Education as known for centuries

We had learnt in the class about PLN/PLE - personal learning network and environment. Taking it a step further is the concept of CoP or community of practice. When I read about the three elements of CoP – 1.      Joint enterprise 2.     Mutual engagement and 3.     Shared repertoire (Wenger, 2000) , I started to think of some of the professional groups, of whom I am a member and how they could fit in the definition. Firstly, of course is my school department of Social Science, which comprises of ten teachers teaching both in senior classes and in Year 9 and 10. We have a robust system in place which ensures that we meet once a fortnight and share ideas on planning of future units in the common subject – Social studies for 9/10 and also for our senior areas of learning. We upload all our resources on the Team drive in Google drive. So, our department is definitely a CoP. Then, I am a member of Google groups of teachers of Account...

I joined the Mindlab course in July 2017. So, when the DCL course started, my senior students at school were already more than half way through their assessment involving carrying out a business with community perspective. In this, they plan and carry out a business as a group. All students are expected to share the tasks and also help in documentation of plans and reviews. This is a totally collaborative task and the assessment of individual contribution is always an issue. As a requirement of the course, I did some reading on collaborative tasks as I found the challenge in the evaluation of this assessment had a possible solution in ICT. When I read about “free-riding” in a study carried out (Strijbos, 2011) , it rhymed with what I was finding in my classroom, where some students would not pull their share of weight and still get away with good grades. So I did some more reading and found the challenge I was facing was not unique to school, but also existed in the corporate ...

--> How much to reflect and what for? My schooling and university education was in the last quarter of 20 th century, when the world was slowly changing from trot to canter or from the soaking to spinning cycle to use a washing machine metaphor (vacations are meant for laundry!). Suddenly, log table books were a pile of recycle and Casio digital diaries, PDAs, PC-AT, PC-XT were the buzz words. My teachers, who hitherto seemed knowledge incarnate - were asking us how to “boot the machine” or “connect the printer” or even “insert the floppy”. Something had definitely changed - a new knowledge cycle had started and that had brought everyone at a level playing field. We - the Gen X - knew things our professors didn’t and that was alarming for them and exciting for us. That prompted me and my friends to stay up late, listening to the humming of the dial-up internet trying to connect us through Hotmail and Yahoo messenger to people all over the world. I am n...