Introduction:
In my case, the pursuit of my Master's coincided with teaching obligations as is the case with most educators pursuing a Master's degree. I didn't do a great deal of research on what type of Master's to pursue or where I want to get said Master's from, but I knew I wanted to enhance my understanding of the seemingly new mandate form state departments all of the country..."teachers must integrate technology into their lessons." This was enough for me to want to better understand the role digital literacy plays in the modern classroom and how I can best use this new understanding to help the learners in my classroom. Both the classes were "supposedly" designed around using new technologies in classroom; specifically multimedia design, web-based formats, opportunities to apply online technology tools. My usual approach to learning is building an idea of what I think the learning will be, reading the course syllabus (outcome goals), and then transitioning into my constructionist understanding of meeting the outcome goals as I understand them. This approach is generally filled with excitement, which is some combination of looking forward to learning coupled with a dose of fear of failure to understand and meeting the learning goals. The term many professionals are starting to use more fluently is "good anxiety," since anxiety by itself has such a negative connotation. It's very similar to the term "Flow," which is that dynamic of just the right amount of struggle to produce the determination and rewards of success vs. a struggle that produces too much frustration that ultimately leads to failure or quitting. Since both of these classes fall into the same category (my categorization) I will speak about them as if they we basically the same class and not make any real distinctions between the two, which in my opinion also has the instructors in the same category.
The Beginning:
As a "New" teacher, I am always looking for ways to improve, work smarter Not harder, and reflect on my classroom practices. I was very excited to take these classes as they seemed to offer what could be some very useful information and tech tools to use use in the modern classroom. I was starting the year as long-term substitute in the JROTC program and as a Veteran I was looking forward to that experience, but before the first week of school was even over I was being moved by the administration to a more permanent long-term position in a self-contained BD/MI classroom, which was going to give a greater opportunity to work with students in a more academic setting. I was finally going to have my own classroom where I would be able to implement my ideas of classroom management and was going to teach three sections of math and two sections of science. Being a social studies teacher I was a little more than just apprehensive about the math, so the idea of having some graduate classes with exposure to technology tools and how to better integrate them into the everyday classroom was something I was really looking forward to, because I felt that's what I needed most to compensate for my perceived short-comings in math. At the same time college classes are starting and I'm beginning to build relationships with my high school students, I was made aware that my current position was going to be re-posted and there were a few candidates that if they applied would likely get the position ahead of me due to my "out-of-field" certification. This prompted me to prepare for certification in SPED MI/BD as well as apply for other jobs currently posted in county and surrounding counties, which I did. I interviewed and landed the position I currently hold. I also continued the certification process for SPED MI/BD, which I now have as part of WV Teacher Certification. A lot changed in those beginning weeks of the school year except for the technology courses, which I needed more than ever because my new job required teaching all four core high school subjects 9-12. To me this meant a greater need to have the use of technology tools to engage me as learner, while helping the learners in my classes.
The Classes:
The very first thing that would become even more annoying over the course of the semester was the instant navigation problems that existed with the content delivery. In that, the instructor had set up the entire course on the university's class access system, I'll call "ChalkBoard," which can and does have its own brand of problems. The system itself has many features that could be useful to learners, but can only be accessed through a single portal, which can become clogged if too many users are trying to access the portal at the same time. The other issues around the access system, centers around ease of use by both the instructor and the student, which generally translates into one of my main issues. If the instructor only know one way of setting up the course then the students are forced to access the entire course step by step every time they access the system.
Example One: begin the course by accessing "module one" by clicking on the course content form the
Main Menu > Module One > section one > section two > section three > Module Readings > Module Discussion > Module Assignments >
This sample of navigation is simple enough right? Easy to follow right? So. what's the problem?
The problem was that the way the instructor set the navigation was that every previous step had to be opened before the next step would open... after finishing with section one and moving on to section two, if you ended a session and came back you had to re-open all of section one before you could re-open section two, which just seems a little time consuming and petty on my part right?, but an online course that had multiple modules and multiple sections per module with an archaic navigation system caused a great deal of my excitement for learning to shift to questioning instructor competence. It would be fair to question that maybe that's just the way the navigation had to be set-up because of limitations of the ChalkBoard system... and that's a fair question, except I had previously taught classes using the ChalkBoard system, so I knew it was an instructor issue Not a system issue. This question of competence on the part of the instructors now becomes a barrier to learning (for me), which only gets worse. This brought me back to the quote I chose for an earlier post... "In the beginning was the text; to the New Critics is was wholly within the text that the meaning was located, and the teacher was the privileged holder of this meaning (Thomason, 1984;Probst, 1986)" (Knobel, Chapter 4, page 63). I guess at this point I was counting on the instructors to be the more experienced learners, yet they were Not and worse yet they still held all the power.
