David Warlick recently posted a message on his blog 2 Cents Worth about how technology is transforming learning. He specifically discusses what the learning environment should look like. He feels that learning should be question based in the sense that students ask questions when they run into a road block and then search for the answers. This kind of learning should cause students to have conversations with one another, their teachers, or beyond such as experts in the field. The learning that takes place depends on how the learner responds as long as it is authentic and relevant. The learning could then be considered more valuable and the learner must then make a personal investment. Warlick also used a great example with video games. A learner should be free to make mistakes much like a person playing a video game does. Each time a person plays a video game they make a mistake in different places that they will learn from for the next time and hopefully not make again.
The most prevalent point made in the post, to me, was the idea of safely making mistakes. As technology is so much faster and much more advanced then the old paper and pencil approach, mistakes are much easier to fix then they ever were in the past. It is so important for students to make mistakes so that they can learn from them. In so many other areas of their lives mistakes help them learn and move forward so we need to have that same thinking in education.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Great post! I really like your connection to mistakes helping us to move forward. Real learning does begin when we change our behavior because of our past mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your blog and the comment you made about the importance of learning being question-based so that kids are encouraged to converse with one another in order to come up with answers. Allowing kids to make mistakes also while learning is important to their character development.
ReplyDeleteI think it is also vital to have the teacher there to help students learn from their mistakes. In video games, the game itself is set up to do this to a certain extent. There are a number of educators who see gaming as the future of education, particularly the scenario games where users work through problems and really use information literacy skills as they move up the levels.
ReplyDeleteYou comments on conversations of students (with each other, with the teacher, and with the materials) brought to mind a slide show I saw from Buffy Hamilton: Pivot Points for Change: Connecting the Dots of Information Literacy with Social Media. I posted the link on the first page of D2L for everyone.