This weeks readings and videos was all about – what do we do beyond our POT experience? How do we continue to share our ideas & experiences? How do we keep in touch with colleagues?

Sharing

I was really impressed with Dean Shareski’s video on sharing and how important it is to the future of education. Technology has made it so easy to share. Students can share their ideas and resources. Instructors can share their lesson plans and discuss new ways to engage students. With all of the open source material available on the internet, the sharing of course content has become so much easier. I wonder what might happen to the publishing world if more and more instructors used only freely available content for their classes? Open resources could be an important factor in the prevention of the corporatization of education.

Networking

I really liked Helen Crump’s video on Personal Learning Networks and Alec Couros’ lecture on teaching and learning in a networked world. Both videos have inspired me to work on expanding and refining my PLN.

I was thinking about my networks over the years and realized how narrow networks were in the past. During my undergraduate life at Cal State Fullerton, my learning network was very narrow and consisted mostly of the professors I took classes from and fellow students in the Phi Alpha Theta honors society. After getting to UCLA my network expanded to include meeting professors and fellow students at conferences. I learned the art of “schmoozing” as a networking tool. Then, email was introduced at UCLA (Yes, I’m that old.) and it was so much easier to keep in contact with people; maintaining a network. Today, with all of the tools mentioned in this weeks readings and videos, there is a bewildering number of ways to interact and share information. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. give us great tools for building and maintaining networks for our continued learning, but I think that we need to be careful and utilize these sources wisely.

With the exception of our POT class, I feel that I have practiced what Dean Shareski called “educational voyeurism”. This week has inspired me to work to be more “active” rather that “passive”. Through this class, I have a network and resources for online teaching and the discussion of pedagogical issues. As a historian, I see that need to work on that area of my PLN. I’m going to take time to work on establishing ties with community college instructors who teach world history. Historians, any suggestions?

Finally, I also think that we can apply what we have learned about sharing and networking to our classrooms. We can easily create Student Learning Networks in the classroom and encourage them to share information through blogs, social media, etc. While sharing is great, I think that it is our duty to also teach students how to evaluate and judge the usefulness of all of that shared information.