Now this is a very interesting concept... and it is not one we think of very often. I think that is a little odd seeing as we often look at other parts of our life in this way. Dave White explains our online presence as on a continuum falling somewhere between a visitor of the internet and a resident. As the idea suggests a visitor to the internet would be someone who has a small to non-existent presence online. They might only use the internet to do specific things like a small amount of e-mail, casually surfing the web, shopping, etc. This means their digital footprint is fairly small and if one was to search their name, the likelihood of them actually coming up in the search is VERY unlikely. An online visitor would not appear to be someone who has settled in to this region of existence, just as a visitor to a city would not likely be in the local phonebook, the newspaper, high school yearbooks, etc.
On the contrary, if someone is a resident of the internet, they would generally be findable, or searchable. The exist on the web and would often either blog, post on Facebook, Tweet, record vlogs or have podcasts. On the extreme side, most of their life would be recorded online and their digital footprint would be significant. And with the world becoming more and more saturated with technology, it makes a lot of sense that people are becoming more and more likely to become residents. As White points out, originally the idea was shared as "Natives & Immigrants" written by Prensky in 2001. The reason why the language changed is because no one is really native to the digital world, we are all immigrants. The difference is our status of residency. How present are we? Are we residents, or simply visiting cyberspace? When it comes to my level of residency, I would say I am at a healthy medium of the spectum and even maybe a bit further toward resident. I have created a few websites over the years, I have a facebook, I have an active domain, as all readers would know, and I have a modest online presence on other social media (however, the only one I really used much is Facebook). White, D. [Dave White]. 2013, May 31. Visitors and Residents. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sFBadv04eY
1 Comment
Will Richardson starts off his essay by first offering an allegory. This allegory shows how when left to their own devices, students will find the answers they need and many times in the most innovative ways that we as educators might not have even thought of. After this brief allegorical example, he moves into the real issue. What is real learning and are the educational institutions today doing what helps kids learn or simply repeating a pattern? Richardson writes, "Our story about education has gone basically unrevised for 150 years." (Richardson, 53) Is this really an approach we need to take? When talking about school reform he brings up most of the things we often hear on news reports and with politicians: it focuses on "how to get our students performing 'better' on the tests..." (Richardson, 74). This is all what he calls "Old School" thinking on reform, and it what we have been doing to "reform" the system over the last 150 years. Bigger tests, more to learn, more memorization, and making sure that our students know things that they will forget soon after passing the test. I actually once had a teacher who told us, "You just need to know this for the test. After the test you can just forget about it." But is that all? Are we doomed to repeat the same "reforms" over and over for an eternity? As a History buff, one thing that always comes to mind about why we learn about history is that if we don't learn from it, we will be doomed to repeat it. But Richardson throws another approach out there: the "New School" way. Now, in addressing this approach of reform, he is not in any way trying to castigate the "Old School" model; nor is he saying that the "New School" doesn't have its own limitations. What he is saying is that the "Old School" way of thinking had a very particular reason for why it did things in the way that it did: Scarcity. When the educational models were originally tooled, information was much more scarce. Yes, there were books and teachers who had experience and learned what they were taught and then carried on this tradition of learning and teaching to the next generation. But today, we have an abundance of information. Simply typing, "American Revolution" in Google gives me 22.1 million results (in 0.63 seconds, too). And typing "cheese" gives me 345 million. There is an abundance of information accessible to us at our fingertips today. If I wanted to know an empirical fact, I need only search for it. So why are we still teaching kids facts? When discussing the "New School" approach, he points out that there are six unlearning/relearning ideas that we can take as educators to have a real reform in schools and make the schools ready to meet the challenges posed by the ever-evolving and ever-abundant 21st Century world. They are:
As an educator, the one I would be most committed to concentrating on most would first be "Discover, don't deliver, the curriculum." I think this tackles the biggest issue of not teaching the students empirical facts that they will soon forget, but rather getting the students excited about learning and eventually being fueled themselves with the passion to find the answers along with me (the teacher). It is more about a journey and finding out more about the subject by experiencing it together rather than just saying, "Here's a study sheet, study this, take two pills and call me in the morning." It is getting down in the nitty-gritty with the kids and experiencing and learning ourselves, and from each other in the process. Richardson points out that when he was visiting High Tech High in San Diego, the founder, Larry Rosenstock had said, "We have to stop delivering the curriculum to kids. We have to start discovering it with them." (Richardson, 412) Richardson then paraphrases saying that the "New School" approach moves "away from telling kids what to learn, and when and how to learn it." (Richardson, 412) But rather we need to instill a passion in them to find answers to things by letting them learn about what they want to learn about. So that is definitely a model I want to commit to. For these six, the one that might be the greatest struggle for me would probably be "Do real work for real audiences." Although we could put together digital portfolios or YouTube videos, I think it might be a little bit of a struggle to get the kids excited about it. However, this is linked with "Transfer the Power" so after giving them a little more control over what they want to learn and how they want to go about doing it, it might make the "Do real work for real audiences" less of a struggle. Richardson. W. (2012). Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Education Are Everywhere. Kindle Edition. |
AuthorRichard Sable is from Vista, CA and graduated from Azusa Pacific University in 2014 with a B.A. in Social Science and is currently working on his single subject teaching credential in the field of Social Science at CSU, San Marcos. Archives
March 2017
Categories |