Month: January 2016

Blogging has been a part of the digital world for as long as I can remember. However, I believe blogging is an art, the literal art of self-expression which clearly.

Statistically speaking, artists do not make up the largest part of our society, they are usually small in numbers but fierce when it comes to their self-expression. I mean, think about it, when you blog/perform, you really put yourself out there. You open yourself up to criticism, trolling and in extreme cases, ridicule. Let me tell you, not a lot of people can handle that much pressure.

However, blogging is actually performing behind your computer screen. Sure, anyone can type up a few paragraphs on word and make them public for all the world to see. It doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy. But in fact, it is.

Some proponents of blogging will liken in to being out in society and trying to start a conversation with someone or giving your opinion on a subject in front of people you don’t know. They would have a point. However, just like everything in the digital world, the blog will never go away. It could come back to haunt you forever and ever, like a bad credit score. If you don’t like the conversation of someone you just me, you can just turn and walk away, move on to the next person. If you don’t like the opinion of someone when you are in a group, you can tune that someone out and not take notice of them. But with blogging, you have to be extremely careful. You have to be politically correct, you have to be an excellent writer and most of all, and you must have something interesting to tell other people. And come on, let’s be frank. No one can be interesting and novel all the time. So instead of blogging, and unless you are fighting for social equality or speaking up against abuse or such, I honestly don’t want to read about your day, EVERYDAY.

Connected Learning, which connects interests, peer culture, and academic success, is a model of education that is truly appropriate for the early 21st century.  As we discussed in class on Wednesday night, education has become a process of measuring “outcomes.” Perhaps it has always been this way, but now that we have all seen how technology can transform education into so much more, this traditional view has come under criticism. The abundance of information and the ease of accessing that information allows us reexamine the purpose of education; if it is no longer a challenge to obtain knowledge, then we can ask ourselves- what can we do with all of the knowledge that we have? What was the purpose of learning it in the first place? In the day-to-day grind and the policy making of education, these questions seem to get lost, or obscured by the pressing needs of passing the next test. This brings us to another topic we discussed in class- how institutions can sometimes be slow to change, even when many people want to change them.

Part of the appeal of academia, however, is the hope of being able to rise above some of that institutional sluggishness. That is the main reason why, for me, teaching college is much more appealing than teaching high school. From my viewpoint, a teacher of a college course has more power to implement his or her vision for the purpose of the course, while a high school teacher faces more constraints. This brings the conversation back to me, and the rest of the students in contemporary pedagogy, as we begin our journeys into teaching careers. My hope for this class is that it will help me to develop my own ideas for the purpose of education in general, and economics education in particular, and how I can use Connected Learning to implement those ideas.

A good starting point here is the idea brought forth by Scott Rosenberg in his article “How Blogs Changed Everything” of human creativity being “like a gene that will turn on given the right cues.” If human creativity is the key to solving the world’s problems, and I believe that it is, then the purpose of education should be to spark this creativity. Connected Learning provides an abundance of potential “cues,” as well as the opportunity for learning to occur once the creativity gene has been “turned on.” Right now it is Thursday afternoon and I am sitting in my living room, excited about the upcoming snowstorm. I have never been very interested in learning about how weather predictions are made, but this week my curiosity has been piqued, as I hear vastly different estimates for the total snowfall we will receive. The “cue” here in sparking that interest was a feeling of snow-deprivation after living in Virginia too long (I am from Massachusetts) combined with the discovery that there are many different models of weather prediction. Thanks to facebook posts by knowledgeable friends, websites, and weather blogs, I will be able to fuel that spark of interest with information all evening if I want to. In other words, the possibility of Connected Learning provides me with more opportunities to learn about something that interests me than I could hope to take advantage of.

As a researcher, I believe it is my responsibility to add to this network of knowledge. I agree with Tim Hitchcock, who argues in his blog post “Twitter and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion underpinning it” that public conversations should be a central part of an academic’s work. I want my research to be applicable to problems, and to spark ideas that others may have.

As a teacher, I hope to keep in mind what the purpose of my course is,  and to use the framework of Connected Learning to spark student’s interests and creativity. Gardner Campbell’s article “Narrate, Curate, Share: How Blogging Can Catalyze Learning” points out that putting what you have learned into your own words, like you do when blogging,  reinforces learning.  I have noticed in my own learning that information really only sticks when I have put it into my own words, when I can reproduce it on my own, even if only in my head. I hope therefore that as an instructor, I can create assignments and environments which encourage students to do this.

Thinking about the potential power of Connected Learning in education has forced me to think theoretically about the purpose of learning and how that purpose can be fulfilled. It has also opened my mind to practical tools that can be used to connect students with knowledge and, more importantly, inspiration.