Quote:
“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him as long as the fish supply holds out. But create a collective, and every man will learn how to feed himself for a lifetime.” (p. 53)
I like that the authors are continuing to add on to this quote. For me, this metaphor is guiding my reading and I like that I can refer back to it to try and make sense of things. Their argument in chapter three was that teaching a man to fish will only feed him for a lifetime if there is an unlimited amount of fish and the strategy for catching fish never changes. In this chapter, the authors argue that by providing the man with a collective, he will have access to an almost unlimited amount of resources and the content will change according to the collective’s needs.
Question:
In what ways can collectives be harmful to learning?
Connection:
In order to gather research for my 20% Project I am participating in a collective on Pinterest. I am pinning things that interest me and are geared towards the learning goal that I have set for myself. My participation in the collective is minimal because I usually pin other users’ posts and do not often add my own. However, my participation is still important because by pinning others’ posts I am increasing their visibility and therefore altering the collective in a meaningful way.
Epiphany/Aha:
The aha moment I had after reading this chapter was that the aspect missing from classrooms which would transform them from communities to collectives is a desire to participate. All members of collectives choose to be members for a specific reason. So now we must figure out how to get each of our students to make a personal decision to be a member of the collective.
Chapter 5
Quote:
“All the elements of Facebook-content, approaches, personal investments, depth of information, and so on-combined to make forming a study group in which the students could do “whatever they want” very easy. And they learned far more as a collective than they could possibly have done individually. (page 71)
This chapter discussed the many benefits to learning as part of a collective. Participating in an online collective is no different than meeting up for a study group in terms of ethics so it is crazy to think that a college student was punished for starting a Facebook study group page.
Question:
In talking about the new culture of learning, the authors state that “the good news is that we get to play again, and we may find even more satisfaction in continuing the search” (p. 73). How do we get students to think this way, to be satisfied by the search?
Connection:
I had a blog when I was in middle school from a site called Xanga. I used it somewhat like a diary and I’m pretty sure the only people who followed it were my close friends. As an adult, I have only followed one blog and that was pretty short lived. I just don’t feel that I have the time right now to keep up with a blog but I think it could be helpful as a first-year teacher to follow a fellow educator.
Epiphany/Aha:
My aha moment…”blog” is short for “weblog”! Pretty neat.
Chapter 6
Quote:
“A student cannot ask his teacher to ‘give me your experience’ or ‘tell me what it feels like to solve a problem’ or ‘show me how to innovate.’ We learn those things by watching, doing, experimenting, and simply absorbing knowledge from the things, events, and activities around us.” (p. 78)
To me, this chapter was explaining that we learn best by doing. And in order to learn by doing, we must be given the freedom to do so. Telling my students how to do something will not produce the same result as giving them a set of boundaries and asking them an open-ended question.
Question:
With inquiry-based learning, there is a lot of room for freedom. What kind of differentiations are effective and appropriate, but would not interfere with the use of tacit knowledge?
Connection: For a coursework assignment, we were given the task to do a role play of an IEP meeting. But before we could do so, we were expected to participate in actual IEP meetings at our school sites in addition to reading articles and watching videos. I learned more from attending an IEP than I did any of the readings or videos. Actually participating in the process prepared me for the role play and I had more intuition about what to say and how to act.
Epiphany/Aha: I really like the idea that we need to be focusing on “what don’t we know and what questions can we ask” rather than “what do we know”. This allows much more opportunity for creativity and risk.