To me they seem more of a personal or shared diary than anything really useful.
If you want to disseminate important educational information – a webpage/ wiki sorted by topic would be more useful and appropriate than a chronological blog.
It may be useful as a message board where teacher/students poses questions ideas and fellow teachers/students respond – e.g. exam questions dot points. But would a forum, Google doc, wiki, or simply email chat be more useful for this?...
In looking at the recommended links on blogs – I came across this Blog: http://bigthink.com/blogs/dangerously-irrelevant and the post: http://bigthink.com/ideas/38139
(& this : http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/versions)
It contained a very interesting discussion of how the amount of available information (and amount of digital information) is increasing over time. The quote below and graphic were quite telling:
Right up until 1986, all of the information that mankind had collated since the dawn of time - all 2.64 billion gigabytes of it - only 0.02 billion gigabytes was digital. So over 99% of the information we had to work with was analog - written down.
What we have witnessed in the past 10 years is unprecedented growth in information - all of it digital. From our 2.6 billion gigabytes in 1986, we now have well over 400 billion gigabytes of collective human information - and growing at a rate of 5 billion gigabytes every 3 days according to Google. The big difference now is that – since 2001 when traditional paper-based information and digital information gained parity – digital data now accounts for well in excess of 95% of all information. The info landscape reversal looks like this...
With so much information so many opinions (uninformed and informed) will we reach a point when the time taken to find relevant & useful & valid information exceeds the importance of the information?
Will quality content be buried in the morass of mediocre information available?
Creating may be the highest rung of Blooms taxonomy – but are all creations equal? – considering the intellectual quality of many of the posts on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter I would argue that they clearly are not.
Perhaps what we are neglecting in the rush to head toward ‘user created content’ are the fundamental concepts and skills necessary to have informed/expert opinion or deep understanding before splurting digital diarrhea onto the growing heap (at least in the past verbal diarrhea could only spread to those in earshot and viral misconceptions to those in your sphere of influence. Now they are available to infect all!).
Web 2.0 and Education
Perhaps this is against the common trend of arguments about student-created content, but the above led me to reflect on the importance of actually grounding our students in some key facts and concepts. Things that they can use as concrete examples from which to judge online content.
We need to make sure they understand some (as many) fundamental truths as we can. Truths that they have a reference point to use when assessing reliability and validity of online content. Sure, they need to become independent self-motivated learners - but to learn from the web without some prior knowledge*… to me that is a scary thought (particularly in Science where misconceptions and fringe theories have really found their niche in the Web).
*an aside to this – I think that some skills may be enhanced by Web 2.0, writing skills for example – If the digital medium is motivation for students to write (and write more, and get peer-pressure to improve from peer review) then of course their writing skills are going to improve. But similarly - we cannot neglect real work skills and activities – sport, experiments, TAS skills, conversation and speaking skills – things that – for the time being I suppose –exist only in the non-digital world.
No – this would be a disaster - there is no doubt that digital technologies are the way forward with education. Education does not exist in a sphere outside the ‘real world’. We need to accept that we are in a digital world or become redundant.
Does this mean we neglect web 2.0 and creation in the classroom?
No – it is our duty to prepare them for what are becoming vital skill but lets not neglect what is actually important in this process.
We need to ensure they can read, write, calculate, play, experiment. Then, in terms of depth of understanding, make sure they can identify, outline, explain, discuss etc – all the way up the Bloom’s staircase as in traditional education (and as professionals we may even use Web 2.0 to achieve these goals). Making sure they can do each step well so by the time they are fully-fledged digital contributors they have something intelligent to contribute (and can independently & competently sort the e-wheat from the e-chaff)
Blogging - conclusion
And in this post I’ve discovered the joy of blogging J
Nothing to do with educating - just a great big spleen vent and whinge – I doubt Chopper would be proud L
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