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The Future of Online Learning and the Big Shift #3: Many, Many Teachers and 24/7 Learning

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On Big Shift #3: Many, many teachers and 24/7 Learning With the amount of web content increasing at an exponential rate, whole new spheres of knowledge are correspondingly available for classroom use by teachers and their students. Even in such a short period of five years, technology has altered the classroom instruction. Trips to the library for research are replaced with workshops on how to conduct online research. With internet access, the classroom community extends beyond the four solid walls of the classroom and into the global community. In Will Richardson’s book __Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms__, he outlines ten large shifts in the way technology is changing the way teachers approach the classroom including number three on the list entitled “Many, Many Teachers and 24/7 Learning”. In considering the ways I use the internet and my experience with mentoring HTH students online I have decided this to be a particularly significant shift for the way it forever alters the way information is altered, acquired, organized and communicated using the internet.

Appropriately named, the World Wide Web is making its global way into classrooms and establishing new connections between people, classrooms, ideas and educators at an accessible and faster rate than ever before. A variable number of “teachers” for students to learn from are available for almost any subject and in various new mediums. While teachers are officially certified in the formal realm of academic teaching, there is a much larger variety of “teachers” in the online world. The border between opinion and expert knowledge is more difficult to discern. A common example of “many teachers” is found in the online community of Yahoo! Answers. Signing up is free and open to anyone with a yahoo account. After signing up, users may then freely post or answer any other questions supplied by other Yahoo! users. Similar to teaching, an incentive is awarded to the person with best answer as decided by the user posting the question. In this community, learning can occur at the individual level of the person asking the question, in addition to the larger community which can view all of the responses from the other users. A community may then work to credit or debunk information present on the internet. Without limiting who can become a user, a variety of backgrounds, opinions, expertise and experience are found in the Yahoo! Answers community. Of course, this quality has both its advantages and disadvantages. The validity of users’ answers and sources must be looked at with a critical eye as the answers are available for public view. Nonetheless, Yahoo! Answers builds off an important concept that the knowledge of the group is often much greater than the knowledge of a single individual.

Video is another immensely popular medium thanks to the culturally iconic advent of YouTube. YouTube videos are reportedly uploaded at a rate of 20 hours per minute or statistically equivalent to the release of 86,000 new movie releases a week by the entertainment industry! Most colleges, including UCSD have their own YouTube channels. While there is an Education channel category on YouTube, a variety of other channels may additionally used for educational purposes. How-Tos and YouTube Gurus teach a variety of information from how to apply makeup, to public speaking, to using software programs. A variety of both tangible knowledge you can show to others, and more fact based knowledge are abound on YouTube. While copyright is debatable for many of the videos, they enable a very large number of accessible media clips to assist in education. As an open public site, YouTube communicates and spreads information very quickly—exampled by various YouTube “phenomenons”. Communicating with the teachers is easy to do through e-mail or leaving comments and truly allow for twenty-four-seven learning.

Weblogs, blogs as they are commonly known, provide a grand opportunity for more subject specific insight from folks invested or interested in various field. The general focuses of many professional blogs provide an accessible source of expertise without going through the difficulties of contacting an expert. User input and feedback is often not monopolized by the blog’s producer as scrolling through comment pages often confirm. Established blogs commonly attract a set of followers who are also invested in the field and may even add their own input and depth to the conversation. Thus the internet allows for a wider distribution of knowledge from teacher to student in addition to teacher to teacher exchanges. Learning is not only full circle around the clock, but also full circle between educators who are circulating the information. Indeed many, many teachers in turn opens up a role reversal as many, many students and the opportunities to learn from peers or colleagues.

The conversation of web technologies would not be complete without mentioning the assistance provided by Google. A series of academic resources, such as Google Scholar, widely conglomerate information from academia for the easy disposal of its students. Google has demonstrated the very important notion of convergence with online learning. Consolidating information has largely altered the way group projects work with one another as through Google Docs. While resources provided by Google may provide safer sources of quality academic information, many sites do not and present a serious concern for educators. The massive amount of unregulated internet content is impossible to monitor by teachers. A larger problem may arise in understanding how information is accessed, filtered and digested by curious students. Particularly for college, where most of the learning or study time is expected to occur outside of the lecture hall, the ability to consult online teaching resources is particularly relevant. 24/7 hour learning is furthermore enabled through instant messaging. One of my introductory chemistry professors even had a screen name to provide another level of online support. Multimedia integrations into instant messaging such as those found by Skype encourage the growth of global online communities. Group chats with celebrities or other famous figures have allowed the unprecedented spread of information.

The e-mentoring project with the students of High Tech High provide a transparent example of the way online learning is able to open up new horizons for students. The mentors were able to provide an additional level of support and resources for the students. We were able to research more detailed sources for information and do work that would be realistically difficult for one teacher to perform. My irregular sleep schedule particularly benefits from the freedom granted by online learning. In class writing assignments, have little relevancy in the immediacy granted by online communities. After browsing the content, I was able to post my findings sporadically as I found them, without waiting for class to begin. Furthermore, the content was available to the students only seconds after my post. Concerns over online learning making the classroom experience less personal are countered by the special attention online learning permits. The internet allows an unmatched accessible medium of information flow for twenty four hour learning. I was able to utilize a variety of the tools I mentioned above as a result of the online environment knowingly available to the students. Social networking seemingly becomes informational networking. The newness of the technology leaves it largely unexplored and open to creative manipulation.

If the current stage of information continues as it the rate it is being produced, this big shift will undoubtedly continue to expand and impact the way classrooms utilize technologies. Accessing computers and internet access is an additional obstacle in seeing such a big shift occur on the global scale. Many countries struggling to pay a daily living wage will likely have trouble in acquiring the luxury of computers and internet. The divide between the rich and poor will soon have real life consequences when it comes to the computer literacy. The third big shift I mention is only one of ten provided under Will Richardson’s list of big shifts and surely operates in tandem with to the other shifts. Ubiquity and convenience of information is balanced with the difficulty of discerning quality information. The excess of available information presents another challenge for students looking for dependent and valid sources. The line between the expert and the everyday opinion is less transparent. While the possibility of being more disconnected in such a newly connected age may be argued, the above examples show the multiple learning resources available thanks to the internet. A greater sense of worldwide community, camaraderie and globalization is achieved in the medium of the internet. The information age is already upon us and growing by the second you finish this sentence.

Photo credit: Pensiero (2008, Aug 30). Thursday. 12.10.2009. Pensiero's photostream. Retrieved December 10, 2009 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/pensiero/229071550/sizes/o/