What? The fun is over already?
I, like many of us, started this class with some trepidation. I initially could not adapt to a world where reasonable articulate adults are expected to banter using terms like "blog" "widget""gadget" "Wiki" and not expect others to believe we are listing characters from Star Wars. As we waded more deeply into this territory, I know many of us became less vaguely amused and hit a low as the entirety of the digital universe crashed over us. With Keri's life-saving skills, however, most of us have escaped the riptide and can now swim (or at least dog-paddle) in these high-tech waters.
I now have to admit, that although I do NOT completely buy Richardson's entire sales job that technology is always the BEST vehicle for every aspect of education, I do see many practical and doable uses for technology.
Final Cranky Digs at Richardson
I still resent Richardson's myopic statements that imply that it took blogs or WIKIs to discover things like "Big Shift 4: Teaching is Conversation Not Lecture". Socrates played around a little with the concept a year or two before Mr. Richardson's Read/Write web came along. Even post-Read/Write web -- it is still possible to engage students and have a conversation in which participants actually HEAR and SEE each other to converse--without the wall of a screen and keyboard intervening. There is still plenty of room in education for actual, not virtual, conversation. Students still need to learn to interact in an environment where folks have to navigate the rules of civil discourse--listening and speaking in REAL time.
Or "Shift 6: Readers are No Longer Just Readers"---This is NOT a shift--I can't imagine a single teacher who EVER thought that reading to the end of the page was ever the point of our teaching. Technology did not invent reading for many purposes.
As for "Shift 10: Contribution, not completion, as the Ultimate Goal"--let's just hope Richardson's disciples aren't the ones merely contributing to that incomplete MCAS or college essay or future novel--or that incomplete calculation that causes the next generation car or space shuttle to crash--or that incomplete scientific study that MIGHT result in an ALMOST cure, or ALMOST death...
Proficiency in collaboration can NOT be the endpoint of education.
But a Change is Gonna Come
With that last cranky dig, I will end by saying I have found myself changed by some of the content in the book, and by the ideas we have collaboratively learned and explored. I, like a reformed smoker, now find myself preaching to others to accept that the teaching landscape has changed because of the web. Much of the change offers creative, compelling, teaching vehicles to engage kids who were born into this landscape.
Who Was that Masked Man at Comic-Con?
I actually heard myself telling a college roommate about RSS feeds this past weekend, and I am excited about screencasting, photopeach, WIKI's, and yes, even the freedom of blogging. During a review of basic genres in ELA today, I, the naysayer and skeptic, suggested that in addition to Fiction, Non-fiction, drama, poetry, and folktale--a future class might be learning that BLOGS are a singular division of literature--a genre all their own.
This all makes me feel a little like I have gone over to the AV club side of the world-but heck, I never was one of the cool kids anyway. (And I actually was the only middle school girl in AV club.) I am not going to take up Dungeons and Dragons (honestly--I NEVER did the Dungeons And Dragons thing--as uncool as I was) or attend the next Comic Con, but the "fast and easy"web Richardson describes is a little faster and easier to navigate and comprehend than it was in September.
I hope NEVER to get so sucked in that I actually know about and use the more than 200 different addresses that devotees of all things techie have posted as sharing options on the Comic Con site. OK--so now that you are techie too, I dare you NOT to click on the link that follows and TRY NOT to count the addresses and see how many you actually recognize the way I did a few minutes ago...There's Twitter and Delicious and Digo and Thinkfinity and Tumblr and Yuuby and Zingme.....
check out the more than 200 options for sharing to link to the Comic Con site://www.comic-con.org/cci/
What, you didn't get sucked in and look? Now I'm embarrassed for myself. I'm turning Richardsonian....
I guess I'll have to wait for the sequel.
Diane, I have to tell you that I love reading your posts. I know that only now I'm responding, but I love the wit, humor, skepticism, and hesitant enthusiasm you bring not only to the discussion on this book but also to the idea of how exactly we as teachers are going to use this stuff in the classroom. I love the way you call out Richardson on some of his ridiculous statements and assumptions. I also identify with how overwhelmed you feel because I feel it too! I've been exposed to this stuff for the majority of my life, but I still feel like I'm only capable of a doggie paddle most of the time. But, hopefully, as I experiment with all of these new Web 2.0 tools, I learn a bit more myself and feel more confident in using it with my students.
ReplyDeleteP.S.
I recognized LESS THAN HALF of those sites. Epic Fail!