With the advancement of technology and todays students being raised with advanced technologies at their fingertips, one has to ask how is the today’s learning ecology changing? What fundamentals practices need to be considered in order to efficiently and effectively positively influence today’s learner?
Thomas and Seely-Brown, in Arc of Life of Learning: A New Culture of Learning state the following about learning:
“It takes place without books, without teachers, and without classrooms, and it requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries. This familiar dynamic, in fact, structures all our contemporary notions of play, games, and imagination.”
This is a very powerful statement as today’s learners are adept at utilizing a plethora of social networking tools for immediate feedback regarding their thoughts and feelings. Questioning has been a technique that young children and students have used forever, by questioning they why’s of something learners are able to research and discover the answers that they seek. Today’s learner is comfortable with ‘google-ing’ any topic that can come to mind, accessing Wikipedia, and watching YouTube videos (for pleasure and education). If we can keep in mind that today’s learner excels at finding information quickly and easily and we can keep that discovery in an informative and fun environment than we can reach our students on a level that has not fully been explored.
In my opinion, and based upon the readings by Thomas and Seely-Brown and Siemens today’s learning ecology is:
- Large, networked, and accessible
- Allows for discovery through questioning and interaction
- Informal, in that an instructor does not necessarily need to be interacting with the student for learning to occur
- Adaptable for the life-long learner
- Shaped and changed with the advancement of technology
Essentially, I feel that it is imperative that instructors build the foundational skills necessary to be a life-long learner. With information available easily and immediately, students do no need to be bogged down with the memorization of facts. . .they need to be able to retrieve this information and make the connections to other areas of study and apply that knowledge to their daily lives in a meaningful way.
Creating an environment that relies on and focuses on the use of technology is bound to be met with challenges. How do we keep up the skills and knowledge of our instructors with regards to new technologies? How do we ensure the technologies we are utilizing are easily available to our students? Furthermore, how do we decide which technologies are the best technologies to bring into our schools? The most challenging aspect of technology learning will be providing our learning environments with the latest technologies in a safe and meaningful environment. Investing in the constant upgrades and trainings will be expensive and we must figure out a way in which to evaluate the effectiveness of technology on our students learning.