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Pragmatic Uses of Social Media

Two months now we wrote a post about a book, where the author challenges traditional instruction in America. through uses of social media. Today, and from a different point of view, Darren Draper, talks about the hacking of the curriculum and comes to extract a prediction already established by Clayton Christensen:

"…the delivery of education via online courses will change the entire landscape of course development and control of the curriculum. Each academic field will supply its experts to help create the courses in that field. Once these courses are created, the notion that a teacher at a local school should be creating their own course no longer makes any sense whatever. (Roger Schank & Kemi Jona. 1999.,p. 19)"

All this means students and teacher need to be prepared. Changes in education technology brings in the importance of blogs as medium to transmit and proliferate the knowledge the 'experts' will create according to Schank & Jona.

Harold Harche collects what he's picked from the Work Literacy Webinar, about the good use of blogs and trends of how communication (knowledge) is delivered:

Blogs act as the glue between synchronous events.
Blogs are ways of mapping the learning journey.
Every blog is unique and gives a whole-person view, which you don’t get with assignments.
Blogs encourage dialogue and show how to relate to an audience, which is good for photographers in training.
There is peer group feedback.
Blogs allow for rich media - images, video, sound, links to other resources; all of which can be mashed up, tagged, recomposed, mixed - by all participants.
Blogs can also be emotional and playful.

But let's pay attention to Drappe's four questions on how you, as a teacher, are feeling about the perspectives and future of the education. One of his questions is:"Ultimately, as a teacher, are you willing to relinquish instructional control in your classroom to a piece of software or another instructor, possibly better qualified, but inconveniently located thousands of miles away?"

There are certain things that can only be taught when face to face with a real live person and other purely mechanical where you don't need the personal touch. For those mechanical outputs I will cede control on software of a person miles away. In the other hand, it's not possible to relinquish power. Thing is how to find the perfect balance to the benefit of not the teachers but students and the future of our society.

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1 Comments

  1. the 'internet' is here to stay, if correctly utilized it's potential can be boundless and can benefit people at different levels... i am all for using the internet as a tool to improve education, even if traditional instruction disagrees with it....

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