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__Summary of Journal Reflections__ **  Upon starting this quarter and learning that the observation assignment to our class would be with an online high school environment, I was not sure what to expect. Prior to this fall I honestly had not even considered the possibility that online learning was even being attempted at any level of K-12 public education. But having gone through the process of finding out what is involved in the efforts to teach through the Internet and understanding the goals and advantages it might present for students in developing their individual skills and knowledge on their own terms and in what seems to be unprecedented involvement with the community made possible through this technology, I have to say that I finish this course excited by the potential of what lies ahead in this new and still evolving paradigm in education. In this age of web and technology oriented social life, the concept actually makes sense and came as no real surprise.

Our initial assignment was with the High Tech High Flex program, a brand new completely online oriented high school environment established this year for San Diego with an initial freshman class starting this fall. The prospect of working with them was intriguing but unfortunately arrangements fell through and our class began working with an alternate program which consisted of two ninth grade classes at the High Tech High Media Arts Campus. This presented a slightly more conventional challenge, but I was looking forward to the experience of interacting with students through a social network interface and acting as a mentor to them. But because this final arrangement took some time to set up, our class spent a lot of time in the first half of the quarter simply observing the setup of the Ning social network for the entire High Tech High school system in San Diego. Therefore this reflection will be divided into two parts, that being the initial strict observation period on Ning and a collection of digital portfolios from students and teachers from High Tech High and then the interaction with the Media Arts students that came on Ning later on.

 My first impression of the Ning was that it was a great tool for connecting all the students in one place and allowing them to communicate. It seemed that every student profile and media link that I clicked on brought up something new and interesting to discover about these schools and the technologically oriented programs these students were a part of. The value of this kind of online forum seemed clear as the students have this space to post their work online, have other students and teachers there to give them feedback and generally seemed a way to make school work more interesting. I realize now that all these themes tie into many of the objectives that educators who are looking to incorporate and draw from Web 2.0, including most prominently for us Will Richardson whose text we read for this course.

 However over time as I became more accustomed to the work I saw and was no longer experiencing the initial thrill of discovery of a new way at looking at students work, I started looking at things with a more critical eye. The quality of work by the students actually varied substantially, the amount of interaction seemed scarce or unhelpful in many cases, and I could tell that the effort to use this Ning as a truly collaborative tool was sometimes there but sometimes not there. Perhaps my expectations of a truly revolutionary enhancement to education that clearly demonstrated that it made a difference to everyone involved was premature, but getting caught up in the potential applications of online tools and finding out about where education and technology could be headed tends to make you want to see results right away, and probably unrealistically so.

Still, the work I did see was quite good in general, especially the videos produced by the multimedia class and the reflections the students made on camera about their own work shows that the everyday projects and experience that many of the students at High Tech High go far beyond the traditional classroom experience when it comes to making use of the technological tools that are readily available today. To some degree it felt like a glimpse into the future of learning which obviously is what the High Tech High curriculum is all about: looking to the future of education and making it happen now. Additional highlights of note were the separate digital portfolio sites that High Tech High students maintain outside of the Ning that really present what students can learn in a project based curriculum rather than a traditional assignment and textbook based one. While there was no online interaction possible on these portfolios, the amount of reflection the students were required to post and share was very instructive towards demonstrating the value of this type of exercise to both the student and their audience.

When our class finally began working interactively with the High Tech High Media Arts group and their Sewer Science Project, the initial brainstorming discussions which our own class went through about water reclamation issues on Ning and the more general water and science discussion that got underway with the students definitely made Ning seem like a more vibrant place where ideas were thrown together by all those participating and a true dialogue could be produced over time between students, mentors and teachers. The advantages of Web 2.0 and the dynamic nature of adding content over time on the web and encouraging social interaction and collaboration was starting to become clearer with these exercises. What was also interesting to note was that the personalities of the students often times shined through with their style of writing, displaying at times positive traits such as enthusiasm and curiosity and yet also negative ones such as lack of effort and indifference.

Once our class finalized our group assignments, I began making efforts to introduce myself and start as much discussion as I could with simple questions about their projects and about their thoughts. I was only able to communicate with two out of the three groups I was assigned to, however, as one of the teams did not set up a separate Ning group to document their research and ideas. Then out of the two groups I actually worked with, one was very responsive, which was the Mercury pollution group, while the last group finally came around to more interaction during the second to last week before the project was due, that being the Ocean Dead Zones group. In general I feel I was successful in finding a good balance between directing the attention of the students to resources I thought would be helpful to them and asking them engaging questions to draw out their thinking and focus on their projects so they could think more in depth about their research and add those elements to their end production displays. A few highlights I found especially rewarding was instructing one of the groups how to display a Google doc publicly using screenshots after they were having trouble with the process, eliciting appreciative comments, and getting one of the students to post a picture of their rough draft of their project so that I could provide them feedback on the visual.

All in all, I feel fortunate that I was able to connect in some way and be of assistance to students who were receptive to the advice I could give them, and this helped me understand the kind of team effort and willingness to collaborate and share that is possible with online learning. While the results may have seemed small in scale, and the connections I made with the students somewhat tenuous, it was a positive experience that I feel is only a beginning movement towards more developed and in depth work ahead in the future between students and mentors online.