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!