Well, we made it to the end of module 2, and I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head.
Affinity Spaces:Inevitable / Not Sufficient
Regarding “affinity spaces” as described in one of our readings: Children in a participatory culture are described as gung-ho little multi-taskers, adept at transmedia navigation, expanding their consciousness by leveraging collective intelligence and distributed cognition.
When reading this, I kept wondering when the first toddler CEO would hit the world stage. All of the examples were of very young kids out there acting like little corporate celebrities. The message seems to be “you’re very special, you’re too smart for traditional education, drop out and get rich”.
I won’t bore everyone with my dissection of the paper, but I will just say that these affinity spaces seem to be necessary (or at least inevitable), but not sufficient for the cognitive development of children.
What about critical analysis? What about critical literacy? I don’t feel that the participatory culture satisfies these developmental needs.
The Fourth and Fifth Walls: Spatial Metaphors and Performance
When reading about the glass-walled bedroom where people come in and out, watch and creep around as a metaphor for these online interactive environments, I started thinking about a spatial metaphor from traditional theater.
I copied this from Wikipedia: The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The term “fifth wall” has been used as an extension of the fourth wall concept to refer to the “invisible wall between critics or readers and theatre practitioners. The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events. Speaking directly to, or otherwise acknowledging, the audience through the camera, in a film, play or television program, is referred to as “breaking the fourth wall.”
Violating the boundary: With social media boundaries, there’s no wall to violate because there’s no widely accepted social norm defining behavior at the boundary. And the boundary itself is fragmented, nondescript, difficult to locate and define. The glass-walled bedroom metaphor is effective in describing participation, but I think it needs to be developed a little more to include the ways that information is communicated. The boundary of social media is more like a membrane.
I think it would be helpful to spend a lot of time developing new metaphors. We live our lives and shape our perceptions through our mental maps, and these are formed by metaphors.
Participation: Death of the Transmissionist
What I came to realize this past week was that participation in online environments kills the transmissionist teaching model. The idea that a teacher has to prepare a regimented lesson and deliver it to students who sit in chairs and take notes is a little outdated and in need of reconsideration.
I have heard this sentiment in several classes by teachers who stood before a class of students sitting in chairs taking notes. This is the first class that I’ve had where we practice what we preach.
Also, I very much enjoyed thinking about and interacting with different levels of understanding of participation such as lurking, snooping and furtively gumshoeing. What I came to realize is that I change roles and behaviors in online environments about as often as I do in physical environments given the context of the situation and the role that I embody at the moment.
5 replies on “Reflections on m2”
Hey Greg, I like the phrase “online environments kills the transmissionist teaching model” but what I found myself wondering about in this class is whether some classes would simply work better as “transmissionist” – maybe classes that are skill based that needs a lot of hands on or perhaps require f2f presentations. The online model works well for classes that require you to read. It gives you the liberty to read at your own time. Do you think that more classes should be conducted online or at least have a portion of it online?
Hi, I’m not sure what I think about how much should be done in which format. I feel like my outlook is really changing dramatically by using this eformat. I have learned a lot from transmissionist settings, but after the cost-benefit analysis, I think classroom settings provide less value. I find that I need time to process information, sometimes just a few minutes; by that time, the conversation has moved on. Then there’s the performing, posturing, and blocking that people do in group settings. I have a very low tolerance for power games. If a face to face situation becomes dominated by posturing and strategizing, I loose focus, withdraw, tune out.
Affinity spaces, fifth walls and constructivist/transmissionist modalities are all potential tools to teach, to learn and to understand. None has to die.
I agree that we cannot rely on any one tool or approach in our education of children but this can also be said of adults. Adults have their own needs when they are learning and archivists and librarians who teach them should be able to adjust to those needs accordingly.
I have a good page on androgogy in the wiki if you are interested in pursuing these ideas.
Dean
“none has to die”… Good point. Why get stuck in these binary all or nothing oppositions?
Ah! It was great to read your thoughts on “Affinity Spaces:Inevitable / Not Sufficient”. You couldn’t have expressed my sentiments more exactly. I’m really starting to loathe this dichotomy that those kinds of tech-happy videos tend to suggest between this dinosauric traditional education system and these new-wave mini-CEO technology-wielding children. First of all, being a certified teacher and having taught several years in the school system, I’m a bit at a loss as to where those videos are getting their info from. That is, there is NO question that many teachers trained in the traditional models and methods of praxis teach in the more uni-directional, traditional, lecture-at-students, mode. NO question. But the education system itself- the government mandated program of studies, the curriculum documents, the ‘new’ research (i.e. of the last, oh, decade, or so, if not more) has a HUGE focus on interactivity. Back in my Education degree we learned how to create WebQuests for kids for English class…At the time so cutting edge…I wonder what my prof is teaching those future English teachers now? Probably has replaced WebQuests with blogs or another social media tool.
Finally, one of the videos we watched threw out some stats side by side, as if to suggest a correlation between them. That is, they mentioned how many kids are wired and also mentioned how many kids drop out – all within the context of our static and traditional school systems. Are they kidding? The students who drop out today are, for the most part, the same ones who have (unfortunately) always dropped out. The majority are students from marginalized communities (economically, culturally, socially). And let me tell you, these are most definitely NOT the students wielding ipads. The upgrading adults I taught were: refugees, single moms, and other individuals with much more major life issues than whether or not they were bored because the teacher didn’t incorporate the latest technology in their lesson.
Ok, I’m ranting now. But let me be clear: this is not to say schools don’t really need to integrate social media and other interactive technologies and methods into their teaching and continue to re-examine the way kids learn today in light of some of these new technologies (they do), but the simple dichotomy suggested by these hip-kid videos is so over simplistic it’s bordering on parody.