education
What happens when you wear your researcher-hat while watching YouTube videos
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | e-learning, education, learning, reflection | No Comments
Once in a while it happens that I find some animation on the web that’s actually relevant to my work. Yes, it does happen - rarely. Well, this is one of those instances and this little cartoon rings many bells and raises many questions about children and computers.I hope you’ve got enough steam to read my thoughts once you’ve watched it.
This little movie raises a number of interesting questions. Firstly, how much of a ‘buddy’ does a laptop become? Here it’s given a human form and a very real presence. While this is obviously a work of fiction it’s maybe not so far off reality where we do become somewhat emotionally attached to our gadgets. (Anybody feels uncomfortable to leave home without the laptop? (I do) Anybody a bit sad to turn off your old phone for the last time having replaced it with a new one? (I did)) Even in it’s boxy state it’s a ‘buddy’. Imagine the attachment once we’ve populated the machine with an ‘intelligent agent’ - this work is being done now and although it might take a few years yet, it’s certainly not a fantasy. (And I’m talking about something more complex and less irritating than the paperclip!)
That raises another question: if the computer is a ‘buddy’, to what extent can it be seen as Vygotsky’s ‘more knowledgeable peer’ rather than just a tool for operating on information? Can ‘loving your computer’ lead to learning? Currently, I’d say it’s unlikely. I love my computer. Even though I don’t imbue it with human qualities (at least not enough to talk to in hushed tones in the library), I definitely and perhaps excessively love my computer. Still, ‘I operate it’ rather than ‘we operate together’. It is to me still a machine which provides me a window upon content created by other humans - a window which I choose to point in various directions.
But this line is shifting: take Stumbleupon. How do you think I found this animation? I didn’t search for it. A community of ‘taggers’ and ’stumblers’ enabled by the internet thew the video my way when I pressed that faithful (and oh so time consuming) Stumble button. Having watched the video it made me wonder, reflect and write this blog post. Now, how is that not a ‘more knowledgeable peer’?
The computer is also presented in the cartoon as an extender of the child’s capabilities - in the sense of ‘distributed cognition‘. In that sense it’s a tool, just as a piece of paper where you can write a memo to yourself - it remembers and displays.
Finally I put myself in the shoes of the principal. Is it right to take the computer away from the kid? Or is there some way to reconcile World of Warcraft with maths? I believe there must be and I don’t think prohibition is the way. Yesterday we talked to some parents at a PTA meeting, some of whom had taken quite a radican stance on regulating computers. At the same time these very parents were aware that this tactic might backfire and cause their children to be obsessed with the machines. Surely the balance must lay elsewhere than in severe restriction of access to computers, but rather in negotiating a reasonable position that the child can agree with and in support of the development of the child’s capabilities to regulate their own use.
There you have it. - As spoken by someone without kids.
Working by the bell
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 | education, reflection, school life | No Comments
After a long time without posting, I’m back. I apologise for the long break. I’ve just not had the inspiration to put my thoughts down - admittedly there have been few worthy thoughts lately.
But here’s a nice little parody on teacher life, which although it is hilariously exaggerated, rings some bells (sorry for the bad pun - you’ll see when you watch the video) with what I’ve seen of teacher life so far. Teachers seem to be ruled by the bell. They live by it’s merciless calling and have to drop whatever they are doing when it bids them to. In some schools bells even sound more like alarms than the good old school bell, and make you want to grab your nearest and dearest (computer) and run for your life.
Although the bell can sometimes be a welcome sound to us - both teachers and students - in many circumstances the teacher has to fight against it’s shrill power: raising his voice to be heard while struggling to get students to sit still for an extra minute, rushing through the assignment of homework, hastily thanking the students for their work in the lesson. Then the students are released and joyfully (or less so) skip towards next heavily regulated slice of time. The teacher also has to slip in to the next ‘box’ hastily erasing from his mind what just happened in the former lesson and prepare for what awaits in the next. Are teachers really a kind of computers that can perform equally well no matter how many times a day they have to ‘reboot’? I don’t think so. This instant save-and-load mode of school is not conductive to reflection in teachers OR students! So what do the good teachers do? They run faster. Not an enviable position to be in from where I sit!
And here’s the bit of entertainent that sparked this thought.