Chapter 7
"In the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one's disposal and increasingly about knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic" (p. 93). I can read this excerpt with a degree of tongue-in-cheek for the much younger me who felt I was not "smart" because the sophisticated literati on TV could rattle off from the top of their head a suave quote from a book I had not heard of, and another would invariably recognize it: "Ah, you've read Pablo Neruda!" I grew up believing that being smart meant having near-perfect recall, which I did not. (Then again, I grew up without dial up AOL until sixth or seventh grade, and AskJeeves was the height of search sophistication until some time into high school. It was not quite the "information age" yet.) This chapter focuses on Knowing (the shift from "what" to where to find it), Making (hands-on creative activities and experiences to have an impact on the surrounding environment), and Playing (they compare knowledge acquisition to solving riddles: it is an experimental, plug-and-play-and-try-again model that only really comes together once you figure out the answer.) Wouldn't "Making" just be a specific kind of "Playing"? Chapter 8 "As people start to play in their environment, they [experience] . . . a shift in perspective, where the process of knowing stops being about one's relationship to others and becomes about one's relationship to the environment" (p.102). Thomas and Brown describe a three-step process to developing that sense of indwelling. 1) "Hanging Out" is social in nature and involves developing a social identity in relation to others in the collective and in learning how to navigate socially in context. 2) "Messing Around" sees a shift from social focus to environment focus as the user begins to experiment with changing and customizing their environment. Lastly, in 3) "Geeking Out," the user combines the social with the play as he explores and grows the limits of his abilities within the boundaries of that space. The book does not address this, but I wonder if there are many others who more or less bypass Stage 1 (e.g. the social interaction)? Chapter 9 "As we watch the world move to a state of near-constant change and flux, we believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning" (pp. 117-118). In this chapter, Thomas and Brown use World of Warcraft to illustrate their vision for the future role of education. The game provides a natural boundary (the web-based program itself), but within it the users have freedom to create characters, manipulate the environment, to create and insert their own code, etc. They work collaboratively to achieve common goals and objectives within the game, and they constantly engage in self and group assessment for continual improvement. I was thinking just the other day about Economics and how the only way I think it could be fun to teach is if you could have the kids engage in project-based learning by setting up their own class token economy that they would spend the semester building and developing collaboratively. In my head, I was trying to picture how this might look in practice via traditional classroom materials. Ideally, though, it would take place online. I wonder if there is any kind of program/website out there to sustain this kind of project with total flexibility for an entire semester?
2 Comments
2/13/2016 04:07:45 pm
Thank you for your post Mrs. Snow! I like how Thomas and Brown discuss the three dimensions of learning in Chapter 7. It really made me think math education. In many math classes, students do not get to do much in the way of making or playing, if at all. At the same time, math is a subject that many kids think they don't need or that has no relevance to their lives or world. If we were to use all three dimensions of learning in our classes, I'm sure that more kids would enjoy our classes and would find meaning in their work.
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Caitlin Eichlin
2/18/2016 10:33:51 am
Daydree,
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