Thoughts on educational stuff...

I'm taking two online classes at the moment, both dealing with educational theory and the use of technology in the classroom...

A posting that I just dropped over there interests me because of what I said and exactly how much/whether I believe it or not...

The professor's original questions:

Some interesting replies to some of the most engaging questions. Rarely do we stop to consider the answers to such meta-questions unless we are teachers. Can you calculate the square root of 2570 exactly without a calculator? Who cares? You might ask, and you'd be right to ask that question… who in fact does care and why do they care? What are they trying to do or make? What does it mean to be active or engaged in an activity? Can we learn without engaging in an activity? Better yet, is it possible to not learn if you are thinking about something? What is thinking anyway? Can we not think? (regardless of what your mother may have said to you when you were 14 years young… "Think…. can you please think?!") Can we be shamed into thinking correctly about something in order to learn it "properly"? Descartes and Locke had a lot to say about the changeless core that most of us believe endures to make up our identity and enduring self. Does our thinking and learning continually change us and transform us and our values? Many of your comments have both a social and emotional aspect as you related your stories and experiences. As several of you have pointed to, the things we hold in our memory and construct our knowledge upon definitely have emotional and social underpinnings.

As you read these questions and responses do you get the feeling that learning and thinking are such very personal activities that we cannot possibly predict what one individual may learn from certain online words, icons, pictures, movies, or simulations? Do you get the impression that each of us creates her or his own flow of meaning or dialogue around a particular topic? Do we learn more in our shaping of the question or trying to find our solution or answer? If this is so, what does “shared meaning after learning” mean to us as a group?

And my reply:

Do you get the feeling that learning and thinking are such very personal activities that we cannot possibly predict what one individual may learn from certain online words, icons, pictures, movies, or simulations?

If that were true in its purest, most extreme form, then there would be absolutely no reason to teach. Every person would have to learn every little bit of everything in their own way, and it would be stupid of me to even try to guide the class in the same direction. We wouldn't be a crew of twenty-plus heading in the same direction in one big boat, we'd be the plastic men in an electric, vibrating football game. Any little bump would send us all outward in a different direction from everybody else.

But I do think that the question is closer to the truth than it is far from the truth. We each take everything into our brain in ways that depend on everything from what we had for breakfast this morning to what mom/wife/dog said to us on the way out the door this morning to which way the wind's blowing to bring random scents to us as we learn.

I can hope to throw out experiences and situations that seem to have lead my students in a certain way in the past, but I sure as heck had better not assume that those same situations will lead this new group in the exact same direction this year.

Do you get the impression that each of us creates her or his own flow of meaning or dialogue around a particular topic?

We see through a glass darkly...everything that I take in is colored by everything that I have taken in before. Sure, you can't understand a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins, but even then, you still don't have the full picture.

If this is so, what does “shared meaning after learning” mean to us as a group?

It is a hope that we aren't alone, that somebody else can reassure us of our beliefs, memories, and thoughts so that we won't be fully and totally isolated. If we can't at least hope that our friends remember and learned the same things from our common experiences, then we might as well not have them.

(Wow, that last answer really turned out dark. Sorry 'bout that, folks - but on rereading it, I think I might believe what I wrote there.)

I hate my online masters program because it takes my time, because it feels redundant, because of so many reasons, but from time to time it does actually force me to think, and I have to say that I do a lot of my best thinking when I'm talking or typing. I find that so much of what I throw out there almost on a whim seems to ring true once I take a moment to listen to it.