TLC Members’ Work Webby Nominated

Youth Venture’s social change website, which Members of The Learning Collective helped created, is nominated for a Webby.  Adam Aberman, along with Lior Ipp (former TLC Member), created the original specifications for the website, developed by Interfuel, up for a 2011 Webby in the Youth category.  Adam Aberman and Lior Ipp did this work in 2009 while employed by Ashoka’s Youth Venture.

Related articles

• The 2011 Webby Awards (viralblog.com)

Connectivism And Modern Literacy

In the 20th century literacy was simply the “ability to read and write”. The subset of skills necessary to be called literate has changed greatly and the definition has expanded to encompass the, ” …ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) With the advent of the internet and social media students have been challenged to add new resources to their tool set to be prepared to be productive citizens in the information age. Modern literacy in the information age calls for lifetime learners with a set of skills that are constantly evolving and is permeated by dynamic, participatory media (social), and web-based tools that aid collaboration and information sharing.

In the book “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,” Howard Rheingold wrote: “If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Participatory media include (but aren’t limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs.”

Modern youth multi-task more often, multi-task more effectively and have shorter attention spans than any up to this point in history. This student demands the use of rich multimedia learning environments and, project-based instruction that engages the student and challenges him to use dynamic web-based tools and participatory media. Terms like “Connectivism” and “Networked Learning” are now being used to describe the new processes that are emerging. Here is a excellent video that explains these new paradigms and what they mean for the 21st century classroom.

This is a key reason teaching must change to keep up with the new paradigms called for in the information age. The lecture-based educational model is obsolete and role of the teacher has morphed from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide by a students side”.

Related articles

• Let kids ‘Tweet’ in class, says expert (cbc.ca)
• The presence of a teacher (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Hunger to learn (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Re:Reinventing Project Based Learning (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• The Future Is Now — 21st Century Teaching And Learning (slideshare.net)
• Why we need another great education debate (guardian.co.uk)
• Techno Literacy (slideshare.net)
• Literacy -> Digital Flow: moving beyond Traditional Literacy. (dougbelshaw.com)
• Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom: Media Literate 6-year-olds (wired.com)

Education and Google Buzz…A Match?

It seems, Google has thrown down the gauntlet…Google Buzz is a incredibly powerful attempt to take a piece of Facebook’s market share in social networking. Google Buzz is powerful because if you have a Gmail account you are already a member. Within minutes of logging in to my Gmail account I had followers and I was following a number of people. This is how “friending” and “following” on Google Buzz works. Google has filtered users’ Gmail inboxes and Google Talk IM contacts and used algorithms to determine the users that they communicate with most frequently. Users can then share Buzz posts with the world (and Google search), or they can share privately through their existing Gmail groups or custom-made groups in Buzz. Here are a few a videos that explain the tool in more detail:

When I logged in for the first time with buzz activated, I could not believe my father was instantly among the people I was following. I liked that, no more sending him links… he is not a “first adopter” like me, and if Google can get him to interact with the social stream I am impressed. I’m not sure liked the asymmetric follower/friend model, though, because there were a few people that appeared on my list that I did not want knowing my business… or my whereabouts, so this feature made me a bit uncomfortable.

Why Use e-Learning?

Collectively we’ve spent many years testing and improving e-learning ventures.  By “e-learning” we mean any training or learning that happens on desktops and mobile devices thru a variety of mediums including social networks, distance learning courses and learning games.