Seguimos con la colección de piezas para la educación del siglo XXI, aquella dirigida a los nativos digitales e “inmigrantes integrados”. La Milken Institute Global Conference organizó esta semana el panel Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education:
Do you need a secret decoder ring to decipher this session's title? The students and new young workers collectively called "digital natives" certainly don't. For the millions of children and adults weaned on cell phones, video games and the World Wide Web, digital tools like weblogs (blogs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), community-authored websites (wikis) and social networking services (YASNS) are an integral part of their daily lives. The implications of this sea change in how users relate to technology go beyond the "technology as friend, not foe" level. These tools are providing fundamentally new ways for people to connect and learn. This roundtable session brings together a collection of leading researchers and opinion leaders to explain and discuss the new "web-2.0" world that is shaking up the traditional education and corporate-training establishments. Copies of David Weinberger's book, "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual," will be provided to session attendees.
David Weinberger, uno de los ponentes, escribío sobre la marcha un post donde resumía el debate. Estas son algunas de las ideas que surgieron:
Blogs como espacios de aprendizaje (Will Richardson):
… thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas..."I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They're learning places."
Blogs como conversaciones asíncronas (Liz Lawley):
"It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can't do when you only have four hours a week in class." She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.
El conocimiento reside en la red, no en el sistema educativo (George Siemens):
the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.
Pero, ¿hasta que punto los contenidos que proporcionan los profesores son relevantes?:
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn't the center of the experience.
Liz: Content isn't irrelevant. If we're going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it's not a matter of pouring content into people.
Los mundos sintéticos educan para la imaginación (Douglas Thomas):
… he's concerned that we're training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they're not on the test. "Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum." MMORPGs are one way to do that. They're not just games; they're synthetic worlds.
