Last two weeks, I hundred percent involved in my qualifying examination. It was the first time I have to read over thirty journal articles and book chapters in a short time frame. I felt struggle and judge my answer over times. Fortunately, I passed the writing test and oral defense by done great job. However, the side effect is many course assignments and readings were delayed to do and I tried my best to catch them up. This is why I post this blog and write comments to others in my group later than the due time.
This week we read and think about the form of education and institution in future. Benefitted by the development of Internet and mobile technologies, as we had learnt in this course before, I believe the participatory culture and connected learning are two main types of learning in informal setting for all age groups people. However, how do we reform or invite the new generation of learning in to our conventional education institution is a series tough challenge. One challenge is the how can institutions support youth students access to Internet learning resources and ensure their safety and privacy. Because once kids can participate freely with adults in an atmosphere of anonymity, issues of credibility and vulnerability arise (Davison & Goldberg, 2010). Perhaps a kind of firewall can be designed for educational institutions’ connected internet so educators, teachers, and computer engineers can collaborate together to determine, design, and implement a network can filter out all, at least most, unsecured or unknown information sources. Also, the media literacy is another important part of new generation learning need to be fostered, especially for youth.
Another challenge I learnt and first time catch my attention is the authorship and intellectual property issue. Collaborative learning is a crucial symbol of online learning. People engage in open-source writing or producing in the Internet environment. But, the open-source is a collaborative way to create a product and it can raise issues of intellectual property and authorship. “In the traditional role of author and producer, who most directly benefited financially from the book’s popularity, not the open-source researchers who added to or transformed author’s ideas” (Davison & Goldberg, 2010, p.29). Who own ideas in a peer-to-peer environment is difficult to determine. A chaotic environment of copyright, intellectual property, and authorship will weaken people’s motivation in writing. I don’t have a certain idea to solve this issue, however maybe we can cut in this issue by using technology that can track conversation or collaborative work and record as histories. Once we need to figure out each one’s contribution, then we have records to refer.
In addition to the reading of this week and connect with my current research focus of transnationalism. The Internet related learning also allows transnational culture capital flow waving in the future educational institutions. The connected characteristic offers multi-culture, multi-language, and multi-social-value environment for worldwide students.