tstorr's blog

Most of this week has been spent doing administration type things so that the project can actually get underway.  I can't believe how long it has taken to write consent forms, prepare project information sheets and complete my research plan.  At times it has taken far longer than it should just to fit the correct word into a sentence!  If I were a pupil at school, I'm sure my teacher would have been giving me a detention for taking my time.  I think we hurry our students far too much and reward the fast more than the best.  Quality thinking takes time, ideas mature, sometimes they go off, but timely consideration allows us to reflect and gain a deeper understanding.  It would be great if schools could develop quality thinking.

Over in the e-fellows private yak-yak space we've been having a discussion about Marc Prensky and his assertion that kids today are different than those from previous generations.

"Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach."

Maybe the world is a different place, but I'm not so sure that the kids have changed.  If our educational system does not start to change though, it could risk becoming irrelevant to those it is trying to help.

Wow! First may I give my heart felt thanks to Vince, Michael, Ann and the team at CORE-ED for making last week such an enjoyable and useful experience. To spend the week in the company of teachers who have such interesting and challenging ideas of what education could be like in the 21st Century was something special.

At an individual level the week was spent crystallising my ideas about what my research topic should be on. At the start of the week I knew that I wanted to research something to do with how Moodle is used in secondary schools - probably some aspect of what 'community' means - how to sustain and cherish learning communities but was concerned that I'd not be able to look at what what types of activities in Moodle appear to be interesting for students to use. After having an Eureka! moment, I realised that what teachers perceive to be interesting, engaging and successful is not always the case from the learners point of view. Web2.0 activities are often promoted as being effective means to teach and learn using social or co-constructive methods. My research will look at the experiences of teacher and learner - (Y13 students) when using Moodle to learn about Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP to build interactive websites.

The running title of my project is "What does co-constructive learning in a web2.0 context mean from the perspective of facilitator and learner?" Hopefully at the end of the year I'll have a more firm idea of the educational possibilities of using Web2.0 tools with senior classes.