Random Thoughts

Reading Adult Education and Technology, I ran across a link to an old video by Stephen Downes that I had never seen.  It is great!

I was struck by a lot of things he said.  One big thing for me was the idea of the personal nature of the web. “You are at the center of your own personal learning network.”

For instance, he said that we shouldn’t worry about how anyone else should tag something; the tag is to make it easy for us to find it again.  That made me feel better about my rather long list of tags in delicious.

Other ideas:

• Create your own project pages to make access to documents or forms or templates easily available to YOU.
• Put all your learning in one place. Summarize what you have learned on a blog or wiki.
• Take notes in a blog.
• Forward important emails to yourself at gmail.

Something else was the fact that email isn’t a chore. It is a tool that allows us to communicate with others; we should look forward to it and find time to do it on a regular basis.  I have a friend who hated to check email.  She finally opened a gmail account and found that she liked email when it wasn’t filled with meaningless messages from her employer.  She now enjoys email.  It’s great!

Stephen talks about filtering  what we read.  Don’t try to read everything.  Don’t save things because someone else tells you to; save it because it is important to you.

He talks about Web 2.0 being about how we organize information.

He has made me rethink how I want to approach my summer classes.  It is the idea of the learner making meaning, making connections. I need to think seriously about this.

Today I was in class and it hit me:  I have lost a lot by using WebCT this semester.  I have, for instance, some visiting scholars who sit in on my classes, and I always have to give the the URLs to the articles we are reading or I have to tell them to look on with someone else.  They have no university ID, so they can’t access WebCT.  I have also lost the opportunity for my students to showcase their work to their family and friends back in China.

As I said, this was a startling discovery in the moment when it hit me.  How had I missed that?  How could I not have known?  And then I realized that I wasn’t surprised.  I knew this would be the result when I started out.  But because I was new on campus and because no one could tell me what university policies, if any, existed to cover use of social media sites, I opted to put the course on WebCT.  And in the fact that it is the platform that the students will use throughout their academic careers here, I do not regret the decision.

But last weekend I began working on a wiki for my classes next semester.  I was debating having final versions of papers uploaded to WebCT or posted to a blog.  I have decided for sure now that they will go on a blog.  We already have a delicious account, and I can expand it as we ad more texts for the different course.  I am thinking about using Pageflakes to pull it all together, but I haven’t decided for sure yet.  The class blog could do the same.  Or the wiki.

And another startling but not very surprising discovery… I am really excited by the prospect of doing this again.

Didn’t I finish that last post by saying I wouldn’t mind being a little ahead of the game?  Well, I don’t think I meant it in this way, but I have just spent the last couple hours getting ahead of the game — and of myself, probably.

I decided it was time to update the CV on my portfolio, so I spent some time doing that.  Then I looked at the links to my wikis and WebQuests and such.  And from there, it was all down hill.  Wikidot, where I have the wiki I used for my WebQuests and such a couple years ago very innocently asked me if  wanted to start another wiki.  So I decided to set up a new wiki to use next semester and beyond with my students here at ENMU.  I took one of my Webquests from the old wiki and recycled it into the new wiki.  It was easy to do from a backup that wikidot let me make in about a minute.  So I guess I am on my way to using a lot more social media this next semester.

I have come to realize how narrow using WebCT has made the class.  Well, maybe narrow isn’t the right word.  Linear is a better description, I guess.  And I don’t think I want my class to be so linear.

But anyway, here I am on a Friday night working on a class that won’t start until late January.  That is seriously ahead of the game!

Patricia’s post about Facebook built on something I have been thinking about a lot lately: Why do I want to use social media in the classroom?  Now, I am not saying I am opposed to it, but I want to know why I am using it.  What are the pedagogical reasons for it?

Patricia makes some excellent points, I think, when she says:

Facebook is a social place and they should use it for social purposes. It’s THEIR place, THEIR space, THEIR party. Making them use this very social space to learn things is like crushing a party on a Friday night. One of the other teachers pointed out that it is incredible how often students use facebook. And, that’s true; yes, they do. But that’s because they need to. They need to exchange nonsense videos, the need to send each other hugs, and they need to have a place to vent their exasperation about education (how telling is that!) in desperate messages in which they complain how much studying sucks. Taking away this SOCIAL space from them and turning it into an EDUCATIONAL space would be a crime.

Students spend time using social media.  We want to take advantage of our students’ interests to teach them things.  Both of those statements are basically true, I think.  But the question is, does the one necessitate the other?  Since they like social media, do we have to use it to teach them something?

Like Patricia, I am inclined to say “No!”

So what are we to do?

The answer, I think, starts with looking at the pedagogy.

That is what Chris is saying in his post about his NECC presentation.  He says in his slides:

Pedagogy matters. A Lot.

His slides include one that says technology must be

Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible

And he says:

What’s Good? Is a Better Question Than What’s New.

So what would be the pedagogy behind using social media?  Would the use of social media be “Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible”?

And if we take over social media sites to use them for our own purposes where will the young people go to socialize?  As Patricia says, they need that space for socializing.

I don’t think that any of this means that we shouldn’t use social media with our students, though.  If we strive to make the technology “Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible,” we could surely use social media.  But the invisible part would make it hard to crash into Facebook without an invitation.  And I think it comes down a lot to choice.  If students are given projects to work on and want to use social media to do it, that would be fine.  If, for instance, students were doing some sort of a project on other countries and wanted to use 43 Places, that is their decision.  But the minute I tell them, “You have to go on 43 Places and get information about your country,” I think we have distorted the whole thing.  We have taken the “social” out of social media.

How do we strike a balance between taking advantage of our students’ interests and co-opting what matters to them and using it for our own purposes?

As I said, this is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.  I don’t know that I have any answers, but at least I have some questions.  I guess that’s the first step.