Month: January 2016

This week’s readings seem to over-emphasize the role and function of blogs. In my opinion, blogs are a new form of communicating tool, just like telephones, emails, and web searching tools. These communicating tools are indeed useful and make education more efficient. For example, nowadays students can get an article on web by clicking a few keys on board, instead of going to the library and make a hard copy. However, saving time does not necessarily make one go into the right direction. It is still one’s thinking, opinion, philosophy, and reflection upon the world that determines what information one wants to acquire. A more efficient technique just makes that happen sooner.

Some scholars seem not to get the key problems of present school education. Hitchcock said: “If there is a ‘crisis’ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content.” In my opinion, this is opposite to the truth. Nowadays the real difficulty of the humanities is that they have NO CONTENT except political correctness. What humanistic scholars really care about is to promote so-called equality rather than pursuing truth. Such equalities could be economic, gender, ethnic, and cultural. Equality is not a bad thing, however, we must keep in mind that equality is subject to higher values such as freedom, and these two things are not same. But this will start a much more complicated topic which is not appropriate to discuss here.

Anyway, blogs can make one’s opinion much more available to the public than traditional methods, but maybe people should keep in mind that occupying more public space does not necessarily make an opinion more meaningful. Just like Campbell revealed, blog maybe is just another form of “narrate”, or story telling.

Has technology benevolently given us unprecedented access to information and other people or has it created a world of disconnected and discontented souls? The answer seems to be as complicated as human beings are: yes and no. Or, as we marriage and family therapists (MFTs) who are also social constructionists like to say, it’s “both …

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Hello, readers! I’m back today to talk about the new world I just stumbled into. the world of Connected Learning and educational blogging. Now as most of you know, I’m obsessed with finding new and exciting initiatives within teaching. I generally scour the forums and journals to find the latest and greatest in teaching. I even read the comments (I know, I know it’s like digging through garbage) to find the rare diamond amongst the throughs of coal. Well, as I was taking a new course on Contemporary Pedagogy, to learn on the cutting edge, I found myself introduced to this new concept called Connected Learning. I thought that it was worth talking about, and so I bring it to you here. Now, admittedly, upon further inspection, Connected Learning is not completely new. In fact, it’s a remixing of the digital literacies movement to incorporate the humanist, student-centered classroom. However, I believe this remixing is combining two things that were meant to be drawn together. What we are witnessing is essentially the birth of the educational PB Chocolate Swirl. I’ve got your attention now, don’t I? From what I’ve been reading and observing, Connected learning is learning that brings together all of the different aspects of a person’s life with digital tools to inspire personal learning and growth in a way that is both self-encouraging and self-motivated. That’s a powerful idea. essentially we are taking the student-centered classes of Donald Murray and Howard Gardener and using digital tools (Like Blogging) to make them available to everyone while incorporating feminist teaching ideologies and social cognitionist teaching to ensure total incorporation. If you Haven’t noticed yet, this post is an inception-style use of this theory. I’m currently using Connected Learning to Learn about Connected Learning, to use Connected Learning to teach you about connected learning in a connected learning environment (And the top keeps spinning). This is an exciting time to be jumping into all this and I believe that, as many of the articles that we are reading for week two have said, the blog is the perfect tool to start with. it incorporates much of  the ideologies and hopes of connected teaching into an easy to use format.

This being said, like with any technology or innovation, I think that it would be unwise to go forth without voicing my reservations on the subject, so here they are: Connected learning seems too big. I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am, but right now it seems to be taking on too much. It wants to free students from the classic classroom, incorporate digital technologies, and invite communal participation and action within the lives of the students. It’s simply too much. It’s like trying to learn to swim, run, and fly all at the same time. And, that’s if others are willing to cooperate. I can’t speak for the college level, as I have not been teaching here very long, but at the high school level getting a parent to show up one night a year is considered successful. asking for complete community participation in addition to total digital emersion seems like a pipe dream. However, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a sucker for idealism and I’m ready to get behind this if others will help.

What do you think about this initiative? what are some of the limitations that you can see? Let’s talk about it in the comments.