I have been searching and browsing through various databases on the PSU library’s website looking for articles to start rounding out my experience with this class. I have a slew of pdfs and citations saved. Not sure how I am going to move through these. Before I get to writing about the specific articles, I thought I’d post a little bit about the process. I have come to view scholarly publishing as a slow web. Articles exist situated in a web formed by bibliographies, and tend to be somewhat dialogic with other pieces they reference. Instead of URLs you can click on, you get citations which you have to search for and content may or may not be available without physically traveling to a library. I find I don’t have the tools yet to determine which pieces are of a higher quality than others. On the web, I approach content with some skepticism, but I can quickly search to find many opinions and use the to formulate my own approach. It is much harder to do this with the slow web. Perhaps as I am newcomer to this world, I still don’t have the skill to tell the difference between a academic nigerian scammer email and an academic wikipedia article. I am fascinated by this alternate, hidden world of information and dialogue and I hope to spend years to come exploring it.
Here is the piece I chose to read to this week:
V�ljataga, T., & Fiedler, S. (2009). Supporting students to self-direct intentional learning projects with social media. Educational Technology & Society, 12 (3), 58-69.
This article describes a course similar to this disruptive technologies course in that it is based around participation in social media and has a content related to education. The course described in the article seemed to have more of a bent towards distance learning and purely technology-mediated interactions. I am curious if formal self-directed learning experiences can act as a scaffold to move students into the entirely self-motivated, self-managed informal education that can happen on the internet.
Another article:
Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0, new literacies, and the idea of learning through participation. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Volume 8, Number 3, pp. 107-122
The author, among other things, uses flickr as a specific example of community learning around a shared practice, in this case images. This is interesting to my because I observed many interactions in flickr centered around informal learning and teaching. I think there is something interesting happening there that may deserve to be understood in greater detail.
Still, both these pieces are very specific to certain tools and limited experiences. I’d like to find a way to tie all this together with the broader questions of “what is knowledge?”, “what is learning?”