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?
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Chapter 4: "Once a particular passion or interest is unleashed, constant interaction among group members, with their varying skills and talents, functions as a kind of peer amplifier, providing numerous outlets, resources, and aids to further an individual's learning" (p. 51). Basically, the entire purpose of the existence of the collective is to participate in a shared experience in exploring a particular interest. In other words, without the common interest the collective would have no reason to exist. It also implies that active collaboration on the part of the learner is what makes learning possible. But what about self-proclaimed and not-ashamed "Visitors" like me? I learn a LOT by trolling forums without ever actively participating in the conversation. Sometimes one forum does not already contain the answer that I am looking for. In theory, I could add my comment to the cluster, and wait around until someone who knows responds to me... OR I could just Google a little deeper--try a different search term or a different forum--until I find what I'm looking for. It's faster NOT to participate because the vast majority of threads are long inactive by the time you get to them, and the ones that are active may contain much less relevant information. Chapter 5: "They [Facebook and MySpace] provide means for truly harnessing the collective. Through new media. the collective serves not only as a kind of resource for learning but also as a kind of amplifier: It intensifies and heightens the process of learning by continuously relating it back to the personal" (p. 67). While I agree that Facebook definitely produces an amplifying effect on the "content" being consumed, I can't help but to question how often ANYTHING posted, reposted, shared, and liked twenty thousand times on Facebook is something that is actually WORTH learning?? Social media, blogs, and forums are too often created and maintained not for the pure sake of sharing and growing in knowledge, but to provide some half-valid excuse for click bait to generate PPC ad revenue. I'm not saying that there aren't places on the internet where Thomas and Brown's idealistic view of collective learning occurs, but I would certainly argue against that place being Facebook. Chapter 6 "The concept is a certain familiarity that forms through the process of prolonged inquiry on particular topics or from repeated use of the skills and techniques . . . Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices, and processes that are so engrained they become second nature" (p. 84). In this chapter, Thomas and Brown explore two forms of innate knowledge that are integral to inquiry-based knowledge: tacit knowledge and indwelling. Tacit knowledge could be described as a form of intuition: an internal and unspecified knowledge about a subject with which we are familiar. Indwelling is perhaps the manifestation/application of tacit knowledge. For example, I have a tacit knowledge for drilling corks: I know by an intuitive feel born from thousands of times doing it whether a cork will drill quickly and cleanly, whether the Dremel will be prone to skipping, whether the cork will be at risk for splitting, and the best way to jimmy it in and out of the jig without breaking or tearing it. I wish they included some additional examples to elaborate what they mean by dispositions though. Any ideas? |
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May 2016
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