My latest post for DMLcentral is up. Entitled Scaffolding Web Literacy Through Learning Pathways, I discuss the difference between training and learning, as well as ways in which we can scaffold the development of web literacy.
I’ve closed comments here to encourage you to comment over there. It’s a great encouragement to hear your thoughts – however brief! 🙂
Excitingly, Mozilla’s Webmaker training starts on Monday. Join us (free!) to learn creative ways to teach web literacy, digital skills and open practices with fellow educators, technologists and mentors around the world.
Sign up here: http://training.webmakerprototypes.org
Each of the four weeks is a separate topic, but if you decide to do all of them, they build upon one another:
The brains behind the operation is Laura Hilliger, our Training & Curriculum Lead. Several of us from the Webmaker Community team are going to be helping out with running sessions.
Laura’s put together a really nice ‘how to participate’ Thimble resource that’s worth checking out:
Week beginning 12th May. Learn about the theoretical frameworks and pedagogies (teaching methods) behind Webmaker. This module helps you understand the web as an ecosystem and why an open web is so important.
Week beginning 19th May. Develop open educational resources that embed web literacy and making with other topics that you might already be teaching. Using open practices, you’ll make learning materials that are designed for others to use and remix.
Week beginning 26th May. Put theory into practice. In this module, you’ll learn how to use open and participatory learning techniques to teach digital and web literacy skills in your classroom, during workshops or at events.
Week beginning 2nd June. Amplify your work by making connections in your local community as well as within Webmaker’s global community. In this module, you’ll learn how building relationships can help you achieve greater impact.
There’ll be three main places to pay attention to:
If you’ve always wanted to improve your web skills so that you can teach the web to others, this is your perfect opportunity – so sign up!
Ever since April 2010 when Karl Fisch first suggested what has eventually become known as ‘the flipped classroom’ I’ve been both attracted and repelled by the idea. For those who haven’t come across the concept, it’s a very simple one: the ‘transmission’ part of schooling happens at home through pre-recorded media (videos, podcasts, etc.) with the discussion element, the groupwork happening in the classroom.
Described as such, and with the present realities of the education system (especially in the USA) it’s difficult, prima facie, to argue against this suggestion. On further reflection, however, I think that the flipped classroom is only possible because we’ve commoditised learning to such an extent that it’s becoming indistinguishable from training.
Let’s just step back a moment and look at the western idea of an education system. There’s at least five unspoken assumptions common across most schools:
I, along with most progressive educators I know around the world, disagree with these five unspoken assumptions. It is assumptions like these, I would argue, that lead to the flipped classroom looking like a good idea.
As far as I understand it, the flipped classroom concept is gaining traction (especially) in the USA because of a synergy with the Khan Academy, lauded by celebrity educational funders such as Bill Gates. Khan Academy, for those who don’t know, is a kind of YouTube for educational videos, but with exercises. It’s gamified drill-and-practice for the 21st century. Whilst I think Khan Academy does have a place within the educational landscape it is, undeniably training. Training is a (very small) part of learning but to mistake one for the other is an error seasoned educators should not be making.
John Hattie’s table of effect sizes is the result of a meta-analysis of many, many learning interventions in educational institutions. Feedback, the student’s prior cognitive ability, and instructional quality take the top three positions in Hattie’s table;Â in other words, the flipped classroom would look to have an evidence base. I think that such an approach would work very well in one school I used to work in, a high-achieving specialist school with a predominantly middle-class catchment. However, in the first and last schools I worked in, there would not only be huge digital divide issues, but the usual problems surrounding homework and classroom behaviour.
All of this reminds me of an important lesson from a Philosophy of Science module I took as an undergraduate. Until Copernicus came along and changed the way we understand our place in the universe, the Ptolemaic system was the dominant astronomical model. In order to explain the phenomena (i.e. the seeming speeding-up and slowing-down of planets in relation to the Earth), Ptolemy and his followers added ‘epicycles’. These were rotations around a particular point, over and above the (assumed) rotation of the planet around the Earth.The whole Ptolemaic system was, of course, spectacularly incorrect. Ptolemy had started with a faulty assumption that seemed ‘obvious’ (that the Sun goes around the Earth), modifying and refining his theory to fit the phenomena. It was an impressively-complicated system. But it was wrong.
I think we’ve gone about reforming the western education system in a Ptolemaic manner. I think we’re adding epicycles such as the ‘flipped classroom’ instead of challenging core assumptions about how we can and should be educating young people. I think there’s a debate to be had. I think we had better get on to having that debate in a grown-up way. Quickly.
