Jennifer+Merryman-The+Big+Shift

**__THE BIG SHIFT__**

One of the ideas presented in the __Big Shift__ by Will Richardson is how information is being shared and generated over the web in a collaborative fashion. The web is designed in large part like a wiki, where information is gathered and collected by a whole host of people. My 4th grader came home with a project for school one day with the instruction of finding at least one online resource. The teacher warned her students not to go to Wikipedia as it can be edited by // anyone // and therefore discredited. I chuckled to myself, musing over the many times I have often started my research on Wikipedia in order to get a grasp on something or someone that I am researching. However, I think the attitudes and fears contained in the teacher's admonition, reflect the larger dialogue that exists between the traditional educational system and what is possible in education in an online forum.

What is possible in online education is that the ultimate authority in education is no longer the teacher, but knowledge. Knowledge guides the discussion, and the output of information is coming from multiple sources with multiple points-of-view. I think this is fabulous because it cuts into the dogma of tradition where education is concerned. As it stands now, education is ranked a lot like the military in that your commanding officer is the Professor or the person with Ph.D in front of their name. They then become thrice removed by the authority of their degree. I would liken the students to an enlisted man or a private the lowest ranking soldier. The idea in academia is that this wall of separation is supposed to provide a hood of safety to the professor. Safe from what is my question? Safe from being wrong, safe from being questioned or addressed like a human being? It's certainly a dogma that in many ways allows professors to exploit their own personal point-of-view and assert their thinking as the ultimate model before their students. Isn't the beauty of education that we are all different, the role of the teacher is to facilitate a learning environment, not act like the gateway of thought and acceptable behavior.

One of my experiences in student teaching this quarter involved a young woman who like me was student teaching. She was complaining about a young teenage boy who had described something about her project or lesson as being “gay”. She immediately asked the boy to leave the class and scolded him for using a term that was derogatory to a community of people that defined themselves politically by their sexual orientation. and this term. While this word was a "trigger" word for her because of her own political view points, she projected a whole history of political activism onto this teenage kid, who did not mean anything derogatory about the gay community, but was merely using a word that has had several meanings all different depending on what generation you lived through, and currently is still used as an adjective in the English Language. The point is the role of the teacher is not to educate students based on their political standards and points-of-view, the role of the teacher is to facilitate learning. By this student teacher kicking this young kid out the class, not only did she not succeed in her role as the teacher, she attempted to falsely label and condemn a child who was operating from his frame of reference, not hers.

Another experience I had while teaching was at the school itself. I attended Saturday school to work on a project with one of my students. Saturday school is a wonderful opportunity to teach. However, that is the last thing happening at Saturday School. The teacher is there to make sure the students sit at their desks in complete silence for 4 hours. She does not give them anything to do, only sits at her desk making sure they don't talk to each other and are completely silent and still. This was unbelievable to me, as it resembled a prison like structure not an educational structure. Education and learning is fun! It's dynamic and exciting and engaging. It offers unlimited opportunities to connect with the world around you and these high school students who are at a “failing” school are not getting the support or education they need while in school. No wonder so many kids wind up dropping out. If I had to be subjected to these controlling, castrating females that don't even put together interesting lesson plans, I wouldn't want to come to school either. Even when the kids are at school, it's a waste of their time, they are not learning anything and they are not getting the skills they need to go onto higher education.

I found this really infuriating and frustrating and it greatly depressed me to see how education is not offered equally to everyone. These children are not being invested in they are being controlled. These kids have all the potential in the world to achieve, but it's often the system and tradition of education that stands in their way. I think online learning is a way around all the pomp of titles and tradition. Teachers who are truly brilliant don't need a title in front of their name. They earn the respect of their students and colleagues based on their conduct and their knowledge, not on their title. Online learning is collaborative and interactive and diminishes the traditional role of the teacher being the final authority, allowing for a young intellect to grow and be developed outside of a traditional system.

Online learning forces the teacher to be a collaborator, it forces the teacher to create the educational structure and it allows everyone else to contribute without the personal barriers/prejudices that might otherwise get in the way. The other shift Richardson mentions is know "where" learning. This takes me back to Wikipedia and my daughter's teacher. My daughter's teacher admonished her students only to go on reputable sites. The reality of navigating the web is one is deciphering what is a "good" site based on the integrity and quality of the information contained therein. The researcher becomes the filter, editing content as it is viewed, learning how to sift through information to find the gems. Not only does the web change the way we process information, it also changes the way we write about and contribute to information that we are gathering. This is another shift Richardson mentions, that we are learning to write not just with letters, but in conversation, video and audio. In a sense the full spectrum of the human context is represented in the web. The web offers a unique opportunity to be viewed in more than one dimension, the inside world blogging with the world out-loud.

I had a chance to visit with High Tech High School Students last night who greatly restored my faith in public education. This school has an online, multi-media focus and not only are the teachers there facilitating incredibly diverse and exciting learning environments, the students are incredibly connected with the work and engaged by their projects and also with one another. The model of this high school is very reflective of online learning, it is collaborative, it is conversational it is musical and exciting. It is everything education should be and I was very impressed at how the students were being educated and how very complex math and physics concepts were being understand through the student's point-of-view with creative options. Math and Science suddenly seemed so much more interesting to me than I had ever given it credit for. In closing the beauty of online education is it breaks free from the prison model I spoke of earlier and sets the whole world at your fingertips with education and knowledge being the focal point.

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