Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

I think I actually experienced recently, what I had only read about previously: that with Web 2.0 you can become part of a much wider community, and are able to draw on a much larger and diverse range of opinions than those of your colleagues. I realised that I enjoy being challenged and stimulated by others who have taken the time to express their opinions and relate their experiences, and who have done so in a way that is well-written and compelling to read.

I’m going on about this because of a Weblogg-ed article in my reader mentioning an online conversation on the Brave New Classroom 2.0 blog forum on whether “the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between?” The blog post was good and encouraged me to read on through a couple of the linked posts.

I could relate to the comments in the Weblogg-ed post about how professional development for teachers has tried to cope with implementing technologies:

“I would argue that Ed2.0 needs to concentrate now on the teachers, not the students, and among the corpus of teachers, focus ONLY on those who want to try to make some change, the “early adapters” if you will. The others, some of them, will follow along in due course or they will not; but the enterprise moves forward on the energy of its best players, not on continued, and boring, Soviet-like efforts to lift everyone at once by dint of big meetings where All Teachers are obligated to come so they can receive some hours of poor teaching practice (being talked at, mostly) in the evident expectation (still!?) that somehow, this experience, the lead, will be transmuted into gold.”

While doing this course and considering how to use it in my lessons I have also been thinking about and observing what other teachers do to develop their teaching skills (for some, not a lot!) and I wonder why this is? Rather unexpectedly, I now find myself classed as an “early adapter” and want to use these methods and try and remove some of the technophobia of others.

A blog post from the Brave New Classroom 2.0 blog entitled “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)” by Michael Wesch (who did one of the (slightly scary) videos from Thing 2) had the challenging remark,

“We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.”

I find it worrying to think that my teaching, because of the limits, constraints and exam grade pressure at school, could get in the way of students learning or their love of learning.

And finally, a thought from another article I moved on to, which listed the educational benefits of Web 2.0, among which was critical thinking:

“The vast amount of data on the Web requires more critical thinking than was needed when I was growing up. In my era of “trusted authorities,” Time Magazine told me most of what I needed to know about the news. There was actually a lot more diversity of opinion on most topics than I was exposed to, which quickly becomes evident when you drill past the first page of a Wikipedia article and look at the discussion and history tabs.”

This appealed to me as I have been thinking about how to minimise students just reading sources (mainly webpages), copying large sections of text from these sources, pasting them together and thinking they have done their project/homework/wiki entry well. I want them to be able to use the project etc as an outlet for their critical thinking skills, which they all have, and seem to apply during every conversation in my class, but then leave at the door when they start their project etc.

I admit I was eventually suckered in by the picture, in the blog’s sidebar, of the Mantyhose – not for me, I think!