New Media Literacies and Cognitive Science Meet Blogging!

Our second class meeting focused upon new knowledge about human learning and how technology applications can help us take advantage of this new knowledge to create new experiences and learning for students. Evrim began the evening with an interesting, resource filled talk on New Literacies and then moved to an introduction to blogging as one example of a platform where new literacies can be developed. Students then examined a few educational blogs looking for examples of new literacies. I then chimed in with a discussion of our reading in Bransford and Papert and we worked to connect the approaches of the two authors to each other and to our explorations with technology.

I was pleased with our first attempts at discussion and student sharing. In most classes, it takes awhile for students to feel comfortable discussing and sharing insights and I felt we made good progress in this area. I am hoping that a few more students will share gears of their childhood in our Facebook environment.

Evrim and I did a little more talking than we usually will in our learner-centered environment, but I think this is a necessary part of getting things going. We look forward to active, student centered evenings together and online!

Amanda chose an appropriate resource for our evening when she shared Zapitalism, an online learning environment focused on issues of supply and demand. Her experiences using the resource in her classes were especially interesting. Amanda will lead a discussion of her resource in our Moodle site this week.

I am excited and a little apprehensive about our first online class experience the week of January 31-----our community is beginning to grow face to face and I want our online experience to continue to nurture our connections. We will call this an experience in adventurous teaching and we will approach our online experience metacognitively as we evaluate the ups and downs of the experience together.

Getting Started!

After a little confusion about class meeting times, we got off to a good start on Monday, January 10. We have a large (19) group of students with diverse backgrounds, which will make for interesting and useful interactions as we explore technology applications for classrooms. We began with course and people introductions and then moved into a brief introduction to Logo. Logo provides a backdrop to our course since it was the first educational computer application that focused upon creating an active learning environment for students. 505 students quickly embraced the Logo experiences and worked through primitives, procedures and simple programming. I look forward to seeing the resulting Logo assignments.

I was pleased with our first night together. We have an active, well informed and talkative group, and I anticipate a dynamic learning experience together.

I am a little concerned about the Martin Luther King holiday taking some of our initial momentum, but I think we will all be ready to go with issues like cognitive science, school transformation and blogging!