In this TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8, Michael Wesch talks about how it is technologically "ridiculously easy" to connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate and publish. However, it's very hard to truly connect, organize, share and collaborate with other people, and to publish something of worth. His idea about education is that we should move away from teaching students to be knowledgeable (know stuff) towards teaching them to be "knowledge-able," which means being able to find, sort, analyze and ultimately create knowledge. I agree that this is a worthwhile goal; I also agree that this is not as simple as just logging onto the internet and poking around. Wesch describes knowledge-ability as a "practice" that takes sustained effort. As a teacher, he does the following things to help students create knowledge-ability:
(1) embrace problems that he doesn't know the answer to;
(2) collaborate to solve them; and
(3) harness relevant internet tools.
These are all steps I can and should take in my classroom. In fact, I have already started. Recently, in my world history class we looked at child labor during the Industrial Revolution. I asked my students to use the internet to find out about child labor in the world today, including the industries where it is occurring and American companies that sell popular products that rely on that overseas child labor. Then students wrote letters to American manufacturers and retailers asking them to take specific steps to stop child labor. Students saw this project as highly relevant to their lives, because they realized they were consumers of some of the very products that rely on child labor. This is the type of project I want to do more of in the future, and better--with more collaboration and more visibility in Web spaces. I think Wesch would agree it's a good start on the path to knowledge-ability.
(1) embrace problems that he doesn't know the answer to;
(2) collaborate to solve them; and
(3) harness relevant internet tools.
These are all steps I can and should take in my classroom. In fact, I have already started. Recently, in my world history class we looked at child labor during the Industrial Revolution. I asked my students to use the internet to find out about child labor in the world today, including the industries where it is occurring and American companies that sell popular products that rely on that overseas child labor. Then students wrote letters to American manufacturers and retailers asking them to take specific steps to stop child labor. Students saw this project as highly relevant to their lives, because they realized they were consumers of some of the very products that rely on child labor. This is the type of project I want to do more of in the future, and better--with more collaboration and more visibility in Web spaces. I think Wesch would agree it's a good start on the path to knowledge-ability.