Week 4: The Networked Learner
This week we explore a bit more how Web 2.0 is also enabling different roles for learners and teachers/facilitators. Specifically, this week, we read about research focused on helping to reconceptualize the learner’s role. Based on what we see digital learners doing, the learner is networked, entrepreneurial, a maker, a tinkerer (see John Seely Brown video), and passionately involved in topics of interest, such as cooking, gymnastics, stamp collecting, or football.
Assignment
Questions
- What are the ways in which the learner role is being conceptualized within the context of connected learning?
- Is it different from how it has been conceptualized in the past, and why?
- What do you see as challenges to implementing this view of the learner in formal and informal contexts?
- How do you see the role of teacher as learner and what challenges and opportunities are possible?
Answers
1. What are the ways in which the learner role is being conceptualized within the context of connected learning?
The learner, referred to as the 21st Century Learner, according to the MacArthur Foundation, will need a love of embracing change, curiosity, bottom-line orientation, and a questioning disposition. Often called the ‘gaming disposition’, epitomized by the mantra, ‘If I ain’t learning, it ain’t fun’, this ‘digitally native’ approach wants to be measured and to see how much they are improving, will produce and consume digital media, and are often inspired by the idea of developing.
21st century learners will need different skill sets than learners in the past. In traditional learning, learners are taught not to ask ‘too many’ questions but instead to listen and repeat the expected answers while learning a set of basic skills, which may no longer serve a modern society. Although learners must acquire knowledge, learning content is not enough. Today, the meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to locate and evaluate information effectively.
Today’s users are active, engaged, and headed into a busy and competitive world full of uncertainties, joining a well-qualified and mobile workforce, building careers that span multiple jobs, positions, and skill-sets, need to be fully prepared for successful learning in the information age.
Learning needs to promote creative and critical approaches to problem-solving and decision-making, introduce ways of working emphasizing virtual communication and collaboration, leverage tools for information-literacy, and foster ICT literacy, or advanced literacy with Information and Communication Technology reflecting the ability to think critically and creatively, about information and about communication, as citizens of the global community using ICT responsibly and ethically.
2. Is it different from how it has been conceptualized in the past, and why?
Yes. A 20th century learning approach would be focused on the content. A 21st century approach to learning is more focused on the tools and skills of re-making that content and becoming the creator and the producer of new learning and digital media that links to a peer environment. The learning, outside the classroom, matters tremendously for the learning inside the classroom. Informal learning and formal learning need to work together in a much more coordinated way.
- 21st century ‘informal learning’ skills cannot be reduced to simply ‘skills for the workplace involving technology’. Instead, these new skills will involve using tools for creativity, civic engagement, a full-range of experiences.
- Classroom-based, formal learning will be leveraged to provide learners access to a baseline set of standards, literacies, and expectations about what they need to participate in contemporary society, be reflective, and take opportunity of a safe, shared-space to explore and grow.
The Past
Connected learning transforms classroom spaces and shifts expectations of expertise and content delivery. Instead of following traditional, “banking” models of education, teachers, too, are learners in connected learning environments. I want to underscore that in this context then, the principles of connected learning (e.g., it is interest-driven and collaborative) apply to teachers, as well as their students. Connected learning principles can provide a vocabulary for teachers to reclaim agency over what and how we best meet the individual needs of students in our classrooms. With learners as the focus, teachers can rely on connected learning as a way to pull back the curtain on how learning happens. Considering these possibilities, teachers today are environmental designers: We craft the educational ecosystems in which we mutually learn and build with students. These principles look to structure and support moving educators on their journey to rethink, iterate, and assess how we can make education more relevant to today’s culture and needs of 21st century learners.
3. What do you see as challenges to implementing this view of the learner in formal and informal contexts?
Games and Education Scholar James Paul Gee writes on “Video Games, Learning, and Literacy“. He is writing about the use of video games as an immersive, focused learning vehicle. The challenges to implementing this model are:
- monetary (cost)
- creative (the design of these systems)
- risk (novel), and
- one of will (boldness) and the will to make a mistake (to learn)
For example, it would take all of these qualities to build a video game-like learning environment. James Paul Gee is an expert on how video games fit within an overall theory of learning and literacy. Video games are a set of problems you have to solve and are there is a theory of learning and design behind video games, like Halo ‘on hard’, describing how people learn, with hundreds of complex variables. Situated and embodied learning is being able to solve problems not just know a body of inert facts.
Cultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito writes on “Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media“Can social media be used to foster the intellectual engagement, civic engagement, and the personal development of users? Ideally, yes. Ito emphasizes the need to put aside prejudices against new media in order to harness their potential as learning tools: “I think there’s a more general perception in the culture around new media [interest-driven activity should not be conflated with friendship-driven] that it is inherently a space that is hostile to learning. And that’s a perception that I think we really need to work against.”
Further, Learners can build their own connected learning environment by tying together their interests, peer networks, and school accomplishments. With a bit more support, invitations, and infrastructure for connection, the learning possibilities are endless and inspiring to consider. Social, economic, technological, and cultural changes are driving the need for new teaching approaches and new learning designs. Connected learning, in this context, centers on an equity agenda of deploying new media to reach and tries to enable youth who otherwise lack access to opportunity. It is not simply a “technique” for improving individual educational outcomes, but rather seeks to build communities and ‘evolve’ and ‘accelerate’ new, collective capacities for learning and opportunity.
4-Especially, how do you see the role of teacher as learner and what challenges and opportunities are possible?
In Cantril’s TEACHING IN THE CONNECTED LEARNING CLASSROOM, in ‘TEACHER AGENCY AND CONNECTED LEARNING’, Garcia describes connected learning as learning that is engaging, richly productive, and collaborative. Media products/tools can now function as building blocks for unique and personalized productions, which develop expertise that can be networked, amplified, and deployed globally.
Connected learning transforms classroom spaces and shifts expectations of expertise and content delivery. Instead of following traditional, “banking” models of education, teachers, too, are learners in connected learning environments. I want to underscore that in this context then, the principles of connected learning (e.g., it is interest-driven and collaborative) apply to teachers, as well as their students. Connected learning principles can provide a vocabulary for teachers to reclaim agency over what and how we best meet the individual needs of students in our classrooms. With learners as the focus, teachers can rely on connected learning as a way to pull back the curtain on how learning happens.
Considering these possibilities, teachers today are environmental designers: We craft the educational ecosystems in which we mutually learn and build with students. These principles look to structure and support moving educators on their journey to rethink, iterate, and assess how we can make education more relevant to today’s culture and needs of 21st century learners.