Learning is a Journey

Post in evidenza

I want to be in the Openness team

I had a teacher, who I considered a wise person with a great knowledge in his field of studies. I did my exam and it went great, during my exam I openly spoke with him about a project I were involved in at that time, which were somehow related to his subject and research topics. So, some days after the exam I sent him an email, asking for a book suggestion, in order for me to study a bit more on a specific argument, openly saying that this would help me in the above mentioned project. He denied, he said he couldn’t help me, in suggesting a book or an author on a given topic, because I may have gained profit from this information one day, and he wouldn’t have received anything in change. I felt disappointed, angry and confused. How could someone working in the education field be so closed minded?

Openness in Italian, my mother tongue language, can be said as apertura. But, it is strange to me to think about openness in terms of apertura. In fact, we usually use the word apertura when we’re speaking about something closed, locked, unaccessible, apart from that specific point where there is an apertura. As I’m doing this considerations, I feel like I’ve grown up thinking to closeness as normality and openness as something special, yet beautiful and valuable. Indeed, we’re speaking about this as a topic because educational practices and resources are not generally open. If I ask myself what openness means to me, I don’t mean it as apertura, I consider it as mindset state to be reached in every filed where there is knowledge. I feel openness as a sharing practice and philosophy. I don’t want education and knowledge to be closed but with some openness, I believe in them to be freely accessible and sharable.

Knowledge is power, so it’s understandable that who detains it, find it difficult to share it, without receiving nothing in change.

This attitude belongs to western modern society, and it has strict relations to capitalism and monetization of everything, including knowledge. This is why I don’t believe that technology is the primary driver for openness in education. It can help, as print invention did in XV century, but it can also lead to a degeneration, the opposite of the initial purposes: closeness. Mooc technology resulted in Udemy, Coursera, and others platforms where the main principle is not sharing but selling. And selling implies buying, which means you need to have something to give in exchange, not really what I mean with Openness.

During PBL group discussions, it came out that maybe “the negative aspect about openness is the quality inferiority of the material”. As there is none controlling, ensuring quality, this may be the feeling. Anyway, I think it’s not inferiority, but variety. If we decide not to delegate to some authority the power to recognize, select and ensure quality in educational resources, we have to be ready to do this by our own, and we need specific skills to do it properly.

I’m finishing this post on delay, topic 2 ended last week and this morning we started speaking and reflecting about collaborative learning, topic 3. This is good, I can see how Openness is the link between Digital Literacies and Collaborative Learning.

If we have, and continue developing, our digital literacies, plus we embrace the openness attitude through knowledge sharing, then we can learn collaboratively and use digital technology tools to enhance both the process and the results.

And when we meet someone playing for the other team, the locked and competitive one, just remind to ourselves they are the one missing the added value openness, sharing and collaboration.

Why continuous feedback from students to teachers is a win-win

Feedbacks are useful to rethink activities and improve the effects of our actions. For an effective teaching-and-learning process, it is important that feedbacks that are given by students and teachers work in both directions.

Dec 10, 2020

A teacher enters a classroom and sits at the chair in front of the blackboard. There are 5 minutes left before the beginning of the first class of the course and the students are taking their seats. It is the first time they see each other, they don’t know the teacher and the teacher doesn’t know them. Will they understand what the professor will talk about during the class? Will the teacher be able to distinguish curious eyes from those lost and confused? Will they ask something or will they just leave the class with a simple “goodbye”?

The relation between a teacher and a group of students is a relation of communication in which both parts give and receive information in a continuous exchange. When a person receives interesting or important information, she tries to reprocess them and use them to modify her own beliefs on a given subject. To succeed in this means learning. But what happens if the information is not given efficiently? What happens when communication is disrupted and doesn’t work? Learning becomes hard, the interpretative effort increases, the misunderstandings distance the achievement of learning outcomes, the motivation to apprehend drops.

