Saturday, March 19, 2011

Week 7: Connectivism, Social Knowledge, and Participatory Learning


‘Future Learning Landscapes: Transforming Pedagogy through Social Software’ was one of the articles that I have read this week. This article pointed out that current society and education has been affected by the attributes of Web 2.0 such as its connectivity, the function of knowledge sharing, or interactivity: As McLoughlin, C. and Lee, M. stated, many colleges and universities are developing new teaching and learning models to keep pace with this trend. Many higher education institutions are providing students more opportunities than before to employ their autonomy or be engaged in social networks in learning processes within the context of Web 2.0.

I cannot agree more with the argument in this article that teachers should embrace Web 2.0 into their classrooms to meet students’ needs in these days. Teachers should study how they can integrate Web 2.0 into their teaching process in a way that they can satisfy students’ desire to create content themselves, share the content, utilize their creativity, learn from others’ views, socialize with their peers, interact with them, work collaboratively, learn from an authentic task, etc. Students’ needs’ have become changed. They no longer want to be just consumers of knowledge but they want to be producer of new content as well. Also, they want to be connected with others to share their unique views and learn from others’ different perspectives. Teachers should be aware of new needs of students and try to meet them by integrating Web 2.0 in their teaching. 

1 comment:

  1. I couldn't agree with you more on being aware of the new needs of students as producers. I have received much praise lately because of the interactivity of my classes. Today's students are the neomillenials we learned of in week one, and they have such short attention spans that we need to speak to them on the tech level they operate on to keep their interests.

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