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10 Jan 09

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able - Preview

web2.0 teaching wesch knowledgable

This new media
environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching
methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an
environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less
important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and
more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share,
discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from
being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.
networked digital information is also qualitatively
different than information in other forms. It has the potential to be
created, managed, read, critiqued, and organized very differently
than information on paper and to take forms that we have not yet even
imagined.
19 more annotations...
- This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and
  its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us
  to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an
  almost limitless variety of ways.
- The “message” of this
  environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that
  information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come
  to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for
  good information, and that good information is beyond discussion
  (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In
  short, it tells students to trust authority and follow
  along.
- Marshall McLuhan called
  it “the rear-view mirror effect,” noting that “We
  see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into
  the future.”²
- But as David Weinberger and Clay Shirky have demonstrated,
  networked digital information is fundamentally different than
  information on paper.³
- such media beg for participation
- The message of Wikipedia is not “trust
  authority” but “explore authority.”
- applications like Diigo
  which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
- Our old assumption that information is hard
  to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our
  hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can
  find us.
- “the crisis of significance,” the
  fact that many students are now struggling to find meaning and
  significance in their education.⁴
- if we work
  with students to find and address problems that are real and
  significant to them, they can then leverage the networked information
  environment in ways that will help them achieve the
  “knowledge-ability” we hope for them.
- We have had our why's,
  how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what
  should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why
  altogether. In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first
  address why, facilitate how, and let the what
  generate naturally from there.
- Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective
  intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new
  subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what
  psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's
  self-esteem.”⁶ You have to unlearn perspectives that may have
  become central to your sense of self.
- Even a quick scan of these subjectivities will
  reveal that they can only be learned, explored, and adopted through
  practice. We can't “teach” them. We can only create
  environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished,
  encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
- Students
  are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to
  harness and leverage the new media environment to find information,
  theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each
  student has a specific role and expertise to develop
- Students continue
  to harness and leverage the new media environment to learn more about
  these interconnections, and use the wiki to work together to create
  the “rules” for our simulation.
- Managing a learning
  environment such as this poses its own unique challenges, but there
  is one simple technique, which makes everything else fall into place: love and respect your students and they will love and respect you
  back.
- When you watch somebody
  who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given
  themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine
  those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you
  immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere
  cognitive dimension.
- we become students again, pursuing
  questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along
  with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave
  the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more
  importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from
  their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to
  inspire.
- The beauty of the current moment is that new media
  has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of
  question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.
  There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the
  questions that drive us on.