Quote: “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him as long as the fish supply holds out. But create a collective, and every man will learn how to feed himself for a lifetime.”
Question: If a collective is defined as an active engagement with the process of learning and depends on participation, then how can we shift our classroom communities to classroom collectives? How can we ensure participation by all? I feel like voluntary participation is crucial, not forced participation by the teacher. My shy students come to mind, my students who struggle with school and would be insecure to share their thoughts, my more defiant students… How do we get them to join the collective? I guess that connects to overall classroom culture and expectations. Something to think about.
Connection: I connected easily to this concept of a “collective”. It seems very natural to me to discuss learning, debate learning, and have conversations about topics to better understand them. In college that was how I made learning meaningful to me… I discussed each topic with my study group. Yes, it takes longer, but then the information wasn’t just something I crammed for and memorized, it was something I really thought about and connected to, thus learned more deeply.
Epiphany: My big epiphany in this chapter was when I was reading about blogs and how the participation is what makes them so authentic. You never know which way a collective will go. Information changes and often becomes better with more participation. I thought of when I read cooking blogs and in the comments section people will talk about how they changed the recipe to make it better, and by the bottom of the page, you’ve got 10 different options for making this dish- each person adding to it or substituting something to make it better. So cool.
Chapter 5
Quote: “The learning that happens through blogs, social networks, and other new media may be deeply grounded in experience and personal expression, but it also arises from the contributions of multiple people and voices. Expertise and authority are dispersed rather than centralized, and once a digital space hits a point of critical mass, it is very likely that some member of the community will have valuable expertise to share about a given topic.” (pg.71)
I chose this quote because I felt like it summarized the overall point of the chapter. By participating in social media platforms, blogs and any type of online “collectives” as a form of learning takes “static information” and makes it fluid. There is not one “expert” (or teacher) sharing information, but many. It’s guaranteed that by participating in such a forum, you are going to be forced to think about the information from different perspectives and you will gain insight (or critique) from the true experts.
Question: This idea of “collectives” is mainly connected to online platforms in this chapter. My question is how do we allow universal access to these collectives? Would participation be something happening during school hours only? Could your classroom community be transformed into a classroom collective? I feel like a lot of the great learning in these collectives is done on people’s own personal time, but not everyone has access to internet at home. This creates a dilemma and many questions for an educator.
Connection: I connected to this chapter personally when the author discussed blogs; specifically people who blog. He describes how blogs are transforming into their own form of journalism. He explains that bloggers can “get away with less, and afford fewer pretensions of authority”. I guess I connected to this idea because I enjoy writing but would never consider myself good enough to be a “journalist”. Blogging has opened up writing for all people and has given them an opportunity to be a “writer” without dealing with the formalities and criticisms of journalism. He also explained that blogging is “more of a conversation than a production”. I love that.
Epiphany: My aha moment occurred when I was reading about the online study groups at Ryerson University. The students were being accused of cheating… but my thinking is, at the university level, students are really there for the learning. “By working through all of the different points at which others became stuck on their problems, each member of the collective encountered more theories and applications of chemistry than they had ever done in the classroom or traditional study group.” (pg.70) YES. YES. YES. The more questions, the more exposure, the more conversations being had simply leads to a much deeper understanding.
Chapter 6
Quote: “The story of these students illustrates a fundamental principle of the new culture of learning: Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment.” (pg.79)
Question: Do students today lack passion? Or is the problem that their passions were never acknowledged or recognized? “They had come to believe that things they felt passionate about should not be part of the (formal) learning process.” (pg.80) WOW.
Connection: This chapter talks about the benefits of inquiry based learning. Inquiry based learning allows for peer-to-peer learning and for the teacher to learn from the students. I connected to this especially when they author explains how it is impossible (even for really great teachers) to know the answers to everything. But if you put the power in the hands of the students, and have them be the ones to answer their own (and their peers’) questions, really incredible learning can happen. I love this idea. I especially connected to this idea because as a young teacher (who teachers 7 different subjects a day) it is impossible for me to be an expert on everything. My first year teaching 4th grade I found myself studying California history and 4th grade science each night before I taught the next day’s lesson. Even then, I found myself saying “Great question! I will find out for you!” all the time. Why not turn it around and have the students find out the answer, teach the whole class, and me?
Epiphany: What if the questions are more important than the answers? They are.
References
Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely. Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace?, 2011. Print.