Chapter 9

Well, I've come to the end of Richardson. I felt like, while I at times didn't care for his overly positive rhetoric and the-future-can-do-no-wrong outlook, his finish to the book is a rousing call-to-arms. I have a tendency lament by-gone times, when days and lives in general were slower. And I'm only 29. Yet I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he has to say in chapter 9. For instance, when he compares the wide world of business we're preparing our students for, where they "will be asked to work with others from around the globe collaboratively to create content for diverse and wide-ranging audiences," and the out-dated mode of education we still find in many classrooms, which "asks students to work independently for a very narrow audience" (p. 130). I had to nod my head.

Indeed, I liked the idea of driving home to students the notion that their work in class is by no means only meant for the teacher and their classmates. Rather, the work students do in class today can be literally "meant for the world" (p. 135). This notion may totally affect the way a student approaches school work, knowing that not only the teacher, but the whole world will be observing what he or she has to put out. Of course, this idea may be a little daunting at first, but with the teacher as a guide who believes in each student, the child should grow in confidence and be motivated to do their best work.

On the other hand, when Richardson speaks of the difference between the past - when textbooks were edited professionally and were therefore reasonably trustworthy - and today when so much of the information we're consuming is either slanting heavily from bias or is simply bad data, I realize technology has a long way to go before I will ever sign my students over completely to a medium as far-reaching and unreliable as the World Wide Web. At the pace it is growing, I think there is potential for vast improvement in a short amount of time, but first there has to a significant public call for this type of regulation. Until then, it is upon the shoulders of teachers to bear the brunt of such serious discernment. This, too, is just a little daunting.

Chapter 6 - social networking.

I'm thankful Richardson didn't have the gall to try and work in sites like Facebook and MySpace into this chapter. Those sites, to me, are strictly social, and do nothing to educate us but increase our appetite and tolerance for voyeurism. 

I've been spending the better part of the day learning to use this site diigo. It's pretty fascinating. I love how you can annotate and highlight passages of an article you're reading. In fact, I was thinking just the other day how wonderful it would be if there were a way to comment on any page you want with your thoughts. Often I read long articles on a website and afterward can't find a quote I want to use, or even the website again. Diigo seems to greatly help in this arena. It's a little confusing to look at. A little too bland, and jumbled feeling. Perhaps that will improve as it moves out of BETA.

I think a site like this could be extremely useful in a school context. We could probably use it to share our thoughts on a particular piece on a website, and students could then draw from their initial annotated thoughts to expand in a writing journal. Or students could be assigned an article to read for homework, with annotated questions to respond to in writing as they read at their leisure at home. 

I feel like there are a lot of possibilities I'm not picking up on. But as of yet I'm still only learning the site, and I'm sure more ideas will come the better I understand it. 

Podcasting

As often as I get down on the whole fast-paced wave of contemporary technology, I believe podcasts to be one of the best things to come out of it all. I used to think of podcasts as something only professionals would do. That alone was pretty great, I thought. All this free in-depth material on most any subject that might interest you was really a wonderful expression of the persistence of generosity, even among corporations, I thought.

But Richardson and this course have helped me to see that podcasting is for amateurs as much (if not more) as it is for professionals. There seems to be a lot of fertile, uncharted ground to be explored and harnessed for the educational field. Whether it's kids creating their own realm of information, in which "students [teach] other students what they've learned" (Richardson 114), or a teacher providing a podcast of each day's activities and assignments for students to reference at home (as suggested, I think, by someone in our class), I think all that is necessary is a little time and commitment to learning & teaching the simple process of podcasting. 

I'm trying to think of ways I could use this technology in the high school English class. I suspect the possibilities are myriad... 

Chapter 4: Wikis for all

I often feel I somehow missed the boat when it comes to wikis. All the sudden there existed this massive and somewhat specious site known as Wikipedia. College kids dug it and college professors hated it. I, being the good student I was, stuck with the professional opinion. Now, however, I read Richardson saying that Wikipedia and wikis in general have arrived, unencumbered by the former doubtful claims of professionals: "'Four out of five [experts] agreed their relevant Wikipedia entries are accurate, informative, comprehensive and a great resource for students'" (p. 58). I suppose you can't argue with the statistics. Indeed, I have come around to using Wikipedia as a resource for knowledge; my Safari and Firefox browsers come ready-made with a Wikipedia link in the bookmark bar; it seems everyone has come around. And yet there still persists that nagging doubt, that maybe Wikipedia isn't all it's cracked up to be. For instance, for a website that's touted to be the sum of human knowledge (Richardson p. 55), I have personally experienced how selective that knowledge happens to be. When my bandmates noticed a few years back that one of our labelmates had a Wikipedia page assigned to them, we thought to ourselves, "Why not us?" So we gathered the most pertinent information we could regarding ourselves and created a page based around the band. But what a storm of controversy it brewed! From the get-go it was disputed by Wikipedia's editors as having "nothing ... to justify inclusion." It's not that the editors thought we were just making it up. It's that they thought it wasn't important enough to include in the "sum of human knowledge." 

I suppose the editors were just trying to keep Wikipedia "respectable." If every kid in a crappy garage band had a mind to, he could create a wikipedia page dedicated to an endeavor that lasted perhaps six months and garnered no more fans than their girlfriends... Perhaps that's what I feel is the ultimate flaw in the justification for Wikipedia: you can't claim something to be the sum of human knowledge while simultaneously excluding human knowledge. The reason the editors of Wikipedia tried to exclude our page (we ultimately won the day) was that they were in the market for significant human knowledge, i.e. knowledge that many people have and care about. But what resources besides the Internet were the editors using to verify the validity that we were an established and semi-important artistic force? Isn't there still the possibility of important things happening completely outside the scope of the Internet? If so, what envoys do they commission to gather this information? 

My point here is not that Wikipedia is not reliable or beneficial for students. Rather, it's that it cannot and should not be considered a final authority. While it is true perhaps that textbook publishers are worried about the pervasiveness of Wikipedia (Richardson p. 62), but I suspect there are professionals out there other than greedy publishers who are worried as well. Wikipedia cannot be the final authority because as wonderful as it is that just anyone can create and contribute to "creating truth" (Richardson p. 57) on a page, those random individuals are not necessarily professionals in the field getting paid to be thorough. Rather, they are kids, teenagers, adults, many developing a field in which they are not competent to be considered a final authority. They are helpers, to be sure, and Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for anyone looking for a quick answer, but God help us if it becomes the definition of research.