The Philosophy Behind EDU 490
I am taking part in a MOOC called Networked Scholars; it is a four-week course about how individuals can incorporate the social learning pedagogies of the day in an effort not only to grow their learning but also their identity as a learner and academic professional. The course shares much in common with EDU 490, except its scope is for academics pursuing scholarship in the realm of doctoral degree rather than practitioners pursuing a teaching certificate or a Masters.
I would encourage you to follow the course through one of many ways: the #scholar14 Twitter hashtag, the Networked Scholars web page, or the Networked Scholars LMS through Canvas. Like many things in a PLN, this course does not exist in the manner we consider formal education, but rather as a space and time where people are going to discuss issues of social learning, networked learning and digital identity, and look at practical manners in which to engage this theory. Do not feel required or obligated to do anything more than take a peek, but if you are compelled to participate please do so — your voice is important and underrepresented.
And this gets to the purpose of EDU 490 and what we are trying to do and why it is not necessarily the course you anticipated when you were told there would be a tech class. I wrote a blog about it over at my professional site, and I would ask you to read that. In short, my premise is the same as you have seen over the past eight weeks: learning is a situated, contextual and environmental happening, where collaboration, communication and creation are the most important elements of the space (notice content does not exist in that sentence). That said, K-12 education is a large bureaucracy with both an ethereal goal (creating well-learned citizens) and direct manners in which to make sure this happens (through various benchmarks that today manifest in ways such as standardized tests and CCSS). Because of these direct endeavors, the school day is taken up with curricular materials and lesson plans to make sure benchmarks are met, leaving little space and even less support to explore learning where content is a byproduct rather than the pathway.
I understand your needs as upcoming teachers: you need to be able to succeed within a school and within a district, and there is a short-term technology approach that can make that happen, where we build virtual field trips and use Moodle and you learn a few of the hot-topic technologies of the day. If we are lucky, you get interested and start following trends. If we are not lucky, you use these because you are comfortable and you struggle to keep up with future trends. I do not believe teaching is about luck. That is why this class started with theory: PLN, identity, the Domain of One’s Own, and now Open Educational Resources. We are moving into where theory meets practice.
All of you have noted your CTs and some administrators want to see the use of various tech in your classroom. That’s great. I hope the first part of this class has started a conversation (at least for you, though perhaps it has stretched to others) about the best way to utilize technology within learning. It is from that space you will engage the final project, which is a web resource for a state-of-the-art technology being used today. This can be an iPad, IWB, Moodle, Google Docs, or some of the other fandango things schools are paying $$$ for today. You will dedicate some of your web space to creating lessons where this technology is beneficial, you will create instructions on how teachers can use this technology, you will have a FAQ, you will address concerns about the technology, etc. In short, you are going to become an expert on a specific technology. Within this network of EDU 490, we will see 10-14 various technologies where there are experts, which will allow all of us to better engage some of these tools for our classroom use. Technology without theory is a hammer without a nail. This approach gives us a whole slew of nails for different needs.
This will start in Week 10. Until then, consider this as you spend the next two weeks getting more comfortable with your web page!
