Week – 1 Blog – 2: Learning 2.0

What has taken us so long? When grown-ups have had a challenge in their professions, haven’t they typically called a meeting and gotten everyone together to work on the problem by dividing it into relevant sections like in the Apollo missions at NASA or a big merger on Wall street? What about when the military approached Oppenheimer about making a nuclear weapon? It was agreed that in order to beat the Japanese and the Nazis in discovering the secret, they would have to centralize everything and get all of the nuclear experts together. Speaking of war, are wars fought and won by each general and admiral just doing their own thing as they see fit? Not exactly, they have to meet and centralize their efforts and strategies and reach a consensus on how to defeat the enemy.

Why can’t students use the same kind of approach to learning and meeting challenges they face in school? Well, they can and have been for years. The pros call it cooperative learning or collaboration while most call it learning in groups. True collaboration actually engages the brain and leads to real accomplishment. (Kovalik, S., 2002) I didn’t start doing it until I got into college. From my own perspective, it seemed to have taken far too long for classrooms to start to pattern the adult world in this respect, but hopefully now they can catch up with a vengeance. Web 2.0 is now helping to facilitate what’s being called Learning 2.0. Thanks to Web2.0, a student is not limited to the group members in his/her classroom to achieve something. They now have access to many more ‘colleagues’ all across the world. The planet’s surface is the limit. Imagine the enhanced opportunities a student can have teaching each other about the biomes that they live in in real time. Virtually all content areas can benefit in the Learning 2.0 environment. I remember wasting a lot of time in the library looking for just the right video to illustrate my point and then I would end up settling for some Nova video that would put my worst ADHD student wired on caffeine to sleep. Now students can make their own videos and share them with other kids in Russia, South America, or anywhere else on the planet. At this rate, we’ll achieve warp drive and venture into the stars a lot sooner than Gene Roddenberry fathomed we would. In this little blog I don’t want to get into what has impeded or encouraged this progress, for the reasons are many and the debates go on; however, I do wish to state that I don’t think that anything can replace pencil and paper, or a good page turner for kids and adults. Kids need to memorize their times tables. And I hope a computer will never replace the worthwhile relationship between a student and a teacher.

References

Mobile Learning Institute. (2009). [With George Mckenna].

Video posted to

http://www.mobilelearninginstitute.org/21stcenturyeducation/films/film-george-mckenna.html

Kovalik, S. & Olsen, K. (2002). Exceeding Expectations: A

User’s Guide to Implementing Brain Research in the Classroom. Covington, WA: Susan Kovalik and Associates, Inc.