Chapter 4
Quote: “Blogs are a medium for learning, but they do not teach. Rather, they generate the space for a collective to emerge. It is impossible to predict what that collective will look like, and once it forms, equally difficult to manage in any traditional way.” page 54. I chose this quote because it encompasses the potential of collectives as well as the challenges in the educational community. Collectives have great potential to encourage open learning without boundaries, but in K-12 education it is important to be able to manage student interactions to create safe spaces for learning and this is difficult when you have a free form community that cannot be managed in traditional ways.
Question: If you cannot define or direct collectives, how can we use them to accomplish learning in our specific content areas in a way where the environment is safe for students?
Connection: In our class, we were encouraged to participate in and create different collectives related to education. We have created content on our websites and in our blogs, as well as passively participated by commenting on each other’s blogs and participated in already created collectives by joining Twitter chats.
Epiphany: Students need a space where they can learn, interact, and direct their learning without someone managing what they do.
Chapter 5
Quote: “A blogger is not writing to an audience; he is facilitating the construction of an interpretive community.” page 66. I chose this quote because the juxtaposition of this statement and the statement about teaching being about taking personal experience (such as knowledge of a content area or subject) and making it public via lecture or notes so that students can privately practice by taking individual notes or individual assessments really struck me. It emphasized the intent behind the communication as being more important than the mode of communication itself. To me, a writing a blog is the internet equivalent of a monologue or maybe even a soliloquy, and in teaching the equivalent would be a lecture. But the intent behind blogging is to engage a community and create a conversation, not just to be internalized by an audience, and that changes how I look at teaching as well.
Question: If we engage our students in online collectives, how do we convey the different meaning of public and private expressed in the book to parents? How do we accomplish this while still respecting parents’ wishes in a society where the privacy of children is paramount?
Connection: The description and exploration of the purpose of blogging really hit home for me with regards to what we have been doing in our technology class. We have been creating a community and collective by blogging, putting information out, and then linking to each other’s blogs and commenting on them. By gaining a following of our classmates, our blogs and Twitter accounts were elevated to a status where we began being followed by random educators and people we have never met or interacted with because we were in the same web of a community with them. Participating in a collective this way and then understanding the meaning of it and how what we are doing could impact learning was an eye opening experience for me.
Epiphany: In the same manner that blogging is intended to start a conversation and create community engagement on a specific topic, whatever manner we teach in needs to have the same intent if we want to have an impact on our students.
Chapter 6
Quote: “Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices, and processes that are so engrained that they become second nature. Not unlike the notion of inquiry, indwelling is also an adaptive process, meaning that the practices have flexibility; they are responsive to changes in the environment and situation.” page 84. I chose this quote because to me, it is the epitome of what math teachers wish their students would achieve in math class. We teach formulas and then don’t understand why students can’t apply them when we change the situation slightly. We often times can only half explain why we chose to adapt the method for a problem because the habit is so engrained that we “just see it.” I come across this a lot in areas like proof and trigonometric identities. There is no magic formula, and students are so stuck in what they’ve been taught that they cannot even conceive of needing to understand how concepts work together to figure it out. They get frustrated because we “can’t teach it,” instead they have to learn it. This to me is what the idea of knowing more than we can say is all about, and how it links to inquiry. Some topics cannot be taught because in order to understand them, you need to understand the links between ideas and the only way to do that is to explore them, not to memorize them. The patterns can’t be described for every iteration, you need to see the connections to find patterns in any given problem.
Question: How do you create an environment within a math class where students can learn mathematical concepts through genuine inquiry?
Connection: This chapter most strongly connects with the 20% project we worked on in our class. We were each allowed to pursue something that we were passionate about and set goals for it. The boundaries were some online learning, using a content curation tool, and a goal with many questions associated that we could answer and accomplish within 5 weeks. This allowed us to pursue learning as we saw fit and follow whichever direction we were most inclined towards for answers.
Epiphany: The way that our school system is set up, with specific content separated into different classes each with their own set of learning goals, is not at all conducive to learning through inquiry.
