Not an Adventure, Rather a Personal Journey

I wholeheartedly agree with Amy in regards to the growth that I have personally done since September and my first blog of EC&I 832!  In 832, I began the course somewhat overwhelmed – which quickly turned to confusion – and finally an eureka moment where everything all fell into place, it was quite the adventure!  In 831 I feel that I am picking up right where I left off, although this time, I have a greater sense of confidence,  a hunger for the knowledge, and a sense of which path I am travelling on.

Photo Credit: umrio12 via Compfight cc

For those of us whom are “older”, we experience a shift in the way we teach from the way we were taught.  Gone are the days (or they should be) of the teacher standing at the front of the room instructing from a podium and all students in a robot motion taking down notes and participating at the same level, regardless of needs and abilities. 

Photo credit: http://er.educause.edu/articles/2008/1/minds-on-fire-open-education-the-long-tail-and-learning-20

Michael Welsh, in his Ted Talk “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able” points out that  media mediates relationships and how we, as society, have change from having a uni-dimensional relationship with media to multidimensional. We do not participate in one-way conversations any longer, this course is a prime example, we Zoom and contribute via open discussion with one another on the topics we are guided to explore.

Welsh introduced three concepts of knowledgeably in practice in today’s learning environments:

1. We must allow our students to embrace real world problems
2. Our students need to be allowed to connect, organize, share, collaborate and publish their findings
3. Finally, we must enable our students to move beyond the initial problem, to continue to learn.

Taking advantage of the multidimensional media relationships, Brown and Adler remind us that we can virtually connect anywhere on earth, this therefore leads to learning in a competitive ecosystem, one in which society must supply and provide skills for continuous learning in order to maintain a logistic growth rather than density dependent.  Exploring learning through the social view, such as MOOC’s and Open Education Resources,  allow full participation and collaboration among students in courses.  Social Learning allows for an unleash of inquiry through conversations regardless of geographical location; a fit into an online niche allowing for an unobstructed growth within our personal ecosystem (difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0).

Pavan Arora’s Ted Talk resonated to me, I really like the idea of teaching application of knowledge to our students.  This is critical as knowledge has an expiry date – it’s continually evolving, developing and growing.  Teaching our students how to access information, assess the information, and apply the knowledge gained from the information through the use of social learning is crucial for developing self sustaining learners within social learning networks, and helping our students decided what their individual learning paths will look like.