Lesson 13-Reponse to readings-The Future’s Bright, the Future is…

As LIBE 477 winds to a close, I am excited to be writing this final entry into my blog. A small measure of the scope of my learning lies in the fact that I didn’t even fully understand what a blog was in January. Now, only four short months later, my own little technological diary contains 33 entries and incorporates a gamut of technologies previously foreign to me: slidecasts, animoto videos, podcasts, Flickr slideshows, voicethreads, links to wikis, YouTube videos…the list goes on. I might be tempted to believe that, by the force of my somewhat fragile mastery of this cool Web 2.0 gagetry, I have achieved my Week One goal of muscling my “dinosaur brain into the 21rst Century”. Picking up on Futurelab’s “The Future is Bright, the Future is…(2007) reference, this would be little more than my own version of viewing Web 2.0 as early converts to automobiles viewed these as “horseless carriages”. Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are more than just the sum of their gadgets, compelling though these gadgets might be. I believe this to be one of the most fundamental truths I have grasped by reading, viewing, experimenting and discussing my way through this course. What the immergence of Web 2.0 has created is a whole new integrated information landscape with staggering quantities of digital content, open choice, digital spaces for collaboration and participation in the larger global community and countless opportunities to both consume and create information (Todd, 2008). The result is that our students are creating their own learning environments everyday, whenever they access a YouTube video, go on Facebook or read the Twitters of those they follow. For this reason, Futurelab asks a vital question I believe all governments, school districts and individual educators must ask: “When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalized to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process?” (Futurelab, 2007). There is no doubt that educators still have a vital role to play but this role absolutely must change if we want our schools to maintain any future relevance at all. No longer can teachers present themselves as “information experts” but rather as “facilitators” in accessing the information and the experts and as fellow contributors to the communal body of knowledge that is the Internet. As Futurelab emphasizes, our job will be to “help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all dancing material” (Futurelab, 2007). Here is where the “new literacies” we have spoken so much about come in to play. In his lecture, “Learning 2016”, Stephen Heppell adds his own list of literacies to those of fellow experts when he speaks of the necessity to teach students to “create, critique, collaborate and communicate” (2006). It will be vital that our schools teach these new literacies or I believe our future generations could actually end up taking the horrifying path depicted in Epic 2015 (Sloan and Thompson). Personally, one of the questions that “keeps me up at night” is how teachers and librarians can best advocate for their students in this area, when school districts are cutting technology budgets along with all the rest, axing specialist positions, librarians being some on top of the list, and enforcing outdated and misguided restrictions to technology access in the spirit of “protection”. On the flipside, as someone who has always been somewhat wary of the invasiveness of technology, I question whether such innovations as open source learner management systems and their kin might greatly dehumanize our teaching and learning environments, something I feel would be very sad. While I have appreciated the flexibility and richness of my on-line learning experience, I must admit I would have preferred at least some face-to-face contact. My final and very personal concern is “how the heck” I will mange to keep up with the ridiculously fast-paced evolution of the technological landscape. Through considerable time and effort, I have managed to scratch out a rather tenuous perch in the Web 2.0 world and now comes Web 3.0! Despite these reservations, I find myself much more open and comfortable with the idea of approaching and mastering new technologies and I am absolutely convinced of the necessity to do so. As I look to the 21st century, I tend to find comfort in the perspectives of those thinkers who can bring the debate back to certain essential truths. When Stephen Heppell speaks of the future, he puts a very hopeful and a positive slant on the Worldwide Web and all its associated technologies. He refers to the 21 Century as a “learning age and a transparent age” and perhaps an age where Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 tools will be there quite simply for the purpose of “helping people to help each other” (Heppell, 2006).

Lesson 13-Demonstration of new knowledge: My Vision of the Future

I thought you might like to see the Slideshare I created as part of my Vision for the Future assignment. To see my complete project, please visit Patrice's Vision for the Future wiki at: http://patriceslibraryvision.wikispaces.com/

Kids Of The Future

View more presentations from Patrice Mauriks.

Lesson 12- Response to readings: Reflections on Online Repositories, Open Access and Stone Soup

It was interesting to read the perspectives of both Willinsky and Esposito on the issues of open access and on-line repositories but I must say I was left a little confused. Should we trust Willinsky, when he states that “In this current knowledge economy, the Internet appears to be able, through various models of open access publishing, to do more to extend the circulation of knowledge, and to increase participation in a global exchange around that knowledge, than print has been able to achieve” (Willinsky, 2003)? Or should we believe Esposito when he warns that, “OA is the Botox of scholarly communications, a cleverly applied poison destined to keep a permanent smile on a publisher’s face (Esposito, 2004)? Thank goodness for Alice and her Voicethread on on-line repositories and open access! Her presentation made the topic much more accessible by bringing it out of the world of academia and into our classrooms and libraries.

