eLearning and teacher education: Crossing digital divides

Image by Wayan Vota via Noeline Wright started the presentation with a reference to Prensky's notion of Digital natives and the fact that it was always supposed to be a metaphor, and has since be used in ways that he never initially meant. The notions of digital natives do not replace. for example intuition, good judgement, problem solving, and ability to discern patterns. Also, "in and unimaginable complex future, the digitally unenhanced person, however wise, will not be able to access the tools of wisdom that will be available to even the least wise digitally enhanced human" (Prensky). It suggests that delayed use of these types of tools will be impoverished use. Media should not be regarded merely as teaching aids or tools for learning. Education about the media should be seen seen an indispensable pre-requisite for education with or though media (Buckingham and Burn, 2007).

Critical thinking and metacognitive skills need to be present alongside engagement, intention, deliberation, self-monitoring, and self-regulation (MacDonald et al, 2011). The ability to engage often comes after the means to engage have happened. Engagement does not happen before the ability that they can work on the learning...that it is accessible. while we build self-esteem in students, and that sense of belonging, rather than working with the texts, it will only ever be social. The learners also need to have the confidence to have different points of view, to be able to agree and disagree with each other. "Extended cognition is a core cognitive process, not an add-on extra [because] the brain develops in a way that complements the external structures in ways that people who have not experience these types of interactions would be unable to do. There is a strong link between high achievement and metacognition, which "highlights the importance of learning the self-monitoring and self-regulating behaviours that will ensure task-specific meaning-making" (MacDonald et al, 2011).

The teacher, therefore, guides students through an analysis of the text type, working out what is conveyed, what can be deduced about the writer and/or the origin of the text, how the student located and collected information, and what produce they would create from it.

"Multimodal texts are fast becoming the dominant mode of communication...stdent need to be a discerning user of them" (MacDonald et al, 2011). If the key focus of education is to reduce the distance between a learner and a text, and for the learner to then make that their own - then the role of the teacher is to facilitate the process, and explicit teaching around critical thinking and inference.

Noeline gave some illustrations from initial teacher education, and when she shows them a Web page around a 'Guinea worm' there is often no curiosity or motivation to find out more...do they even exist? What are they? Why might they need to be eradicated? In other words there is little motivation to investigate what the text is.
Noelene closed by saying that what she believes is that there needs to be deliberate acts to teach metacognition, and critical thinking about all types of texts.

Dialogic inquiry online

Image by Candace Nast via FlickrIt was really interesting that Jennie Swann started by indicating the synergies and overlaps between the previous 2 sessions and hers, although she is developing communities of inquiry rather than a CoP as CoPs take time to develop, and the course she works on is only 12 weeks in duration.

Jennie started with a 'conceptual artefact' "students never claimed to be digital natives and we spould stop beating them up for not being epxert online learners. Teach them" @easgill. This was the top tweet from the first day at the conference, and Jennie totally agreed with the thrust of the tweet, and used it as a segue into discussing experiences in MOOCs, in particularly the age of participants. The ones who participated effectively were the ones who have the skills. So there is a gap between Prensky's original assertion that the digital native's students' thinking patterns have changed, and the need to work with things that are familiar.

Image via Wikipedia

Learners in tertiary, also, are diverse. Research shows that students are skilled at using LMSs, Google, Wikipedia, emails, and mobile phones. Thye have littel familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent socail technologies. The students do not appear to have radically differnnt patterns of knowledge creation and sharing (Margaryan, Littlejohn, and Voijt).

It has been asserted that learners can, through social software can easily connetct and share with each other leading to conversations. But what do these conversations look like? And what do you do if they don't? Also, (and oft quited reason for not encoouraging coversations)how does the content get coverered?

Ways of knowing underping forms of intellectual and ethcial development in the college environment. Students often, for example, believe that knowledge is certain and it is the role of the teacher to cram this knowledge into our heads and we'll regurgitate this in our exams. Lecturers often feel the same - and the focus is on lower order thinkoing skills....Jennie wondered if that was because there is no compulsory teacher training in tertiary. Once knowledge is not seen as certain, then people can have different points of view on things...it's OK to disagree and discuss.

Contextual knowledge judged on the basis of evidence in context which promostes the applicaiton of knowledge in context and promotes ecaluative discussion of perspectice. In this discourse, teachers and students often critique each other.Lecturers can also use a range of open questions to help initiate discussions. The Web site (Networked Dialogue)  is openly available.

Jennie showed a site that scaffolds students through the process and structure of conversations - it takes them step-by-step., as well as indicating possible issues that might be faced.