Human race is a massive learning machine, just let us. I have started to reflect on how academia has structured education to fit it into a nice neat box. This little box is very limiting. We, the entire World, would not be where we are today if we had ever stopped asking why and critically reflecting on what was considered knowledge at the time. Traditionally, an instructor would learn the subject through their own view of the world and then dictate this back to the students. To most students this type of education is very boring and we have struggled for years to try and figure out what we needed to do in order to make the learning more interesting. Some will say that there has been some success here, I would say very limited. I now say we just need to get out of the way. By embarrassing a Personal Learning Environment, supplying them with the guidance required to build it, we merely need to supply them with the questions. They will find the answers. The students will engage, discover things from their own point of view, interact on an intellectual level with their peers who are also discovering through their own personal view and then ultimately learn. Is this not the entire point of education?

Finally I could not get my word cloud into this blog. A skill I must learn at a latter date unfortunately. I did notice that the word cloud spoke pretty true to my personal feelings about education. I found the words to be student centered and focused as well as primarily positive.

Here is that link;
(www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html)

Have a great week.

Jeff