Learning in New Media Environments

This was a very interesting video and had some great points. Some of which I thought, hey he is right. Others I thought that does not make sense. First on the that does not make sense side. One of the things he mentioned about the village in New Guinea was that after the media came in within weeks the culture was unrecognizable. This sounds somewhat odd. This is a culture that has developed over thousands of years with likely little change. I find it hard to believe that anything could make it unrecognizable after a few weeks... Just my opinion.

 Moving on... I loved his thinking as far as what a class should be. An open learning environment without walls so to speak. The idea of letting students pick a spot on a map and become an expert is very cool. Students buying in, becoming  responsible for their own learning, having a say in the output, growing their creativity this is where we want to be. But darn if they don't still need to know the difference between a Populist and a Progressive which is question #7 on the district mandated test they are taking. How do we bridge that gap? Do we wait for top down change? (I think the answer to that is no.) As someone so very new to this profession I want to teach in a system unlike the one I have been in for all of my life (save for the last two semesters). But how do we get there? My guess is that we start small, one lesson at a time and move from there. Our classrooms need to be more about equipping our students to knowledge-able, to me that means being able to manipulate knowledge in new and meaningful ways.. This type of teaching lines up very well with Pink's assertion that dominating with the left brain is not going to be enough in the future. Our students will still need to be top notch left brainers, no doubt. But to dominate, they will have to match this or even exceed this with right brain abilities. These are the skill that are presently being left out of our students classes.

One last point in my now obvious ramble... The speaker talks about media being able to be used or to be used against us. As educators, it is imperative that we learn to use media. We must know media, how to use it, how are students are using and how it is using our students and our profession. From here we can begin to adapt the media as a useful tool for our classrooms and students.