The second example comes by way of course design and change, or lack there of, in that as technologies changed it seems prudent that the course material would change or at least be updated, but in the case of these two instructors, which created their course content and set the deadline dates for the course modules the only thing that changed was the dates and in many cases the dates were not fully updated. When the expectation is updated learning on new technology tools or new learning for new technology tools the minor problem of navigation is easily overlooked if those expectations are met, but when they further question competence it becomes harder to overlook even minor details.
Example Two:
Since a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 had come about due to technology advancements the promise of interacting with these new tools and teaching new learners how to interact with new tools was exciting. The problem was that the ChalkBoard platform could not accommodate these new interactive interactions, so the instructors chose to continue to use ChalkBoard instead of choosing a different course platform. This was accomplished by having the students create Web 2.0 work and then "screen shot" that work to upload on an assignment page in the modules. To further illustrate this point consider this project assignment: Step 1, Create a wiki based on any topic that you would use in a classroom as an assignment to your students. Step 2, Submit a screen shot of the wiki in the assignment / discussion box of the module. Step 3, Comment or suggest changes to at least three of your peers' wiki submissions as a reply to their wiki submission. Step 4, Respond to suggestions made to your wiki submission by your peers. This caused me a great deal frustration almost to the point of quitting, Not because I was unable to perform the task, but because the task had become worthless. My expectations of learning and interacting with the "New" technology tools had been rendered worthless, yet the cost to me in time, effort, and money was substantial. In the quote the author is planting the idea that the teacher shouldn't be the only keeper of the knowledge, yet there is this certain expectation that the teacher should be creating opportunities for furthering knowledge Not stifling knowledge theirs or their students'. It would also be worth mentioning here that I was called out by one of the instructors for a portion of work I submitted as part of an assignment that required a grading rubric, in which the rubric I submitted was a rubric I created for similar type activities and knew it would be a great assessment tool for this assignment, so I included a link to the rubric. I knew the rubric had a creation date / last updated time stamp and because I did Not update the rubric (No changes needed) and it was something I had created months before this particular assignment the instructor accused me of Not putting the effort necessary for a good grade by just submitting previously used material. What a hypocrisy! Something I created and used for a previous activity, very similar to the current, assignment, which I thought was a good use of known and proven resources was suddenly dubbed lazy and unacceptable by an instructor that had not changed their entire course for more than 5 years, 10 semesters, and static submissions of interactive material... REALLY??? I nearly lost my mind with the overwhelming grip of frustration... then coupled with the comment that I had Not adequately responded to the suggested changes of my wiki screen shot... comments that were made in the last hours prior to the deadline... REALLY??? I would have setup alerts to posts if I had known I needed too, but wait... there is No way to set up an alert for those sections of ChalkBoard. My faith in the instructors was now dismal at best... please note that is Not to say I think these individuals are bad people, I'm sure they are quite lovely in their own pretentious ways... make No mistake about it I definitely knew I had to conform to their will and understanding because like I said, "they had all the power."
The third example comes by way of open ended instructions for an assignment, the final assignment of the course.
Example 3:
Create an assignment on anything that you could use in a future classroom even if that is Not the classroom setting you are currently in because some of you may Not be in a full-time position. So, this assignment should be something you can and should use in the future. This assignment will have a peer review component prior to final submission and your peer will assigned to you after you submit your draft to ChalkBoard. Note to peers... please be constructive with your comments and suggestions so your review can be used to help make the necessary modifications or changes if needed. I chose a social studies world cultures activity based on written language development, which also included a look at how modern cultures are still shaping and changing modern written forms of text. Remember I said the instructions were open ended and should be for any future classroom you might have... My peer, reviewing the proposed activity wanted me to send them a full copy of the finished product so they would have it to use because as a historian they loved the idea of early forms of writing, symbols and graphics, as they compare to modern forms of writing. In that this is a great way to connect students to they past and the present. I included in the list of activities for students a simple form of program coding called, "Scratch" where students would create a simple "Scratch" video. The instructor felt that this component of the activity was more for a computer programming class Not a social studies class and further more I listed in my class introduction profile that I was teaching high school and this seemed like a middle school activity, which it was, the instructor further commented that this activity did Not seem suitable for an online course... REALLY??? When was this course changed to "learning how to teach online courses"??? What? Did I miss something?
My frustration was beyond anything I had really had to deal with thus far in my academic pursuits and the biggest part of that was not simply with the instructors or the issues with navigating their outdated courses it was that I felt that I had been cheated out learning. Learning I so desperately wanted and felt I needed in order to be better prepared for my classroom. To me technology tools will work and fail in a classroom daily, but when learners show up at the door eager to learn and you fail them because you are not prepared, that cost is far greater than a few tuition dollars. The learning in the non-examples I received from those classes was good, but the learning of how complacency can kill a learner was priceless. Standing still is the same as moving backwards in this ever changing global environment and it is time experienced learners set about the job of helping other learners be the more experienced learners of tomorrow! I wonder how many students feel cheated out of their education by their "so called" teachers... turn to page 129, read the section and answer the review questions... REALLY?