Quote: “Blogs are a medium for learning, but they do not teach. Rather, they generate the space for a collective to emerge. It is impossible to predict what that collective will look like, and once it forms, equally difficult to manage in any traditional way.” page 54. I chose this quote because it encompasses the potential of collectives as well as the challenges in the educational community. Collectives have great potential to encourage open learning without boundaries, but in K-12 education it is important to be able to manage student interactions to create safe spaces for learning and this is difficult when you have a free form community that cannot be managed in traditional ways.
Question: If you cannot define or direct collectives, how can we use them to accomplish learning in our specific content areas in a way where the environment is safe for students?
Connection: In our class, we were encouraged to participate in and create different collectives related to education. We have created content on our websites and in our blogs, as well as passively participated by commenting on each other’s blogs and participated in already created collectives by joining Twitter chats.
Epiphany: Students need a space where they can learn, interact, and direct their learning without someone managing what they do.
Chapter 5
Quote: “A blogger is not writing to an audience; he is facilitating the construction of an interpretive community.” page 66. I chose this quote because the juxtaposition of this statement and the statement about teaching being about taking personal experience (such as knowledge of a content area or subject) and making it public via lecture or notes so that students can privately practice by taking individual notes or individual assessments really struck me. It emphasized the intent behind the communication as being more important than the mode of communication itself. To me, a writing a blog is the internet equivalent of a monologue or maybe even a soliloquy, and in teaching the equivalent would be a lecture. But the intent behind blogging is to engage a community and create a conversation, not just to be internalized by an audience, and that changes how I look at teaching as well.
Question: If we engage our students in online collectives, how do we convey the different meaning of public and private expressed in the book to parents? How do we accomplish this while still respecting parents’ wishes in a society where the privacy of children is paramount?
Connection: The description and exploration of the purpose of blogging really hit home for me with regards to what we have been doing in our technology class. We have been creating a community and collective by blogging, putting information out, and then linking to each other’s blogs and commenting on them. By gaining a following of our classmates, our blogs and Twitter accounts were elevated to a status where we began being followed by random educators and people we have never met or interacted with because we were in the same web of a community with them. Participating in a collective this way and then understanding the meaning of it and how what we are doing could impact learning was an eye opening experience for me.
Epiphany: In the same manner that blogging is intended to start a conversation and create community engagement on a specific topic, whatever manner we teach in needs to have the same intent if we want to have an impact on our students.
Chapter 6
Quote: “Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices, and processes that are so engrained that they become second nature. Not unlike the notion of inquiry, indwelling is also an adaptive process, meaning that the practices have flexibility; they are responsive to changes in the environment and situation.” page 84. I chose this quote because to me, it is the epitome of what math teachers wish their students would achieve in math class. We teach formulas and then don’t understand why students can’t apply them when we change the situation slightly. We often times can only half explain why we chose to adapt the method for a problem because the habit is so engrained that we “just see it.” I come across this a lot in areas like proof and trigonometric identities. There is no magic formula, and students are so stuck in what they’ve been taught that they cannot even conceive of needing to understand how concepts work together to figure it out. They get frustrated because we “can’t teach it,” instead they have to learn it. This to me is what the idea of knowing more than we can say is all about, and how it links to inquiry. Some topics cannot be taught because in order to understand them, you need to understand the links between ideas and the only way to do that is to explore them, not to memorize them. The patterns can’t be described for every iteration, you need to see the connections to find patterns in any given problem.
Question: How do you create an environment within a math class where students can learn mathematical concepts through genuine inquiry?
Connection: This chapter most strongly connects with the 20% project we worked on in our class. We were each allowed to pursue something that we were passionate about and set goals for it. The boundaries were some online learning, using a content curation tool, and a goal with many questions associated that we could answer and accomplish within 5 weeks. This allowed us to pursue learning as we saw fit and follow whichever direction we were most inclined towards for answers.
Epiphany: The way that our school system is set up, with specific content separated into different classes each with their own set of learning goals, is not at all conducive to learning through inquiry.