Learner-centered teaching for the digital age - Web 2.0

To those who are interested in information on teaching students to "sleuth" the identity of the owners of certain web pages, UC Berekeley has a very good step by step web page at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html.

What I got from today's talk...

Will Richardson's talk today in Neff 101 was not really about the Web, or the relative virtues of converting your transparencies to Powerpoint, or why you should accept Wikipedia as a source in your students' papers.

It was about how teachers must understand and use the context of students' lives now and the realities of today's (and future) workplaces to shape what and how they teach. Your value-added as a teacher is how you situate that content as "real work for real audiences". That is, will your students be engaged in learning activities that have worth and value for them and for others--now--and not just in some fuzzy future. For example, Will's middle school students created a study guide for the book "The secret life of bees" and put it on a blog for other students and teachers to use. People from all over the world saw and commented on it. Will contacted the author, who was delighted to respond to the questions that his students had about her creation of the book, and who also commented on their interpretation of the themes and characters in the book. Furthermore, she got new ideas from the students. Creating a newspaper, collaboratively writing a novel, putting together a magazine, assembling a reference work as a class, or having students create teaching materials, are not new ideas for teaching writing (or any other subject). Prior to the ease of publishing on the web, it was just a lot more difficult to produce these works and get them in front of a real audience. Now it is easy to use these strategies, and to elaborate on them in meaningful ways.

The other point that Will made was that academic content--good, credible content--abounds on the internet. Some of it is even free. Your content is as good as the next guy's, according to Will. Our teaching, instead, ought to be directed more at processes. Some of the key processes that students must learn if they are to survive in a world in which they will have 14 jobs by the time they are 40 are:

-self-directed, self-monitored learning strategies
-co-existing, networking successfully in online environments
-Collaboration in an online environment (not just dividing up the work; his example of a person using IMs from all over to work on a single document in real time under deadline)
-creating knowledge
-"editing information", that is, discriminating bad from good info, developing healthy skepticism
-writing and reading in a hypertext environment (eg,not getting lost, using hypertext to create context for one's writing, organizing and transporting bookmarks

Will Richardson is the author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and is an adjunct professor at Seton Hall. He has been a teacher for 21 years. The program was sponsored by the ACELink project and organized by Sandy Schaufelberger, the ACELink Coordinator.