My pics of the week:
Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. Literacies: Social, cultural and historical perspectives. Peter Lang, 2011.
5 comments:
You seem to be illustrating a case of digital competence (or should I say, incompetence?), and the perspective seems to be one of human relations. I haven’t had difficult situations like this arise during my online classes, but I have had some frustrating situations. Every class and every professor is so different. They use different course management tools and different platforms, and it takes a while to figure out how to navigate each one as a student. Some that I have had seemed to be very removed from the reality of being a practicing public school teacher, and their comments were very philosophical and academic, but were not realistic in application for many teachers. Your frustration that you weren’t getting out of the courses what you wanted illustrates what Knobel and Lankshear say in the reflections on pg. 158, that “in our present clamor to technologize learning we are in danger of short-circuiting important issues and principles, and in the process, shortchanging teachers and learners,” as there seemed to be a less than complete understanding by the professors of the CMS they were trying to use, and this had a negative impact on your learning. They go on to say, “ ‘The same tools’ are by no means the same tools. They become very different tools in the presence of the different funds of knowledge people bring to the tools when they pick them up.” I realize different people will teach very differently, but in the electronic disconnect that can often happen in online courses between students and professors, it seems there could be a greater effort made to ensure frequent and personalized communication between both parties so there are not misunderstandings or confusion. I suppose that could be harder than it sounds.
Well Rafe I think I know exactly what you're talking about because I too had to go through that struggle, I think all of us did. It is important that educator enable the students with up to date technologies, which I do not think were present in this class. There are other resources, just some don't want o put in the extra effort to use them. I remember in one class I took we were suppose to present on the last few chapters of our text, but my partner and I asked if we could make a YouTube video that explained the chapter. So we did and it was a little too long for us to upload to YouTube fr free so we did the last bit as an actual presentation. We had voice overs, animations, integrated videos, and all the works, but ended up getting a C because they could not tell who did the work and said we didn't present. This was infuriating since the people who just made a PowerPoint and presented got an A for their project. This mad me never want to go above and beyond ever again because innovation was apparently not wanted in that classroom. You case focuses on actually going to the next level and how not doing so can restrict an experience and make it almost unbearable. The digital usage was weak in that class, digital competence was lacking, and, as I said, digital transformation was almost nonexistent. I think that, "Not every jacket owner/wearer will be able to use it successfully as a means to gain and sustain real attention. Moreover, the jacket itself (or any similar device) cannot be the medium for sustained attention unless its wearer can claim a 'space' to which others 'return' in order to see what she or he is up to today.", is a great quote to use in here because this jacket wearer definitely doesn't have people coming back for more.
I agree that digital competence seems to be at the core of this case, as the approaches/attitudes of the instructor(s) in the courses you describe were factors in your personal learning experience. It sounds like they were trying to put "new wine in old bottles," to borrow Denise's phrase. Slapping a label on a course and then providing little by way of experience related to it leaves students experiences an expensive and frustrating disconnect. The situation reminded me of our chapter on Literacy and Empowerment, in which Lankshear states "We need ways of opening up substantive debate about desirable pedagogies, literacies, and the like, rather than closing them down by definitional fiat or by recourse to persuasive, trendy or emotive terminology." The instructor was shutting down your pedagogy because it didn't fit into their personal definitions.
Also, I am astounded that anyone teaching such a course would not recognize the inherent value across ALL areas that SCRATCH brings to the table. And as for using outdated materials without updating, which aren't reflective of modern practices....well, it makes me think of how quickly my own students catch onto things like that. We have to use the LINKS program at school and the pre-made materials provided from the WVDE site are rife with typos and outdated information. It drives me crazy, and the kids are like, "What kind of morons are making this up?"
To agree with everyone else, this does seem like a issue of digital competence. I have been very lucky in all of my online classes, but I can see how this situation can easily happen to anyone. While I cannot relate to a lot of your situation, I can relate to working hard on a project (happened to me in my undergrad), putting so much thought and effort into it, only to get negative remarks because it was not exactly what the instructor meant, and in this situation, like yours, the instructions were open ended, and the specifics were not given.
"Beyond a certain point or set of conditions, what appear to be the same ways may actually turn out to have become quite different practices." Lankshear, p. 145. Your professor was glossing over your "ways" due to what she saw as deficiencies in terms of applicability, when instead she could have shifted her perception to analyze your methods more critically to realize your tools were arriving at different practices which are not invalid just because they are innovative in ways beyond her present levels of understanding.
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