Week 20 – POTCERT

History of Educational Technology:

As I sat listening to the lecture in the background while doing 100 other things in the frontground; I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth Lisa and her crew were making me listen to this boring old lesson.  Then I thought, “Oh yeah, Lisa’s a history teacher… that mimagesCA7R70DOust be it!”  Until wala!  The light came on!  Rick discussed the time his boring old science teacher was giving a monotone lecture on the importance of grasshoppers.  His class was then wisked away to the “science lab” to watch his “teacher’s brother” give the same old boring lecture on grasshoppers, but this time it was on an old black & white fuzzy tv.  So it just seemed so much more exciting.  Take away:  don’t deliver the same old boring content through a new medium.  Make the medium work for your content.  Make the medium deliver your content in a different way while using that medium to your advantage…  hmm easier said than done.

Another thought came to mind regarding MOOCSimagesCA0ZH4JD.  The unions are all up in arms about MOOCs and how they will replace teachers, they think MOOCs are threatening our jobs!  There will no longer be a need for professors…  the same thing Rick points out was said when film came into the classroom.  Everybody needs to relax!

I did enjoy this rather long lecture, it certainly helped to put things into perspective for me.  Plus, Professor Rick is a dynamic presenter!

Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the mind?

“Right now, many of these decisions are being made by the geeks of Silicon Valley, who run a lot of things that other people pretend to run. The crucial choice of which intergenerational information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not made by educators or curriculum developers but by young engineers.”

Didn’t this just come up in our reading about CMSs?  It’s hard to think outside of the box when we are boxed in our offices, classrooms & institutions everyday…  But reading articles like this one, allow us to spread our pedagogical wings and fly!  “More Spaceships, please!”

As far as our textbook reading goes for this week:  poof!  Not much captured my attention, which is a rarity.  I think I’m beyond the blended class notion… I’m jumping in with both feet next semester and it’s fully online for me.

Now, on to spring break…  ahh!

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One Response to Week 20 – POTCERT

  1. Jim Julius says:

    It’s good to hear the Schwier video gave you a light bulb moment. The question of whether the medium matters in educational technology is one with a long history of impassioned debate (see http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/faq.asp), but in the end your conclusion is right on. Educators using technology need to think like instructional designers to consider how best to maximize the technology/media capabilities with their approach (content, teaching strengths, intended outcomes, learner activities). So it’s more than just effectively “delivering content” – it’s thinking about what kind of interactions need to occur – between your learners and that content, the learners and you, the learners and each other – to make it most likely that learning is going to happen!

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