I wonder if participatory culture is evidence for the idea that hierarchical relationships are not as effective as voluntary relationships. With participatory culture, everyone chooses whether or not they want to participate. Therefore, the motivations for participating are self-generating rather than being generated by the instructor. In many cases, instructors have to work to engage students with Hamlet. But students do all of the work themselves when generating enthusiasm for Harry Potter.
The use of afterschool programs to help students develop multi-modal skills is something I never thought of and which seems obvious now. Afterschool programs could have a much more informal structure, could be much more student-driven and do not require the facilitators to actually evaluate the students, yet the students can be encouraged to self-evaluate. I still think multi-modal technology should be taught in the classroom, but afterschool programs might have much more of the potential to flexibly explore technology proficiency.
Jenkins brought up instances where children more fully understand certain perspectives by playing the roles of characters within a story, such as with the case of the student playing the loyalist who was shot at and arrested. I agree that students can become more engaged when taking on the roles of characters. These actions help students sustain a higher level of engagement with ideas, but will these students then ever learn to maintain engagement with texts simply by reading them. Students might not learn how to effectively empathize with different perspectives without actually role-playing a particular character.
I think I’ve heard somewhere before that for Internet multitaskers, the Internet is becoming almost like a prosthetic brain. Jenkins mentioned how some skilled multitaskers are able to overcome limitations in short-term memory by simply remembering where information is at rather than committing information to short-term memory. Books seemed to serve that same function though. For example, instead of remembering recipes, we have recipe books. The Internet just allows us to more quickly retrieve information than flipping through a book if we know how to use it proficiently.
I like Jenkin’s analogy of the hunter and the farmer. One of the biggest messages that my psychology 101 class tried to put forward was that the human mind is adaptive. That’s an excellent thing since a glance at history will show how rapidly our world can change. Old models of education were built for an older world and if educators want to really help students succeed, they must help students adapt to the current world instead of forcing the students to adapt to the educator. Instead of being an abnormality, the rewired brains of the Internet generation might simply be adapting like we always have. They’re successfully adapting to the new environment and we must help them as best we can, since many skills might be useful to younger generations, yet might not be obviously useful, such as critical thinking skills.
I hope collective intelligence is the new model for solving societal problems. There are many students who seem to wish they could have a positive impact on society, but do not know where to begin. The online collective efforts such as the Haiti relief efforts allow philanthropic individuals to quickly connect with others who can give them a crash course on the relief efforts. These collective efforts also fill the need for affiliation, though in a very positive way. The fact that educators teach students to think independently more than thinking collectively might result in students developing an inaccurate view of their future work life. The education system suggests to students that they must succeed in school ultimately so that they can eventually succeed in the workplace. Therefore, the education system implies that the individualistic and competitive style of education is only comparing them for the future work world and that the collectivistic and multimodal world is merely a diversion from the world of work.
As your blog post referred to the real world workplace, I suddenly saw images of the Dilbert cartoon and thought once again how unlike the workplace school really is. Like Prof. Mabrito said in class, the boss isn't going to ask the committee who contributed what; instead, he'll take the collective recommendations and proceed.
ReplyDeleteSchool is good at teaching job skills like timeliness, basic hygeine, interactions with authority figures, etc. What it's not so effective with is how to balance individualism with collaboration.
Every class,every blog there is some realization as to how much times have really changed in the last few decades.After-school programs used to be really awesome way before they were labeled. Many years ago it was just a given that everybody had something to do at school, after school. And, it wasn't because we were in trouble. It was the norm that most of our Mothers were at home, we didn't need sitters after school, we just had a lot of stuff to do at school after school.
ReplyDeleteNow, it's like jumping through hoops to get a new program going after school. Even the athletic and artistic programs that are already in place have a slew of paperwork and come with tremendous headaches trying to organize everyones schedules from the children, parents, coaches, and other people that seem to pop out of the woodwork. Grandparents, siblings, cousins-they are important! It's just that every one seems to be so unwilling to bend their schedules or give something up for their students really important activities. It's understandable because things change, it's just different. But, I'm still that Mom, the blast from the past, so I do get irritated when we need to have parents meetings and there are just excuses from interested parties that don't seem that important. At any rate I wish that after school programs existed the way that they used to.
And, now with all of the new tools that are available (maybe not at all of the schools) our students would really benefit from such programs. If we could organize our parents we could do incredible fundraisers, get donations (which make great tax write-offs), get grants! Limitless possibilities if everyone just wasn't so busy.
You're right! The Internet has become like a prosthetic brain! Last week, I lost my iPhone for two days. It was SCARY how badly I reacted, but it was like loosing my arm for two days. I needed that. Suddenly, I wasn't as connected as I was before. Clients were e-mailing, list serves were chirping, and I couldn't hear any of it, let alone look up those facts that I can always access when I'm out and about.
ReplyDeleteWe, as teachers, need to admit that this is the era we live in. Education should have never been about rote memorization, but now more than ever knowing facts is unnecessary. Synthesis and analysis have always been at the heart of education, but they've always been overlooked at the same time. We need to start to teach students that finding information with the new technology is fine, but they need to learn to interpret that information with other new technologies as well. Otherwise--what good is it. Anyone can look it up on Wikipedia!