Discussion+Board+Questions

Welcome to Exploring the Big Apple! Please introduce yourself by telling us your name and where you're from. Then tell us, if you had to choose one word to describe your relationship to technology, what would it be? (And why...) Finally, why did you join this course?

Will Richardson, an educator who blogs about technology and learning, writes about how school may no longer the only (or main) source of knowledge. Rather, school is a node in a networking of learning. "Thinking seriously about schools as nodes in larger more expansive networks of personal learning changes the concept of what schools are for. It doesn’t diminish their role, but it does reframe it, and I think it places the emphasis where it more appropriately belongs these days: helping students create, edit, and participate in their own networks of learning. (What a concept.) What if we started seeing schools as the places where our students learn how to learn, where, when they are younger, the school may be at the center, but when they leave us, they have built a vast, effective network of learning of their own in which school and schooling is simply one node? Where we’ve helped them learn how to nurture and sustain those networks to serve them over the long term? Where we’ve shown them how to leverage those connections in safe, ethical and effective ways? Our roles as educators and systems would no doubt shift away from content delivery toward modeling and supporting each learner’s unique journey. And it would challenge us to rethink the ways in which we assess what our students have learned. But that would be crucial and important work, work that some semblance of traditional school structures might actually do pretty well." (Read the whole post here: http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/school-as-node/)

Richardson seems to be saying that knowledge is now dispersed. Our function as educators is no longer to transmit knowledge but to teach our students how to navigate, explore, and create knowledge networks.

What has been your experience? Has technology changed learning? Do you see schools today as adapting to new knowledge networks? How does this affect our role as educators?