The first item I want to reflect upon this week is the video How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World by Clay Shirky. This video quickly caught my interest because he was taking about the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. I lived in New York in 2002 and was able to see this crazy parade. Anyway, I thought that Clay made a great point of how Flicker's Tag function makes collaboration much more easier and allows anyone the ability to share there pictures and not just photographers. In my own life, I use Facebook often and have used the Tag function for photos of people I have taken. It really does eliminate the need for an institution. You don't need one person finding pictures and publishing them, or a hierarchy of people doing this, it is done by the individuals and the collaboration is done for itself. This truly saves time and headaches! Tagging does replace planning with coordination. Makes life easier.
The other video I watched this week was How Cognitive Surplus will Change the World by Clay Shirky. After watching this video, the events that have been occurring in North Africa and the Middle East came straight to mind. It seems that all of the unrest that has been happening the second half of 2010 and the first half of this year has been due to "Cognitive Surplus". Those countries have come to a point in their history where they have the technology to connect people together and the push forward their yearning for freedom. It appears that much of what Clay was saying will continue to take shape in that part of the world until the people of these countries are free.
The next two things I want to talk about are the topics we discussed in class this past week, Cooperative Learning and Reinforcing Effort. I think Cooperative Learning is so crucial for our students. They will need to know how to do this all of their life. I often see that students don't like doing this much because of personality conflicts. We are lucky today to have different technologies that can help students learn cooperatively and work out personality issues they may have with others. Tools suck as Google Docs and Webspiration can help students gather what they have learned and do so in a manner that is beneficial to them academically and socially. Even making a movie about the subjects they are working on can help them in these areas as well. As for Reinforcing Effort, there are just a ton of tools we can use as teachers to let the students know we notice the effort they are putting forth. Whether it is a certificate made online and emailed to a parent, a quick email home, or a text message to the student telling them they did a great job. All of these things can have a huge effect on how the student feels about their work and have an effect on how much effort they put into future assignments.
I agree with you 100% about kids not always wanting to work together because of personalities. However, it is really important for them to learn how to work with people they do not always get along with as well as get the learning opportunity from working with someone else. Sometimes I would like to tell kids... you have to learn how to work with people you do not like, it will always be a part of your life and future. :) However, as a teacher of 5th and 6th grade, I am not sure they understand yet.
ReplyDeleteBill---
ReplyDeleteI too liked the way that Mr. Shirky pointed out how collaboration made an institution (in this case) unnecessary. I also agree with you on your point of how vital cooperative learning is to our students. Whereas it can be hard to get students to work together, very few occupations allow a person to work in complete solitude. Have you found any secrets to successful collaborative work, besides GoogleDocs and Webspiration?