Our teacher has asked herself legitimate questions: the communicative relationship that she is preparing to establish with her students could be disrupted by a failure to share certain language codes, maybe those specific for the subject or the study materials. The relationship could be also disrupted by the difficulty to receive and read those signals that allow you to regulate your actions, whether they are non-verbal language signals or explicit questions.

For communication, and consequently learning, to take place profitably, the transmission channels must work in both directions. The teacher will make every effort to be as clear as possible, to present arguments in logical units with sense, to give adequate materials to her students, trying to learn their educational and professional background. But that won’t be enough. She will need to know every doubt students may still have, what has caught their attention the most, whether they have lived the lecture with a feeling of anxiety, boredom, or enthusiasm. The learning potential will not be realized as half of the communication process will be missing.

The regulatory function of feedback has educational importance both for students and teachers, as both parts learn only if they can modify their attitude and behavior based on the information they receive during the communication process of teaching/learning. The condition is that the feedback has to be continuous, and has to happen during the course and not at the end — as it usually happens in most university courses. Until a few years ago, this would have sounded like a utopia: how can we allow teachers to have impressions, comments, feedback, from their numerous students in a continuous way during the course?

Today, this is possible thanks to educational technologies as Wyblo. Through a simple and intuitive app, students can make known positive and negative aspects of the didactic, transmit their emotions towards the teaching, and their level of trust in the teacher. The test is taken anonymously and it takes only a few minutes after each class to compile it. Through a continuous feedback system, teachers can learn how to “adjust the range” of their teaching, facilitating the learning of their students. At the same time, students are called to play an active and conscious role in their learning process, feeling co-responsible for the quality of teaching.

Who am I in the digital age?

Reflections on who I am in the digital age and on what my digital identity is start here, with my first personal blog post on the occasion of the first topic in the ONL course.

I was born in 1995, when I was in primary school my teacher was afraid that my classmates and I may cheat during our homework investigations by looking for pieces of information in the so called, The Internet. She wanted us to look in the books, because only books provide reliable information, whereas in The Internet, anyone can say his/her opinion and there is no certainty that what you find it is actually true.

Here I am, at 25, working and studying fully online, with my computer, from home. I don’t think I suffered that much the digital transition that pandemic forced us to do. I would love to go back to my office and to attend lectures with my university friends and colleagues, but I managed to adapt myself to this new situation pretty easily. Therefore, I acknowledge that I am a digital native.

I am not a geek, but I believe in the power digital technologies can provide to traditional human social behaviors. I’m referring to communication, politics, research, collaboration and, of course, learning. This is why, and in some way also how, I ended up in the Open Network Learning community, course and approach.

In ONL “digital” is not considered only as a set of tools and means to reach people from different part of the worlds and train them. Digital is at the same time the tool and the purpose. The first topic, which covered the two first weeks of group activities, was “Online participation & digital literacies”.

Activities started by looking for information in the recommended resources, for example the Tedx Talk form Doug Belshaw: The essential elements of digital literacies. When he says “It’s digital literacies, they are plural, they need to be socially negotiated and they depend heavily upon context”, I think on my primary school teacher. There is a huge amount of good quality knowledge online, but it is mixed and hidden between another great amount of low quality knowledge and falsity. Instead of giving us the chance to develop digital literacies to detect, select and gather good quality information online, my teacher kept us away from internet. If we look at the Seven element of digital literacies:

We can see that a good teacher, especially in 2021, must not avoid “the internet” theme, quite the opposite, he/she has to help students in developing good several digital literacies.

Starting from this model, my group and I decided to focus our investigation in the “Career and Identity management” digital literacy. This is something difficult to manage in ourselves lives, never mind to teach it to our students! The results of our investigation are available here.

As for my personal digital literacy in career and identity management, I can say I am developing it, through this ONL course as well as in a self-directed way: this blog is one proof. It is a continuous learning process, and it is a competence needed for further lifelong learning, as it is said in the European Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning.

In the end, it’s all a matter of moving from a Visitor to a Resident mode in the different tools, context and purposes of being on The Internet.

The IT crowd