I’ve heard teachers say, what’s the use of teaching when students can Google anything? Well, try googling anything. Thousands of links come up. Which one is the most useful? Which information applies to the local setting? Is the information trustworthy or correct? We have to equip students to sift through so much information. Someone said we need to prepare our students for jobs that don’t even exist yet. That means what we teach them now will become obsolete. So what becomes really important is that we mold our students to become lifelong learners.
And then there’s Connectivism –
I first heard about Connectivism from Deirdre Bonnycastle.
So what’s the teacher supposed to do? I agree that one role an educator can play is that of a curator. To do this, the teacher has to find and select the course material (from those Google searches perhaps), editorialize, arrange and create that information molecule. Every teacher will have that unique way of mixing up those atoms of information. And every student can look at that information molecule in his or her own way too.
That’s why I stopped lecturing in class. I have flipped the classroom though using my own videos. But these videos are not lectures per se. Rather it is my way to annotate the recommended reading material for the week’s tasks or assignments. More about this approach in the slide deck below.
As to classroom discussions morphing into ubiquitous learning online, I’ve used the forum tool on Moodle to “force” students to peer review each other’s work. This was surprisingly a fulfilling experience as I also learned a lot from my students. Some students struggled with the asynchronous feedback though.
Now here’s the challenge … how do I bring all these previous teaching experience, and the material that #DigitalScholar has provided into this new online course I’m developing?