The Networked Student

Today I watched The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler. This video is based on students using the internet and other technology to find and use information for their courses. The example in the story was a boy who had a psychology class in which he met two times a day online and he had no textbook. So what was he to do?

The video talked about connectivism. This is being able to be connect with everyone. The boy in this example went straight to the internet to start building his learning network. He did many searches on the psyche and find many different ways to access information. These included: subscribing to podcasts, reading blogs, sending e-mails to professors and other educators on the subject, using skyp to set up a conference with the class, and much more. By the time this student had finished his research he had basically built his own online textbook. Even after his Psychology class is over he and everyone else will be able to view all of his hard work. His work will be available for other students later researching this same topic.

Now, they asked why does this student even need a teacher? Well there are many reasones. Some of which are: The teacher teaches him how to build a network, how to know the difference in good and bad information, how to properly and politely ask to use information. Also, the teacher hopes that at the end of the course the student will maintaine their personal learning network and continue to use those skills in the future. After all, those are the skills we will need in the 21st century.

Now as far as trying this out with middle school students, I feel that this is a high school grade level or higher. I still feel that at middle school age the children need to the structure of a classroom. This is a great idea for high school and college level studetns who should have already built up some discipline to take a course like this. I personally feel that I am not ready for classes to be like this. I still strongly believe in the old time classroom where the kids come to class everyday and take their homework home at night. Now there is nothing wrong with integrating technology into the classroom since it is going to be required in the upcoming years but, I think that it should not be the backbone of the course.