Month: January 2018

When we are little, we learn every day. And it is fun! We learn to count, talk, tie our shoes, feed ourselves, etc … and each and every time we learn something new, it is the best thing that has ever happened! As baby George demonstrated, we even had fun when we failed ~ because failing is also learning, and learning is fun! As we age, learning becomes more tedious, likely because we are judged based how “well” we learn. When we are little, every time we fall or say the alphabet incorrectly, it is cute, we are encouraged to try again by smiling faces, and learning is an adventure (as Kuh states). But later, grades, report cards, and awards make children think of learning as a chore. Something that they have to do in order to succeed. Unfortunately, most of the times when students “fail” at something in a class, there isn’t a smiling face and the reassurance of another chance to try again.

Many argue that we learn everyday even as adults. But how often do adults think that learning is fun? For example, if someone says “Hey – Erin! Let’s do something fun today! What would you like to do?” Even as someone who likes school, my standard responses to this question include “go see a movie,” “go bowling” or “go out to a nice restaurant.” Although I do thoroughly enjoy learning, it often seems to me that me, and presumably the rest of us in academia, are the minority because learning goes from:

To:

In my opinion, using social media and blogging is a way to make learning fun again. It allows people to express themselves in often a less formal manner than typical “academic” writing. This, at least for me, takes off a lot of the stress involved with writing. Additionally, posting writing online via Facebook, blogging, Twitter etc encourages people to write well – as nobody wants to appear “stupid” to the masses. Overall, I believe that using tools such as blogging is increasingly important in today’s working world. It is not just for the youngest generation either – people of all ages are blogging and using social media to communicate with others. It will be really interesting to see how online networking continues to grow over the next decade and how it may bring fun back into education!

After reading Gardner Campbell’s Networked Learning As Experiential Learning, based on George Kuh’s work, I find myself having more questions. Kuh states that experiential learning includes mostly co-curricular activities such as: research, internships, service, and study abroad. However Campbell challenges Kuh for not including networked learning within experiential learning. With the digital age of education, Campbell asks, “Why not offer students an experience of the sense of exhilarating possibility within the cyberspace they take for granted, the cyberspace that LMSs and apps have begun to remove from our view?”

Campbell believes that the current generation of students does not have a vast knowledge of the internet and social media. Additionally, networked learning should provide learning beyond a traditional education. I see benefits to distance-learners by providing courses online and peer-to-peer learning through blogs and e-portfolios. However, I do not believe that the internet should be the only way to create experiential learning. Campbell seems unclear about how exactly to promote experiential learning and does not give concrete examples. Maybe Campbell’s beliefs are meant to be open to more interpretation. The author also seems concerned only with students in higher education. What about people who are not currently enrolled in a institution of higher education? It does not seem that Campbell has considered people who do not have access to education in a traditional classroom. There should also be consideration for continued learners.

I have to be honest and say that I didn’t know what networked learning was nor have I ever heard of it before reading the assignments for this week. After doing a little research of my own as well, I think I understand networked learning to be a type of collaborative learning that uses social media such as blogging on Twitter. This got me thinking about how my lab and others currently share knowledge gained from research in the academic setting. Most of our publications are read by scientists and researchers through journals and only limited to the audience of that journal (so it may not reach disciplines outside that particular field of study). I started to think about how Using public social media I like Twitter and blogging could potentially lead to more people receiving knowledge gained from your research, spreading this information and expanding on it. After this reflection, I feel students can highly benefit from practicing networked learning in the classroom setting. I really like the analogy from the baby George video of how the whole class climbed this mountain together each time pulling the whole class onto a plateau before going to the next assignment. I agree with the speaker when he said how we’re always talking about the real world on the outside but we need to start bringing the real world to the inside and networked/collaborative learning is a way to do that. Take for example doing a dissertation. We are encouraged to develop and conduct our own projects and write our own chapters/publications where very little of any type of collaboration is involved. In the “real world” research is now moving towards networking and collaboration and grants/publications are regarded as higher quality when a variety of researchers are included.

Based on the readings from this week, creating a digital presence is one of the best ways to engage yourself and your audience with your materials whether it be research or coursework. One of the ways we’re practicing a well rounded digital presence this semester is through blogging.

If I’m being honest, blogging is not something that comes easy to me. As an entomology PhD student, most of my written communication about my own research is in passive voice, and that is far from engaging for a general audience. Considering my lack of experience, my plan for this semester is to treat blogging like running.

I have been an runner on and off for the better part of four years, and running for the first time or starting back after a break is always difficult and uncomfortable. It’s hard to know when to breathe and what pace works, but at some point, usually about a month into it, an internal flip switches. The discomfort gets replaced by a steady rhythm. There are still days where it’s difficult, but for the most part, it becomes a second nature.

I’m hoping that blogging will follow a similar pattern. The first few weeks might feel a bit shaky and strained. Finding my voice might feel a bit like finding a rhythm and building up strength, but at some point, I’m hoping for that internal switch.

By the end of the course, I want to take the practice of blogging about classroom topics and expand it into blogging about my own research. Building a foundation of digital engagement as a graduate student would hopefully provide for a smooth transition of digital engagement as a professor.

Tim Hitchcock blogged about the changing platform of public discourse, and the academic’s role, in his post titled, “Twitter and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion underpinning it.”Over the past few decades, discourse between academics and the public has transformed away from print newspapers, monographs, and journal articles, toward online interaction. Hitchcock thinks academics need to lean into this transformation, rather than fight against it—the world is changing and communication will be difficult if academics do not acknowledge the need to adapt. I agree with this point, but I want to respond to Hitchcock’s blog post because I think the advice that academics adapt to changing modes of communication is not such a simple task as moving from paper to the the keyboard.

