Assignment:
Discussion Activity Review Tom March’s Ten Stages of Working the Web for Education found at this website. In this piece Tom comments:
“…You may have noticed that the first three stages to Web-Use Nirvana had to do with your personal and professional growth. The middle chunk all relate to curriculum design. What ever happened to teaching, with kids, in a classroom?” And then he asks “…So what is the New Job for Teachers?”.
Given your experiences as a teacher and in using technology to teach, what would you say to these questions?
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Purpose of the article: “The goal of this article is to offer identifiable milestones to help educators effectively use the Web to engage students in advanced thinking. This could serve as a self-assessment or as guidelines when mentoring others.”
The Ten Stages:
- Getting to know the web – Browse directories (this is written pre-web 2.0 popularity and pre-Wikipedia) and see what’s actually on the web, and not what you think is on the web.
- Find your web– Find a place to call your own. Find places you want to come back and revisit (bookmark them!)
- Meet your neighbours – The value of the web is the connection to other people, so connect to them. When you appreciate someone’s work, let them know.
- Using the web with students – Students are depending on you to know what to do with the web, so become an expert in the first three steps before you engage them in it.
- Design Goal-based Activities – March here lays out some ideas (knowledge hunt, for example) that are simplified versions of what others call for in terms of problem-based learning and previous articles on WebQuests. [Needs a link]
- Advanced Goals-based Design – WebQuests and other activities included here.
- Pursuing Transformation – First guide students to develop expertise, then put them into a situation that requires them to use it. Role-based deliberation can be one such method. Expertise, while laudable is insufficient.
- Welcome to Your New Job – Stages 1-3 are personal/professional growth for the teacher. The middle section is curriculum design. Carrot: Great websites designed by students through ThinkQuest competition. Stick: Plagiarism is easy and convenient; challenging mental engagement is not. We must: maintain the connection with the authentic, maintain motivation and compelling experiences, stay learner-centered, and teach both cognitive and people skills.
- Taking off the Training Wheels – Coach rather than teacher. Analyze strengths and areas for improvement. Come up with ways to prompt expert performance. Give practice in authentic scenarios as much as possible. Work on metacognitive practice with the students.
- All that’s left is learning – the process is internal, not external. What looks the same on the outside can be very different based on cognitive processing.
At step four in this article, I’m starting to get a bit weary of it’s age. The idea that students don’t know what to do with the web is 2012 is a different assumption than it was in 1999. This is still partially true, however. Students today are quite aware of what to do as far as their own communication needs and personal interests are concerned. However, even in the World’s Most Wired Nation™, many of my students are still very ignorant of what their technology and access to the Internet can do for them in their educational and other goals. The Korean-language web is not devoid of good content, as far as I can tell. Rather, it seems that the delivery methods are still very primitive. While most companies in the west have bought into the idea that no website is a death knell, companies here, when they do have websites, may be using what Western users would consider the equivalent of Geocities or MySpace to disseminate information, what limited information it may be. Koreans still largely connect by phone. Email is only a way to transfer documents and collect spam; few, if any, use it as a primary communication tool.
The application sections were interesting, and the more I learn about PBL I wonder how I can employ this for my own students in a culture that is very teacher-focused and still stuck in the Grammar-translation method of language instruction. I remember how a colleague of mine had developed a series of stages in a game scenario (played out in Second Life or Open Sim) where students had to engage with the target language and use it to solve problems and mysteries and win the game. In a science university with high levels of game use recreationally by students, this was very popular.
While considering how to make this relevant to my own practice, I did some searching and found the following article to be of assistance:
- Brief: Problem-Based Learning and Adult English Language Learners This downloadable brief examines some background on PBL and Adult ELL, and provides walk-throughs for teachers and administrators interested in using PBL in their learning environments. Does not provide suggestions for dealing with classes of entirely the same L1, where moving like-L1 students to separate groups does not solve the problem of L1 use.
