May 21 2003
“I did this!”
Joe points to a Washington Post article re: possible outcomes of student’s use of email and IM slang. After spending the afternoon with 12-14 year old students again, his pull-and-comment spawned the title of this post:
| Students also love writing online, seeing it as recreation rather than schoolwork. I wonder about this. How long will we be able to say that before it becomes so commonplace that it IS seen as schoolwork? |
I did this. As long as students can easily point to something they did and share it with all those other people via IM/email/discussion groups/their favorite MUD, then writing online will have a fundamentally different character than writing “for the teacher.” There is a performance aspect to writing online–someone might be watching!
In reviewing the literature regarding the use of the LEGO Mindstorm in the classroom, something that is rarely teased out is the role of performance w.r.t. motivation when using the Mindstorm in an educational setting. Said simply: when teachers use little robots, they expect the students to compete, share, or otherwise perform their work for others. I suspect that this may be the common thread here, moreso than any Piagetian notion of the bricoleur, or builder-learner (eg. building is to learning as writing is to learning).
2 Responses to ““I did this!””
I agree though I’m interested in thinking about this some more. The comment in the article about “exploiting” students’ use of online writing intrigues me. How much do we want to “hijack” this as a learning tool? Are we trying to force it to be something it isn’t (in a school setting) or are we just recognizing something that’s already part of kids’ lives? These are questions that come up in conversations with colleagues. Just thinking aloud…
BTW, you should get Trackback going on your site.
I re-read the article; I still think a lot of the power of the medium comes from thinking about ownership and performance.
A few years back, I collaborated with a high school teacher a few hours away, and we ran a series of collaborative design experiences for our students using the LEGO Mindstorm. They were engaging with the task of designing multiple robots to solve one problem. We gave them a Manilla installation (some weblogs) as their collaboration medium. Multiple students, from multiple sites, on one weblog.
We explicitly decided to only allow a small number of face-to-face opportunities. In short, we challenged them to communicate about a complex design process using only weblogs. By-and-large, it didn’t work.
What *did* work was that they fought the problem, failed (to some degree), and identified all the aspects of the process that didn’t work. They discussed technologies that would have made it better–IM, webcams, etc.–that would allow them to discuss things in real-time, because collaborative design, to be effective, needs collaboration. They pointed out that one group would (it sounds trite, I know) change the background color, or mess with fonts, or the title of the weblog… without asking the group at the other end. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t trust the software, but they didn’t have any ownership–they couldn’t trust that what they wrote and they way it looked would be the same from one day to the next. Their analysis and discussion made the final debriefing session truly amazing.
Point being: I think what we did illustrates an inappropriate use of the technology (among other things). The TV, VCR, and a host of other technologies have been applied inappropriately in educational settings time and again. I only think it’s “exploitation” when it isn’t used with good pedagogical goals. Using a technology because it’s a fad, and not considering how the technology wants to be used appropriately, then… then we have problems.
(As an interesting thought to leave on: equity of access and comfort with the technology also play a huge role in whether weblogs and the like have a place in the classroom. For example, not all students have computers at home. Can you claim equitable access for all of your students if they only get to use one for a short span of time during the school day? …)
Yeah, there’s a lot to think about. But I don’t think the biggest issues are whether we’re “exploiting” their use of online writing–I think the better question is whether it is an appropriate use of the technology (media vs. method, basically), as well as a question of what values have we made implicit in our instruction when we employ weblogs or other online publishing tools in an educational context.
Maybe.
It could just be that I like asking questions.