One difference between traditional modes of communication and electronic modes of communication is the permanence of information. While journal articles and monographs, for example, retain permanence through publication, intellectual conversations that happen in person are not archived the same way. Journal articles and monographs are planned, drafted, revised, and then published—conversations happen in the moment. We have all likely heard the advice, “be careful what you post online, you can never take it back.” In other words, even if you delete a comment you posted on Facebook, the Facebook servers still have a record of your comment. Or another possibility, someone could have screenshot your comment and reposted it. Even if the reposter deletes their post, someone else may have already reposted their post.

My concern is that, if intellectual conversations that used to be in the moment and unarchived, are suddenly archivable and understood to be permanent, individuals may be less likely to engage in conversation as freely as they might in person. I worry this will happen, because they may feel that, since they have the time to sit behind their computer and makes changes before ‘speaking,’ they will feel pressure to speak perfectly. Some people, I think will take on this challenge. Good for them. But I think others may feel overwhelmed by this task, feeling they will be permanently represented by something they said at one point in time, tethering their online identity to one moment of their life. What if they change their mind?

On the flip side, conversations can be manipulated so that they are visually ephemeral. For example, some people have likely had the experience of engaging in a long conversation on Reddit or Facebook, or another online social platform, and later found that another participant in the conversation deleted their contribution to the conversation. If an individual feels that their contribution to the conversation was not appreciated or reflected accurately, or they were attacked, they can delete their contributions. Of course, it is never really deleted—Facebook or Reddit still has the data, and remember, someone could have reposted it before it was deleted. However, deleting one’s contribution to the conversation still works to conceal what they said from many other users of the social media platform.

I think that the same can be said for blogging. While blogging is not typically thought of as a social media platform, it technically is one if blogs are a place for intellectual conversations to take place. While the conversation may not happen in the same format or pace as those that happen on Facebook or Twitter, blogs can be manicured in the same way that social media conversations can.

I certainly do not think blogging should be written off given the concerns I have expressed over online conversations. However, as humans grow and adapt to our changing world, it is important that we acknowledge the changes that result from the advancements in communication—such as speed, access, and complexity; we should critique the ways our communication is stifled by these advancements, just as we should lean into and celebrate them.

In an era of performance charting and standardized tests, it seems infeasible to expect students to demonstrate any more pride and individuality than we attribute to them in the first place. When students are “trained” instead of taught” and when they must be “productive” instead of “enlightened,” we can expect these persons to see themselves in the same way that we see them: as a dot on a performance curve. George Kuh (and Gardner Campbell by extension) present an admirable perspective in opposition to this trend. Exploration and student-centered learning initiatives are mantras that may hope to commandeer classrooms in the near future. Campbell’s suggestions concerning digital literacy may prove to be particularly palatable and enjoyable for a digital audience of current and prospective students. However, these tactics while creative appear to only mitigate student interests and results unless they are also able to definitely establish a “why” for these individuals.

As we saw with Baby George, the learning process can be and likely should be fun. The moment of discovery is but one cathartic moment at the end of a long chain of pleasurable trials. Baby George knows what most of us in higher education do not: he knows why he is trying to walk. He knows what he wants to accomplish, and he is free from distractions and frustrations. George has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do but to keep trying. “What” he is doing and “why” have consumed his very interests. We have not created this same environment for our students. They have grades they want to meet, not subjects they want to learn. Furthermore, we cannot even tell them why these grades are worth meeting. Michael Wesch was able to tailor the work of the university towards the interests of the student, but that does not mean he is able to make that work meaningful. That responsibility lies with the student, to understand and know why doing these tasks differently interests them. In short, getting away from the objective learning curve that has defined student performance in recent decades is but one step on the learning curve that we as educators have yet to make. The environment must not be about distinguishing excellence from the average, the complacent, and the base. Rather, it should be a place of exploration where individuals can find their “why” and find those tasks and work which helps them realize such ambitions.

If performance is a concern, let the students determine that for themselves. Their future and education do not belong to our metrics, charts, and curves.

I have benefited a lot from network learning since my first year in college. Although most work still require independent efforts, higher-level learning is always challenging and takes long time to digest and understand.  Only focusing on textbooks or readings that time can hardly arouse my passion for studying deeply and thinking broadly. And for the knowledge that is more practical and experimental, it is almost impossible to master it without an effective experiential learning that involves experiments, discussions and feedbacks. Luckily at that time, we had study groups and online platforms for collaborating with classmates, solving problem together, sharing our learning experiences, and getting feedbacks. For several times at the end of semesters, I felt the same as Prof. Michael Wesch introduced in his TED talk that “…but in fact that final project was not so final and the real project was themselves.”

Now for my graduate education in this digital era, it is even more important for me to communicate opinions and get feedbacks in a broader context. I appreciate that many courses, like GRAD 5114 Contemporary Pedagogy, have involved blogging via social media as a main tool to force me to think deeper and help me learn in a network with more inclusive study culture. Moreover, for this course itself, learning the experiences and opinions from peers with different education background is a very necessary process to understand the pedagogy from diverse perspectives. It is also beneficial when I become an educator in the future in terms of establishing a public position, communicating my research, and evaluating the effectiveness of my teaching.