- Minds on Fire (Seely Brown & Adler, 2008)
- Learning, Working and Playing in the Digital Age (Seely Brown, 1999)
I was astonished to see that these two readings are both pre-2010. While reading them, I honestly felt as if I was borrowing the brain of somebody just waking up to the shifting world. Work hard, go to college, get a good job with a good starting salary and you’ll be set…right? That couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m glad I’m realizing the changing world now and not 20 years from now. Web 2.0 and its evolving capabilities calls for the education world to shift with it, and get out of the 1970s.
Learning within the context of Web 2.0 strongly differs from that of traditional schooling. In traditional schools, students show up to a classroom that is led by the teacher. The teacher is seen by the students as the keeper of information. The teacher is all-knowing. Students follow the directions of the teacher and hopefully learn some new things along the traditional trajectory of a September-June calendar. Not only that, but the kids in the class were your friends. The kids in your school are basically the only kids in the world that you know. Web 2.0, and specifically virtual school, shatters that old narrative. Now, students are learning from people in videos they don’t know. They can collaborate in real-time with a teacher on the other end of a computer screen. People are coming together like never before with ease with Zoom. Now, students familiarity with navigation of the web, to me and the authors, is just as important as reading and writing. New literacies are emerging, and K-12 schools need to keep up. Unfortunately, history has shown they won’t.
So if they won’t who will? Educational Reform move at a snails pace politically..and quite frankly, I believe a lot of teachers are sick of it. Do I want to spend my life as an employee? Why can’t I do basically what a school does online? Is there a market for this?
A new breed is coming…the educational entrepreneur.
“Our challenge and opportunity, here, is to foster the entrepreneurial spirit toward creating new kids of learning environments, ones that leverage how we naturally learn coupled to or enhanced by the unique capabilities of the Web”
This part of the reading jumped out at me, because it’s a career path I’m seriously considering to take. Businesses have already moved learning online, computerized it, and now teachers would be lost without.. it’s already being done. Programs such as I-ready, NewsELA, Google Classroom, Flocabulary are just some of the ed-tech resources receiving heavy traffic, and more are on the way.
This year my school is primarily utilizing Google Classroom, Accelerate Education, and USATestPrep. We also subscribe to a lot of other accounts, and that’s what I’d like to highlight. All these sites are providing that new learning environment. Students’ days are spent online, if their school has opted for virtual learning. With many school districts opting for online instruction, I predict a surge of demand for web-based educational technologies.
Rather than be a teacher, the keeper of information in a classroom, why can’t we be instructional coordinators who design personal pathways of deep learning for any student online? In the Information age, students need to know how to find information…not memorize it. The amount of OER available online is endless. Acting as a funnel between rich learning opportunities in cyberspace to students with specific needs and interests will become the new norm.
And the hungry entrepreneurial teachers are going to scoop it up.