One of the issues that Alice brought up is one that I thought very worthy of a little more reflection. I am now pretty familiar with Asselin and Doiron’s “Literacies for the Information Generation” (Asselin & Doiron, 2008), as I have addressed them in several of my assignments during this course. I have thought about their concept of “ethics and social responsibility” (Asselin and Doiron, 2008) from a variety of perspectives. This said, I hadn’t really considered the “responsibility” to contribute to online knowledge from quite the same point of view before reading Alice’s Voicethread. Do we, as teachers have an ethical obligation to share online and to teach our students to share as well? How important to digital citizenship is the idea of becoming “givers” rather than just “takers”? Alice’s point about the amount of time teachers “volunteer” to create resources is very well taken. I think it does impact on the willingness of some to generously “give away” what they have created. Is such reticence justified or is it the result of a narrow-minded, archaic point of view? In my comments on Alice’s Voicethread, I used an analogy of the wonderful art project that a teacher might create and share only to find that the following year, it had already been done and published on another teacher's bulletin board with no credit given. How important is the issue of credit and how well will it be respected as materials are cut up, mixed up and mashed up? I’m not sure, but I can’t help but think about one of my favourite primary school books, Stone Soup. Is the Internet not, in fact, serving as a facilitator for our communal generosity in much the same way the hungry travelers did in Stone Soup? How can it be a bad thing when we all take the little bits of knowledge that we have, which might individually not amount to much, and contribute them generously to the global “soup pot” of knowledge? When considered in this very simplistic way, OA seems to provide a great vehicle for the digital sharing that should perhaps not just be considered an option but a moral obligation.

Lesson 11-Response to readings: Learning about Open Learning

I just read Ester Shein's article "One Stop Shopping With Learning Management Systems and found particularly interesting the link to the Gwinnett County Online Campus (GCOC). Of course, I've been living my own "open learning" adventure since January but hadn't thought much about other contexts where such an opportunity might be helpful. While it seemed quite natural to be participating in such a program at a post secondary level, I hadn't considered the use of such technology to provide learning alternatives to high school students. There would be many situations where a high school student might wish to catch up or to get ahead and would find such an online option very desirable. I can also imagine that students who have health or other concerns would benefit greatly from LMS. The sophistication and flexibility of LMS is worlds away from what is now provided with traditional correspondence courses. Coincidentally, my son decided to take a correspondence course beginning this September. In our district, this was the only option provided outside the walls of the classroom. He made the decision to take Planning 10 via correspondence so that he could free up his schedule to take English 11 in his Grade 10 year. Unfortunately, he ended up really struggling to complete the course and "made it out alive" only with intervention by me and a high school counselor. As I compare my experiences using Vista to his using a much more traditional and limited model, I can understand why he found the learning process so challenging. His experience also really taught me that online learning definitely doesn't work for everyone. I can see that you would have to be a very independent, organized and self-motivated worker to optimize your learning...something that many 15 year old boys are not. This said, I can't help but wonder how much more positive the experience would have been for Zach had he been in an LMS environment. Here are a number of advantages I feel LMS has over "old school" correspondance.

More personalized contact: Zach had virtually no contact with his "teacher". When e-mails were sent for clarification, response would come but often a week after the fact. Also, there was no opportunity to connect with other learners for collaboration or discussion. With LMS there is personalized contact potentially through podcasts, video and even the possibility for a "virtual class". Relationship building and collaboration with other learners can occur through chat rooms, discussions forums or wikis. This would go long way to reduce the feelings of isolation and disconnect, which can be demotivating for anyone, but particularly for an adolescent, and enrich the learning experience.

More immediate feedback: One of the biggest frustrations for Zach was the lagtime between the time he handed in an assignment and the feedback he received from his instructor. This occured in part because his assignments were handed in to his school in hard copy format and had to be hand delivered to the office of his teacher. Pick up only happened once a week. It was only at this point that assignments could be marked according to their "position" in the pile, which sometimes took weeks.

No hard copy required!: At one point, Zach handed in one unit's worth of assignments (probably about 9 or 10 chapters.) These assignments somehow were lost in transit and he was asked to redo them...this was the straw that broke the camel's back for him! With LMS, there are no hard copy assignments. In addition, there are helpful tools to organize assignments and resources.

Many opportunities to be engaged: Planning 10 by correspondence was chapter after chapter of read and response type assignments. There is so much excellent and interesting content in Planning 10 and this could be presented in so many engaging ways within an LMS system. Connecting with "experts" through blogs, video, podcasts, virtual classroom environments, discussion forums with "classmates" and experts and many more possibilities.

Although an LMS would not have guaranteed success for my son, it would have made his first online learning experience so much richer and more relevant both to his life and his learning style. I hope our school district and others jump on this technological bandwagon very soon and I hope Zach gives it another shot...someday.