Originally posted: July 14, 2016
The following response is based on: Social Learning, “push” and “pull”, and Building Platforms for Collaborative Learning by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel.
When I was a wee lad, I was able to write with both hands. My teachers told me that was wrong and made me write with my right hand. Do as you are told. Learn whatever they dictate. This is a system of rote learning and obedience. That was my experience. I was that pain in the ass kid that would challenge assumptions and ask “why” with obnoxious frequency. Those times when I could tell that the teacher couldn’t answer me because they either didn’t know, or it was against their programming–I kept it up.
That was when I was young, before they dulled my senses and silenced my inquisitive nature. I gave up from that point on. Now we have this open, social and collaborative environment in which to learn, share and feed our intellectual whims. But yet that stifling old education system still exists in a certain way and continues to struggle to stay alive. Maybe that struggle is just its death throes.
Changing an entrenched system is slow. It can be said that there is a “digital disconnect between children and their schools…what students do with online technologies outside the classroom is not only markedly different from what they do with them in school, but it is also more goal-driven, complex, sophisticated, and engaged.”
These new literacies are just that–new. We are getting to understand how we engage and learn with new tech and social networks. As the traditional structures assimilate these new ways of doing things, our behaviors and ideas about education will change as well. Differences in attitudes regarding our social networked world is described in a paper by Constance Steinkuehler titled Cognition and Literacy in Massively Multiplayer Online Games by Constance A. Steinkuehler. She states that as “older generations gasp and wonder and worry about the furious pace and penetration of online technologies into everyday life, the younger generations just adopt them, adapt them, and move on to the next.” The latter attitude is something that I am trying to emulate myself.
I was finding that I could view the ideas of social learning through the lens of multiplayer online videogames. Instead of the traditional hierarchical top-down approach to education, we can think of how we are incorporating new technologies and literacies as an emergent approach. Like emergent gameplay within a multiplayer online game, our navigation through online spaces is “cognitively demanding, requiring exploration of complex, multi-dimensional problem spaces, empirical model building, the negotiation of meaning and values within the relevant gaming community, and the coordination of people, (virtual) tools and artifacts, and multiple forms of text.” Stheinkuehler states this as an “emergent ‘social realism.’” We are learning to leverage technologies and networked ‘emergent’ culture for education as well as other aspects of our lives.
References
Social Learning, “push” and “pull”, and Building Platforms for Collaborative Learning by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel. https://narrateannotate.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/lk2011ch7.pdf
Cognition and Literacy in Massively Multiplayer Online Games by Constance A. Steinkuehler. http://labweb.education.wisc.edu/curric606/readings/Steinkuehler2005.pdf