Thursday, July 24, 2014

What challenges occur when students are empowered to create online “text” and share globally with others?

Posted on August 13, 2013
Mimi Ito exquisitely voiced what I have been feeling, in her video Connected Learning, Children and Digital Media  in her opening statement: 
 “Why do we assume that kids socializing and play is not a side of learning; and on the flip side, why schools can’t have a spirit of entertainment and play as a part of what they are doing.”
As a proponent for play and hands-on learning in ECE, I concur that it is time for educators and administrators to open our minds to the new digital literacies, and begin to better understand similarities and differences in formal learning and new literacies. Educators have long understood the importance of a child’s home, peer and community environment in his success in school. 

What a child does after school, the activities they pursue outside of school, the people they interact with, all effect their learning and development. If children are spending hours online socializing and playing, what skills are they learning? What benefits do they see? Mimi Ito outlines the importance of the social aspect of online interaction. 

I see it in my own home. My son does not go to his friends’ houses like he and his sisters did when they were younger. Instead, he is on his computer or X-box interacting with “friends” online. This interaction IS their social life. Each participant is at their own computer or gaming devise, with his own controller, fully engaged in the game. NOT a passive observer, but a gamer, a doer, a creator. My son is driven to create and construct online. He has a Youtube channel and narrates his gaming, creates 3-D graphics, and finds copyright free dubstep music to use as the soundtrack for his work. He is fully and completely engaged and engrossed in this creative process. Yet at school, my son is merely average. He comes to life when he is allowed to create and share his online pursuits. I often find myself pushing him to use his digital skills to complete an assignment for school. He has created iconic, historical buildings on Minecraft to submit for his french class, where he builds the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre (with art work inside) the Arc d’Truimph, and labels everything in French. He has created a Prezi for an oral book report, shared graphics from his Youtube account. I have to remind him of his talents and skills. His teachers do not encourage his geekish pursuits. They are lecture based, textbook bound and have lost him. I have found his aural comprehension to be fair at best. This is a kid I have to repeat 6-8 times to take out the garbage before the job is complete, yet he will spend hours creating a video game, or video for youtube, with no instruction or help from anyone. He is a kinesthetic learner who has amazing abilities that are never encouraged in school.ZurichMy son created this Nordic village on MineCraft.

What if we were savvy enough in online learning tools to allow children who spend hours on computers to bring these skills into school to enhance the curriculum, extend learning, share in the leadership, and were encouraged to co-construct knowledge?  How engaged would students be?  How enthusiastic? What if our focus what to allow these “out of school tools into the classroom to empower all students and individuals?” (Ian O’Byrne)
Gunther Kress discusses this concept further in his work Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media, and states that allowing students to construct online creates “Shifts in authority, in changes in forms of reading, shifts in shapes of knowledge and in forms of human engagement in the social and natural world.”
I know my own son would begin to excel, be more engaged, like school better, own his learning. But what challenges would educators encounter in the process?
First, teachers would have to be well versed in online tools, be provided enough Professional Development to support their use in the classroom, and be provided the technology such as computers, software, ipads, online permissions for youtube, facebook and other sites prohibited by most school districts.
Secondly, teachers would have to lay the groundwork and basic rules for online communication, citizenship and how to give appropriate feedback.
Beside content knowledge and digital literacy, teachers would have to include in their curriculum, skills for online content constructions such as : planning, generating, organizing, composing and revising.  Ian O’Byrne provides definitions and examples of each of these skills in the PPT presentation “OCC: Encoding and decoding meaning by constructing, redesigning and reinventing online texts.”
Kress also addresses the challenge of critics arguing that online learning with increased images, videos (multimodal Approaches) to learning dummy down our culture.  Kress states it is an “urgent contemporary problem to address the effect of learning environments on potentials and possibilities of learning, to address the quetion of multimodal representations of knowledge and learning and to develop at forms  of assessments for representations in different modes.”  And he hopes his articles inspire critics and educators alike to “conduct debates on the likely impacts of modal choices, changes and selection better founded theoretically, than the current debate of dummying down content.”
Ian O’byrne ties these thoughts together nicely in his article Construction And/Or Creation of Online Content when he states that “Working online is a fluid experiences which calls for flexible learners,”  Students who struggle or are uninspired by traditional teaching methods can find success and inspiration by actively constructing, not just passively consuming online texts.  It is very important that educators continue to learn, and grow in the field of technology and digital literacies in order to provide the tools and skill these students will need to compete in a global community.  O’byrne states “Our understanding of creating and construction needs to be broad enough for change in the future.”  We cannot get stuck where we are today.  We must continue to prepare students for what may come in the future.














Gail,
I was with you every step of the way in your reflection. My oldest son does well in school but for those classes/courses that are so traditionally based he yearns for a creative project to come about. I know at our school we reflect upon these types of students and wish we could do more to enhance their learning and interest in school. Yet, it requires TIME for teachers to venture in other avenues and receive PD and practice with what has been presented to them. And yes, we should definitely be doing more with media in the classroom!

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