First published Feb. 17 2016 for ETEC565:

Even before I knew it was a ‘thing’, I’ve been using the internet as a way of furthering my own learning in personal areas of interest, as I’m sure many of us who miss the ‘Net’ generation moniker have.  Before it was more than a burgeoning service and system, and certainly before it was explicitly being used in education, the net has been a place where motivated individuals could create their own learner, knowledge, community, and event assessment-centered experiences.  In my case, it was learning simple code to create a website to house my teenage attempts at artwork and writing, mostly fanworks but also including some original work.  As I was a self-directed learner, I was self-assessing my areas of knowledge and weakness as I went, and looked for teachers both in peers and online (prior to the days of YouTube it was written tutorials).  The knowledge acquisition was highly contextualized, embedded in my desire to create an attractive site that worked without bugs, and the assessment came in the form of feedback from visitors who either could or could not enjoy the work I hosted on the site.  I was constantly self-checking the code, my understanding of the process, and re-vamping the site as I either learned more or felt the need to mix it up.

As a teacher, I think the greatest challenge thus far has been creating interactions with students in a blended classroom environment that both encourages their own autonomy and self-efficacy but also supports them at their present levels of ability.  In schools where I have recently been working, inquiry-based learning has been a major point of discussion and development, and I believe it’s because it encompasses the four attributes of effective learning as described by Anderson (2008).  True inquiry-based learning is not something I have been able to achieve as of yet, but I have been making attempts to use its principles more and more, in that I give the students a framework within which they can exercise inquiry-based principles.  This has made a world of difference in the amount of interaction with my students, which as Anderson (2008) explains on p. 55, “is a key learning component in constructivist learning theories and in inducing mindfulness in learners”.

Providing students with learning goals, with may be skill AND content based, and then giving them license to explore within those, has lead to some of my favourite teaching experiences.  An example took place with a grade 12 human development course last term, where the learning goals (pulled from the Ontario curriculum) where these:

Learning Goals:
I will be able to..

• Social-Emotional Development: demonstrate an understanding of social-emotional development throughout the lifespan and of ways of influencing such development;
• Personality and Identity: demonstrate an understanding of various influences on personality development and identity formation throughout the lifespan;
• Factors Affecting Social-Emotional Development: demonstrate an understanding of how factors affect social-emotional development, with an emphasis on the process of socialization.

They had to also meet learning goals related to thesis development and choosing an appropriate mode of communication (they could choose between an essay, website, or presentation), but within the framework of those learning goals they were free to choose their topics based on their areas of interest, as piqued through in-class lessons we had participated in together.

One student, as part of her exploration of personality and identity and factors that effect it, wanted to research introversion and extroversion and how physiological factors might affect these traits.  Through her own research, she discovered – and in fact, taught me – about recent studies that show how the blood flow in the brains of introverts versus extroverts differs, and what this means for information processing.  She found this originally on a .com site, but thanks to good citation, we put our heads together and found primary source case studies (I used my UBC library access to help dig these up), and she used these to learn more about this fascinating development.  I believe this was an instance, rare as it may feel at times, where the “students transform the inert information passed to them from another and construct it into knowledge with personal application and value” (p. 55).  I stressed students use the internet with academic integrity, and mirrored this in my own use of a class Wikispace and through explicit lessons.  At times I had students share or construct their work with each other by building pages on the wiki, but I also tried to emphasize the nature of the internet AS a community, one in which they must have responsible conduct in academic roles – and in general, although they did not generally show an understanding of having one authentic self in all of their online personae.  Assessment took place on an individual and community level in the form of check-lists and peer assessments, as well as with me in almost constant-conferencing.

What I seek to learn is even better ways of pursuing these kinds of interactions, especially at the younger levels.  I’ve been able to play with these methods in grade 10, but those students needed a lot more guidance within their frameworks.  As of yet this is the case with inquiry-based learning for me – it works well with students who are curious AND responsible, but those who are not struggle to find meaningful connections to the curriculum that also meet the academic standard.  I taught myself how to make a simple site, but could I have passed a computer-science class, at the same age?  Probably not.  I think new understanding of technology and its potential provides teachers with the ability to meet students where they are, help them find themselves within the curriculum, and then push them within and outside of it.

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Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F, Elloumi (Eds.),Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved fromhttp://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf