Week 11

Learning online

I wanted to mention that the video on Pedagogy is great and I linked to it last semester for my online educational Psychology class that I teach twice a year.

How does all of this fit to online learning? the internet? social media? mooc's?  The articles give the pro's and cons. My discussion with my friend Claudia (after reading the articles) became, well it all applies. It depends on who is teaching and who is the learner. The medium (a text book, a chalkboard or a web page and video) don't really matter.

Really what is this virtual world (put together by silicon valley geeks)? My view of the geeks is the red nosed guy next door who sent the first connection between UCLA and Stanford University, my husband who is an antenna and system engineer and got me on wifi in the 90's with his companies wifi connection. Are these the silicon valley geeks? In answer to the New York times article that mentions geeks as the creators of the internet; They are the designers (and not young kids by the way although the developers kids are now involved in creating technology or software too) but not the creators of the internet as a whole. The internet is made up of all the contributions made by people from all over the world.

My question when I first got online in the late, late 80's was how do all these people have time to do all of this?   Just like this course, each of us pitch in our time and contribute to the virtual world. That is probably my favorite aspect about the internet in general. Whatever people are interested in or study or create or commercialize they can put it up online. Then other people can use it, copy it (hopefully giving credit to the original writer creator), create something new from it, or even complain about it and get angry that so and so misused the internet.

 My thesis for my bachelors, was education using video games with children. I tested my kids on reader rabbit, the jumpstart series and various other games (age 5 and 6). I then did research by looking for books on the topic and articles. My results with my kids were; great at math games, terrible at reading games.  My conclusion, if you are not sitting beside them and guiding them how to learn the material, they will do best at what they are good at learning, and find a way to go around their challenges. Hmm so much like the classroom. The other side of the coin was that they were having fun and felt like playing the games. Did they learn to read faster and better no (they needed special reading lessons because of dyslexia) did they learn math faster or better? they learned as quickly as it was given to them. They had the same results once they went to school. If they were accelerated in math they were very quick at learning. Reading took years and hard work that paid off.

In conclusion, the internet is a medium that the pedagogy applies to as it has always applied in any teaching environment. The pedagogy I would choose online is the same as I choose in the classroom. My technique is about individualized education plans while keeping a base of information uniform. The sources are dynamic and can be found in books from the students themselves or online. One thing I have found is when I switch to in class teaching, many times I miss the dynamics of online teaching. I don't have internet information at my finger tips and the time needed for the students to read or see the videos. I set it up as a blog so students can look at it on their own time.