Week 6 Questions from Weekly Readings

Kajder 2004

"We’re only just getting started and are at a place where questions far outweigh answers. Emily’s list is long and reflective of our early stage: 'How often will my students blog? How am I going to assess my students’ blogs? What will the rubric look like?'"

How relevent are the above questions to teaching in terms of being new questions? For example, how many teachers say “ how often will my students pick up a pen and paper, or how often will my students type?

"How am I going to assess my students blogs?" Why is this different than pen and paper journaling, and couldn’t the rubric look the same as traditional forms of learning if you considered content over quantity?

Nardi 2004

"Why would so many people post their diaries—perhaps the most intimate form of personal musing—on the most public communication medium in human history, the Internet?"

Would more people use Blogs for knowledge or filters, if they were introduced as such in learning exercises – i.e. teachers are using them as diaries, therefore, they are seen as such.

Many people assume that technology is making the world a more impersonal place – given the above quote from Nardi (2004), how true is the statement, and can a case be made that technology (blogging) actually increases social interaction?

Opinion: Do bloggers who look to their postings for advice consider the advice from known bloggers or strangers to be more sound and credible?

"While bloggers do not always judge their audiences correctly, and may inadvertently write inappropriate or injurious posts, consciousness of audience is central to the blogging experience."

Toner (2004)

If teachers are using blogs as pseudo support groups and seeking advice from one another, is privacy an issue (administration liability, parent or student confidentiality, etc.) ?

Packer (2004)

"A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women).”

Nardi mentions that bloggers are conscious of their audiences. Given the above statement by Packer (2004), is this contradictory, where is the distinction between readers and posters and “everyone else”? Or are readers who do not post, the “everyone else”?

Also, is it the instanteous nature of blogging that creates the appeal in political postings that Packer talks about, or is it the sniping comments that are often viewed as satire?

Week 5: Reading Questions re: collaboration

Week 5 Questions: Collaboration and Cooperation

1. Question: Is collaboration a totally different concept than cooperation (as in Curtis), or is cooperation an embedded social component of collaboration (as proposed by Soller et al.)? Also, how does Johnson & Johnson’s definition of cooperation “fit” with the other two articles?


2. In the research cited in Curtis (2001) email was used more extensively than discussion boards. Since 2001, text-messaging has become more widely used.

Question: can text messging be considered a hybrid between e-mail and discussion board activity, because of the ability to give near-synchronous response times, or is it a completely new medium of communication? If it is a hybrid, will it create a “quick response” discussion board type of communication, and therefore change the results of the tests from those researched in Curtis (2001)?

Week 4 Questions Re: Resnick/Young/SalomonPerkins readings

In Resnick, the role of schooling in economic preparation is discussed:

“Some critics of current practices hold that no formal training in the art and science of pedagogy is required, that everything necessary can be learned through on-thejob teaching practice by an individual with deep knowledge of the subject matter to be taught (emphasis added)”

QUESTION: Where might that deep knowledge be obtained, if not in the schools?”

I reflected on this question, and although my educational paradigm is through foundational learning in the schools, I was intrigued by a conversation with a colleague from India regarding Caste systems, formal and informal learning, and advancement.

The gist of the conversatlion was that people are born into one station in life – the doctors, the laborers, the lawyers, etc. When I asked about possiblities, I was told that for the most part, the doctors train the doctors, and all learning in that field is acquired on-the-job from others in the caste/field. To “break in” to medical work that required being a doctor, there needs to be someone in the caste/field who will befriend you and take you under their wing, and once they have acquired that stature, their families would follow, and therefore the next generation would belong to a different station in life.*

It was stated that this is not easy to do, because it is difficult to find someone willing to invest time in the lifelong learning process that would be required to obtain proficiency to the level of the mentor being willing to accept and represent you to the community as a competent professional in that field, therefore, most people stay put, where they are.

I likened this explanation to the early 20th century European immigrants who set up shoss and businesses on America’s East Coast and in Midwestern towns. The businesses became the backbone of the families, and the children were trained in the families’ livelihoods. Formal schooling came about at a later date.

So my initial question of “where would the subject matter expertise come from” goes full-circle to “the apprenticeship model”. So I think I might agree --- more thought needed.

*(This is definitely an oversimplification of a very complex system, but for sake of our question and answer session on India, my colleague agreed that my understanding was “a good enough overview of the Caste system for the level of depth in our conversation.”

Question 2:
In Young’s article on ecological learning and contexts, it was stated:

“an ecological presumption is that a sensitive exploring agent can pick up the affordance of an environment directly through exploration, discovery, and differentiation (Gibson & Spelk, 1983). So the learning environment and associated tool, activities, and instruction that are designed for instruction should serve to highlight important distinctions and focus the students’ attention on previously unnoticed uses for things in the world.”

Where does this leave us in regards to replicational studies? If nothing new is learned in a replicated experiment, does this mean that nothing has been learned? I would like to think, instead, that support of existing information can also be considered new learning.