zondag 9 maart 2008

Article Ilkka Tuomi

I will write this comment mostly from the perspective of a teacher in a secondary school. I start with reflecting on the practice in schools.
The idea of levels of openness is very interesting and useful. Ilkka Tuomi makes this idea very clear also. Most of the examples in education seem to be on level 1 of openness.
The idea " The creation of knowledge occurs incrementally, by reinterpreting and adding to the existing “body of knowledge.” Is challenging. I get frustrated often when I see that even in a school, we do not share.
If everybody would share his/her knowledge and wisdom, this should be heaven. But I see that even hardworking and dedicated teachers don't share. Why is that?
A lot of us still have the old idea that if you share (materials, thoughts, lesson plans etc) this should be perfect. We are scared that the world will tell you that you haven't thought it out properly.
And most of us aren't used to sharing and collaborating. Very many teachers still don't come out of their classrooms very often.
So the idea “Multiple participants, therefore, can effectively peer-review and improve the contributions of other developers” is very challenging, but very difficult also. The idea of wikipedia is we can look after the quality of the contributions because of the peer-review. Will this also be true if we share educational materials / learning environments / didactics etc??
I hope “where the adoption of new technologies will gradually lead to new forms of practice.” The concept of networked learning is hard to implement in practice in educational setting (I mean now schools, colleges and universities). Many teachers aren't used to using ICT and some (a lot?) of us think that we are the best knowledge base.
We also don't know how to set up learning environments that use the vast knowledge base we have outside the school. A lot of schools have an electronic learning environment, but they don't use it as a learning space, where you can learn together, but as storage room to put quizzes, assignments, syllabi etc.
How can we learn to use the new technologies, not as a new tool but as a new environment of learning.
We see that students and teachers find it hard to find and choose the good / reliable information from the vast ocean of information. So, the teacher chooses what's good information for the students. What we should do, of course is working with students on their information skills!
I cannot understand fully the idea “ Cognitive technologies will be used to repair defects in learning styles and to compensate the effects of aging.”
Technology solves all problems ???

2 opmerkingen:

Teemu Leinonen zei

Hi Jeroen,

I agree that the lines: "Cognitive technologies will be used to repair defects in learning styles and to compensate the effects of aging." sound very techno-centric.

On the other hand if you think about using pictures of moving image instead of text or spoken word isn’t it making it easier for some people to overcome their “defect of learning style”? When talking about “learning styles” I want to present my doubt on the idea all in all, but still if we think that you can make your argument with different media isn’t that great? Overcoming effect of aging is just as simple as eyeglasses. Without them life is very complicate. - Teemu

Unknown zei

yes, but if than we have to be more precise what we mean if we talk about'learning styles'. Mostly this is used for cognitive styles. Now it seems you are thinking of multiple intelligences, don't you?