CI 8395 reading reflection#2

Thursday, February 21, 2008
I am trying to clear up some thoughts in order to be a responsible learning community member. There are thousands of treads and lines of R&D that keep many Web researchers, educators, and practitioners, and policy makers busy forever.To narrow down a line to investigate is an imperative for a grad student! Otherwise, drifting, floating and possible drowning all become possible. Having been teaching and developing various types of web-learning courses, I have to guiltily confess that I need to be seriously taking the responsibility in making the following conditions a reality:1. Emphasize the learning around students instead of the classroom, the institution (such as the Union, the faculty, the administrative, the policy makers, and other issues generated by the secondary stakeholders.) In this category, I am interested in examining the topics such as: transference, social presence, feedback system (assessments: formative and summative), learners’ and facilitators’ contextual settings as well as learners’ characteristics and facilitators’ interventions in the online environment.2. Focus on the strengths and the needs of individual learners. This means that “temporarily” I don’t have to be too empathetic on the cost-effectiveness of budgetary issues on the institutional level as well as the ambiguous teaching/facilitating side of scenarios.3. Assess the student learning outcome more responsibly and accurately.Just focusing on students’ learning, there are already many sub-lines of research challenging all the stakeholders. Though student learning outcome is highly correlating to many internal and external factors (I organized a chart to illustrate them- in progress and done will be posted soon), focusing on students as the core and from there, many other relevant research theories and hypotheses can be generated or tested. Again, assessment is affected by multifactors, which needs to be examined in the contextual environment in order to obtain the genuine learning outcome.4. Look for genuine and capable collaborators from a specific learning community. Capability and genuineness mean that collaborators develop the common interests, trust, engagements, reciprocity, carrying out projects, and can mutually challenge and grow together as well as sustain/expand the learning community.5. Make lifelong learning a practical reality (I benefit from this truism a lot even though not having enough educational budget in the pocket!)6. Keep on visionary awareness and capacity.Though thousand mile journey starts from the very first step, without clearly knowing where the journey up for (to a great horizon), all the steps might end up much ado! So continuously broadening the vision is a must.Here a visionary example (may have some overlapping with other visionaries): Ron Bleed published some of his ideas regarding the 3 roles of IT associates, 3 golden trends, 4 reasons for change and 3 strategies to engage changes:(http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/TheITLeaderasAlchemistFin/40603 (1 of 11) [2/20/2008 9:08:03 PM])Three roles of IT persons:a. The information technology (IT) leader within higher education can be viewed from three scenarios: (1) the IT leader as plumber; (2) the IT leader as gardener; and (3) the IT leader as alchemist.Three golden trendsb. Gold #1: The 21st Century Hybrid Courses will be moving from the haves and have-nots issue (This moving, to me is very skeptical! How and when???) toward the blended learning- an evolving phenomenon that offers promise for addressing challenges such as access, cost, efficiency, and timely degree completion. In addition, this approach will impact aspects of the academy such as faculty development and rewards, student retention, college and department structure, as well as the notion of lifelong learning.c. Gold #2: The 21st learning spaces suggest the necessity to fuse high tech and high touch hybrid teaching and learning. The informal spaces create an environment in which students can talk informally and experience some of the other dimensions of becoming an educated person. In The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid claim: “As much learning happens outside the classroom as inside.” The key to learning is “rubbing shoulders with multiple sensibilities.”6 Second, research shows that successful learning should be active, contextual, engaged, interactive, and social.d. Gold #3: The 21st century Literacy:Bleed used 2 visionary individuals’ Q&As (George Lucas and Bill Gates) to explain the 3rd gold (please refer to the original article), and concludes that the literacy of the 21st century will be composed of digital images and of sounds as well as of words and text. Thus, the preservation of traditional literacy formats and their use in the classroom will work to the detriment of an increasingly large number of students.Four reasons for change: For the 3rd gold, Bleed added up 4 reasons for change to a new form of literacya. Reason #1: The 21st century Students. By the age of 21, the average student today will have spent more than 10,000 hours playing video games, will have sent or received over 200,000 e-mails and instant messages, will have talked for more than 10,000 hours on a cell phone, will have spent over 20,000 hours watching television, and will have spent, at most, 5,000 hours reading books. So this is an omnipresent phenomenon of our student population!b. Reason #2: The Tipping Point. The phrase tipping point is a sociology term that refers to that dramatic moment when something unique becomes common. The year 2004 was the tipping point for the digital video and music world. Dramatic increases were experienced in the consumer market for digital video and music: for example, 150 million camera phones were sold worldwide in 2004, and the number of homes with digital video recorders increased 119 percent in 2004. So, seemingly there is no way to return!c. Reason #3: High Tech, High Touch, High Concept. Based on John Naisbitt (Megatrends) and later Daniel Pink’s elaboration, suggests that the current generation had technology build upon their left-brain abilities of logic, analysis, literalness, and sequential. Now, the right-brain abilities of creativity, empathy, pattern recognition, and the making of meaning will be needed to create “high touch” and “high concept.” Pink claims that the Industrial Age was built on people’s backs and that the Information Age was built on people’s left brains. The new “Conceptual Age” will be built on people’s right brains. We will move to a society of creators, empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning-makers.d. Reason #4: Visual Literacy Skills. Visual culture is permeating in contemporary societies. Thus how to provide students the literacy skills they need to effectively create and interpret visual content is a typical challenge .Finally, Bleed proposes strategies to infuse 21st century literacy
a. Strategy #1: A New 21st Literacy Course. A new course could be designed for the 21st century literacy skills which will become a requirement for graduation.b. Strategy #2: 21st Literacy across the Curriculum. The second strategy to advance the 21st century literacy is to program it “across the curriculum” by encouraging and supporting all faculty to assign student projects that use visual and aural media. Bleed provides two examples to illustrate such strategy: a) This approach occurred in the anthropology courses taught at Mesa Community College by Rick Effland. Instead of a ten-page typed research paper, Effland had the students create digital movies. He found that the amount and quality of the research done by the students in a video format far exceeded the quality of their work done with written papers. The students were more engaged, worked more collaboratively, and learned more when they used visual media.b) The Beijing Project at Colgate University. A Colgate faculty member and Raymond Nardelli, senior instructional technology analyst at Colgate, took nineteen students to Beijing and gave them an assignment requiring them to express what they learned. Allnineteen used video cameras, digital still cameras, audio equipment, and tablet computers to cover different aspects of Beijing such as nature, transportation, Tiananmen Square activities, childhood, music, fashion, neighborhoods, and markets.
c. Strategy #3: Teacher-Education Programs. Any teacher-education program that embraces the teaching of the new literacy will be on the cutting edge in the United States. (Europe and Australia have more momentum in this area.) Pace-setting institutions will attract favorable sponsorship, support, and recognition. Colleges and universities need to serve as a bridge between teacher-education programs and technology corporations, foundations, and influential associations.Bleed provides optimistic side of scenarios which make reading very “endorphinic”. I am always aware of on the roadmap, there are roadblocks which need to be identified, targeted and then solved!!!So with the microscopic practicality and a macro visionary reinforcement in mind, I think I can be more confidently to do what I should have done and will/can be done sometimes ago. Now go back to read, read, read, and thiiiiiiiiiiiink.
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