Schools are for Fish Too!

  

(image taken from ww2.valdosta.ed)

I am not sure if there are 40000 fish in this picture - perhaps there are that many in the entire school. But then again, our field of vision is limited, and we can only see what our vision can encompass. Why have I chosen this image for a Blog posting in E-Learning and Digital Culture? Yesterday, I had the distinct feeling of being a fish swimming upstream, but not making progress. I guess this was a phenomenon unique to the first day of the course. A few weeks back, I had decided to limit my interaction with the course to three media - Facebook where I already live, Twitter which I also use frequently and Blogger. Seems like a nice manageable way to interact with the course. I have a setting in Facebook that notifies me in my Gmail account of any changes in pages that I follow. I hadn't been in Gmail on the weekend, but yesterday when I opened it up, sure enough, hundreds of entries from Facebook. So, lots of marking specific entries, deleting pages of email references, only to be replaced by another page of entries, hour upon hour of  entries from all weekend. Kicking myself for not creating a unique email address just for this course, hoping I wouldn't accidentally erase an important email - occasionally finding some gem of interest on the EDCMOOC list of emails. Finally got my Inbox all cleaned up - then realized that I could filter those emails off into a separate folder that I can browse at my leisure while keeping my Inbox free for other pursuits. The swimming upstream part was that as I was deleting emails, more and more of them kept coming in - felt like I might be there all morning.

The point? Lots of comments about being overwhelmed with information. Learning, as a digital immigrant (Prensky) how to navigate these new waters of technology. Big learning in the last year or so how to aggregate and archive all the information collected from the Internet - using Diigo to collect and tag bookmarks that are of interest - learning how to aggregate Tweets - keeping good habits of housekeeping, cleaning out lists of bookmarks periodically - good file management on local computer. Sometimes (shouldn't be) surprised at how poorly the digital natives (teens) manage the information they collect, and consider it a part of my role as their teacher to help them learn those skills that are important in today's digital culture.

Now on to other things. Just finished Chandler's essay on determinism. Can totally relate to the debate in my circles of teaching among those who think we should stick with traditional methods of teaching and make students put away their devices, as opposed to those who feel that the progress of technology and its adoption by younger generations of learners is inevitable (determinism) - and our best bet is to adopt and adapt technologies to learning, and hopefully in the process improve engagement, improve learning and improve instruction. Happy MOOC-ing! 

Prioritizing adoption of E-learning technology.

A New calendar year - for me a time to put aside the excesses of the Christmas season, and maybe look towards a leaner (on a number of fronts) new year (without getting too much into the traditional resolutions). My school is semestered - semester 1 ended today - my students all start formal examinations tomorrow. In my own classes, my exams were all in-class. Along with a pile of exams to mark, I have a lot of final projects to do as well - so my main activity (along with some exam supervision) is to get all that completed. But with that background, and the MOOC starting next week, its also a good time to reflect on this past semester - and especially as it relates to how technology impacts my teaching. I created a list of all the things I did this past semester (including some time in the summer) that benefit my teaching long term - it had about 11 items on it - much of it was the mundane, reorganize curriculum, create newer versions of assignments, or in some cases, new assignments altogether. That is all well and good. Some of it involved some new learning on my part in terms of technology. In the summer, I read in someone's blog post, "10 things educators should learn from a technology standpoint". I adopted a few of them - Evernote was one - although I use it more in my personal life than in professional - Prezi was another - the philosophical reasons why it was better than PowerPoint, along with some spectacular examples - was enough for me. I revised 4 large slide shows in my course into Prezi presentations - and beyond the simple mechanics of how to use the software, how to use it effectively is a learning curve. And I forced my students to use Prezi, and that went well as well. I was given a "Mimeo Teach" - ability to create a SmartBoard type system with much less hardware - and incorporating that, along with "Mimeo Pad" - wireless tablet to control computer projection - was also a learning curve, and now its onto using both comfortably and seamlessly in order to enhance teaching. Already starting up with groups in this MOOC, I have, in reading the blogs, Twitter and FB posts of other members learned of some new stuff that looks intriguing and that I want to explore. What I am finding in all this is a real need to sift through all that is cool, new and exciting, and winnow it down to what makes my teaching, and more importantly, what makes my students' learning more effective. I envy those out there who have a full time job as technology coaches in educational settings - and get time to play with all the new stuff out there. The mundanities of everyday life in the classroom take up a large proportion of time - and the opportunities to "play in the sandbox" are limited. Also, perhaps as an artifact of living in the digital age, perhaps for me a sign of aging, is the ADHD that comes from having so much of interest to look at, to read, to explore on the Internet - my list of bookmarks on Chrome and Diigo keeps growing - but often I don't get or take the time to actually read the stuff I come across. So my fear in embarking on this MOOC is information overload. How to be selective in terms of which blog entries to read, which people to follow on Twitter, who to friend on Facebook. I find it hugely fascinating to suddenly have access to a huge diversity of people all over the world who share some common interests - and who have interesting perspectives. And that's before we've even had a chance to hear from the "experts" who run the course. I hope I will be able to pick out 3 or 4 things that I can continue to focus on as I embark with a new group of students starting on Feb. 1 - and hopefully at the end of June look back and be able to measure the progress that I have made, but more importantly, the progress they have made. Which is what this business is all about!

I am starting in another two weeks a Coursera course - E-Learning and Digital Cultures - through the University of Edinborough. I am looking forward to lots of reflection on the issues surrounding using technology in education - much of which I do in my Secondary Education practice already - have for years - but don't always take the time to think about why I do what I do, how learning and teaching can be enhanced with technology, and find out what others are thinking/saying/doing in this field.