About 7 slides into his web presentation on the Art of Blogging, George Siemens says that
Learning is not simply a content consumption process. Learning is also a content creation process. This can’t happen if the flow of knowledge is one way.
As long as we don't limit education to the act of filling the student with information or culture, we should have no trouble agreeing with George. If we assume that, in coming to understand what culture gives them, every student and every generation must recreate that culture in their own understanding, then we can usefully and practically see all learning as creating content for oneself.
If we grant that much, then our lovely web tools can help foreground the creating and recreating process and share its products. Posted in public, what we learn can be used as well as challenged by others, thus enriching the process that renews them. Later, speaking of blogs and RSS on slide 14, George says that
Institutions can share knowledge via simple, social tools.
We can use those tools to help make two-way learning the norm rather than the exception. A few days ago I tried to redefine active learning as making something for others to use, and here George Siemens works some of the same territory, I think.
Educators sometimes hear students ask, "What can a person really use this knowledge for?" Instead of being defensive about this question, we can take it seriously as a question to work out together. Honor the question and go ahead and make something useful together. As often as possible, post the results where others can find and use as well.
Thanks for the inspirational post -- it's NOT just consumption. Forgive the selfish comment, but that's something I think I was trying to articulate in my own blog, recently, about the differences between actively taking notes and copying them off the board. Anyway, great post about the power of blogs, too, to make learning ACTIVE.
-- Mike Arnzen, Pedablogue: http://blogs.setonhill.edu/MikeArnzen/
Mike, your May 10 post on note-taking makes me think that we can / should look at any classroom practice and figure out whether it encourages passivity or rewards active shaping and reshaping of content.
Something as simple as the questions that guide a class discussion -- whose job is it to come up with those questions? Every day that we come into class and shape the class around our own questions reinforces the passivity so common in American classrooms; every day that we ask students to help frame the questions that will guide our discussion, the more skill they gain at the task.
Writing teachers face the passive/active split all the time, for example when we take most of the responsibility for providing most of the feedback on papers or share that responsibility with the students. When students share the work of responding to classmates, they learn how to be more skillful and active readers of their own drafts, and both their reading and their writing improve.
Thanks for joining in here, Mike -- I've added you to my Bloglines collection and look forward to reading more of your work.