Question 3 Online Learning in Education

Online Learning in Schools

The Status Quo of online learning in Schools:
· Traditional texts and closed expert systems
· Passive acquisition of knowledge
· Slow, school take years to respond IT change and update
Online learning tools include may include the following social platforms:
· Common web page traits include multiple media forms, hyperlinks, immediately updatable
· Unique traits of blogs and wikis (in stark contrast to books) include comments, editable, amendable, malleable, unfinished
· Open source software such as openoffice.org
· Blogs and blogging are the opposite of owning and protecting our ideas
Our ubiquitous technology is built to do what our social constructs say we can’t i.e. copy, manipulate, re-create, edit, re-mix. As we are rethinking ownership of the text, multiple cross referencing and many ideas coming together
The role of online Learning has many benefits such as the following:
The advantages of online learning are that users now participate actively on the internet. Users have the abillity to contribute without special knowledge through platforms such as blogger, flickr and you tube. In this way, users are no longer only receiving information passively from the internet; they are now creating, editing and re-mixing knowledge on the web and distributing it to others. The web has become a virtual model of physical world communities, and in many cases it is a virtual model of a social constrcutivist learning community - where the learners can interact with like minds from across the globe.

Does online learning have a place in schools? Yes, most definately, as the benefits will be discussed below.
Many features of the new web are suitable for school use, where they can be incorporated into programs so that students enrich their learning.
A special benefit of the new web is that students are able to share work and ideas with others without having to learn special skills to use the technology. These technologies, through their ability to allow students to be open and share work, have the ability to make students more accountable to each other in their learning. Most web based applications run through web browsers and use similar user interfaces which require little to no training. This means that the focus is not on learning about the technology, but on using the technology to learn about other content.

The new web allows students to contribute in a real way to the information and knowledge available on the web. Work that they create becomes more 'important' and 'real' when published openly to the internet for the whole world to see, or perhaps just for their parents and family.
Blogs - can be used by teachers to distribute information to students and parents, and by students to submit work and share with other students. The blog can become a virtual "binder" for students work, where they can bring together their work across topics and manage assignments. When all work is shared in this way, students have the opportunity to make knowledge connections between topics and subjects, Furthermore, students can also look at their education from a holistic perspective.

Wikis - are a great opportunity to establish a virtual classroom where discussions can take place between students and teachers, and this is also a great platform for group work, where students can edit and update and teachers can see the project develop over time.

What are the repercussions of not utilizing this new world? (Prentsky)
If educators disregard this new IT world and do not exploit it in their classrooms they are at peril of not engaging students in their learn, more and more over time. Students nowadays are identified as Digital Natives, and they are fully immersed into the digital and internet culture of our society. Their learning must correlate to this reality.

"All the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it. Some may download songs; some may rap, lipsync, or sing karaoke; some may play video games; some may mix songs; some may make movies; and some may do the extreme sports that are possible with twenty-first-century equipment and materials. But they all do something engaging."

"The fact is that even if you are the most engaging old-style teacher in the world, you are not going to capture most of our students’ attention the old way. “Their short attention spans,” as one professor put it, “are [only] for the old ways of learning.” They certainly don’t have short attention spans for their games, movies, music, or Internet surfing. More and more, they just don’t tolerate the old ways—and they are enraged we are not doing better by them."
Prensky, M. (2005) "Engage Me or Enrage Me" What Today's Learners Demand, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 5 (September-October 2005): 60–65, Retrieved June 5 2007 http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0553.asp?bhcp=1