EDU 255 Week 4 Focus

Week 4 Assignment:  Steve Hargadon; Classroom 2.0

Focus in important to having a good conversation. An unfocused network doesn't offer a good reason to come back. Future of Education faces this as a very real challenge, and I'm hopeful that the interview series will provide some focus since the topic is so big. A network doesn't need to be 17,000 people. It can be a great place for 25 or 50 if there is a good conversation taking place.

I think that Steve Hargadon brought up many good points, but felt that focus was probably the most important aspect.  It seems that in these weeks of exploring new technology, there are many distractions and sometimes so much information that it distracts from the main idea.  It is easy to start “wandering” through and spending more time than is needed by being distracted from the original purpose.  Creating a place for students to learn involves focusing on a topic in particular and inviting many points of view on the same subject.  One of the concerns I have had while exploring is the distracting nature of this “connected” world where you are one click away from a new idea and yet another new idea without depth.

I think that one of the benefits of a classroom discussion is that many points of view are expressed or presented in a small time frame which gives members of the group a lot of information about one topic so they can function at a higher cognitive level – analyze, compare and contrast, synthesize.   Many of the articles we have read refer to the classroom as a lecture – which is really not the model in many instances – many discussions are taking place that provide an opportunity for students to focus on a concept in depth. 

The question is how to recreate that in a virtual environment.  Discussion boards, comments on blogs, shared creations on wikis all have a “time lag” for that conversation.  Any discussion board I have assigned and participated in requires an initial post and a response –but how many students really read the entire conversation?  How do we get that depth of analysis by reading other posts when it takes so much less time to have a conversation or discussion?  These are some of the items I struggle with in the online environment – how do we re-create that problem solving conversation when a group is working together on a challenging task – those AHA! Moments that happen when someone else is showing you or the AHA moment you have when you are trying to explain the concept to someone else.  In math – it is with words, symbols, and diagrams that we communicate.