Week 3 Blog Summary/Presentation

By Dr. Shi PrettyWinter

Ok, here is a summary/presentation of this week's blog discussion.Thank Lauren, Theresa and Alison for taking leadership in coming up with questions for the discussion. The questions are open-ended and make good coverage of the readings of the week. It seems many had deep feelings about children conditioned by the biases of television (9 posted on this topic). We might all have inspired by jlatta’s s applauds of Postman’s book THE END OF EDUCATION and go to read it . One good point is that the posts/comments come from your own life/teaching experiences. Another good point is that in your post you refer to what others said about a point as what Christine did “to add to Lauren said earlier about…” Other good points include relating the issue to our teaching, like audreyd516 went further to relate the readings/perspectives to our own teaching, talk about teachers responsibilities to help students. It is always easy to talk about what we see and what we experience. But we might need to go deeper into the message the piece of reading (or writing, if you want) tries to convey. Deeper reflections on the reading – what Postman really tried to say about the invasion, dominance or control (Postman would not say any of these terms are too strong), of technology, to what we do and what we think (Postman…). His point is that we human beings let tools rule over our mind. Going from there, perhaps we can reflect more on good use/integration of technology with the purpose of advancing understanding and learning? There are two comments (by Lori and Lauren) on backward design. Lauren put forward her understanding from the reading and referred to what others (Lori) had said about this issue and then related to self experience. That is an exemplar post – relate to the readings (better yet, quotes from the readings), refer to what other said, and relate to experiences. Only one post was made (by Kathryn) on the quote "learning in almost any subject today means not only learning the concepts, but also how to use technologies in that endeavor." Here are some suggestions to the class for making more effective blog posts. Perhaps follow Blog Moderating and Presentation Project guidelines more closely – tie our posts closely to the readings themselves instead of merely putting forward opinions/feelings/experiences, ask hard/provocative questions to elicit/motivate more comments/answers to these questions?