This video by Stephen Downes is still worth watching although it comes from a conference that was two years ago!
Right at the end Downes says something that strikes me as very important. He says:
This is not a message about how you should create a learning environment for your studets …. but this is a message about how you should learn.
I can’t stop thinking about the things I could do for my students, the opportunities I could create for them to learn. That seems the perspective from which I view teaching and myself as a teacher. It takes a shift in our views, a shift in our pedagogies or philosophies I guess.
Earlier on I was watching presentations at Educamp09 at http://bit.ly/R2tay when somebody said something along the line:
I can see my students use all these Web 2.0 tools but they don’t seem to use them for learning.
It struck a chord with me. However, the more I think about it the more I think this is a symtom of a situation which is not about Web 2.0 or e-learning but about our own philosophy so typical of an educational environment. We believe we have to make students learn what is good for them. But are we really sure this is what they need? What if they watch jokes and music spots on YouTube because this is exactly what they need? They may not want to become what we (or the society) want them to be. A shift in our viewpoint is needed. I’m not quite there yet. Perhaps rethinking what we want to help our students learn could be the first step and Stephen Downes is qite helpful here as well. Check his article Things you really need to learn.
