Monday, February 18, 2008

One Page Reflection - Team RKPG Seminar

Technology supplants Curriculum

The theme for Day 6 was “Technology supplants Curriculum”, and the seminar was presented by Gordon, Rachel, Pam and Kiran. During the first meeting of the group, it was decided that an effort would be made to include multimedia and provide an opportunity for classmates to create an artifact using multimedia in our presentation.

For the next few weeks, we spent our time viewing YouTube clips, TedTalks, Podcasts, and online journals. We were searching for a piece that would expand the class’s current view of how technology could be used in the classroom, as well as inspire the imagination of fellow classmates to rethink how/if technology could supplant curriculum in their own lives. Then we would email what we’d find for the other members to view and comment on.

During our last group meeting, we choose Richard Baraniuk’s August 2006 “talk” entitled, “Goodbye Textbooks; Hello, open-source learning”. The group felt that the potential of replacing a classroom staple (i.e. the textbook) with an online customizable modular resource had important implications for how technology might supplant curriculum.

One reason we choose this video was because it builds upon previous classes. First, the video is about remediation of a textbook into a digital “super textbook“. (Baraniuk talks about the ways the experience will facilitate hypermediacy and immediacy.) Second, he mentions the issue of “imperialistic education” imposed on developing countries, which was also touched on by de Castell and Luke’s article and Gabriela Alonso Yanez’s presentation. The type of open-source learning modules Baraniuk refers to can be customized to the local context. This allows individual countries/teachers to “create, rip, mix, and burn” context-specific content.

We decided that we would ask the class to view the clip and react to the following three questions: 1) What do you agree with? 2) What do you disagree with? and 3) What surprises you? We also provided a graphic organizer for those who wanted some way of structuring their responses. Once the class has had a chance to share their responses, we planned to ask them to reflect further by proposing some focus questions (here are examples of some of the questions we generated):

  1. Richard Baraniuk shows us an image of LPs that have been replaced by CDs. For all intents and purposes LPs are no longer used. What other resources have been replaced so completely? (Or are on the verge of being replaced?)
  2. Create, Rip, Mix and Burn. Baraniuk claims this new paradigm is true with music, and should be true for text as well. Is it? Should it be?

In response to an objective outlined in our first group meeting, we also decided to create an intellectual production piece task involving multimedia. The class was asked to watch a Youtube slide show entitled “Did you know?” and then create their own 10 slide document to answer the question: “What do I know now?” The reason we choose this clip was we felt that it worked well with our topic. As well, it would be a good launching point for our classmates to start thinking about their own practices through the lens of our topic.

No comments: