Comix, Collaboration and Digital Pedagogy

I have had the chance to read articles written about cyber slang and I have come to understand the obsessive behavior of the learners to use acronyms and slangs. This is the twenty first century characterized by technology and a fast changing world. You try to fight the system, you are left behind and have no one to blame but yourself.

Online collaboration is not an easy task. As a student of CCTI, I have had some collaboration online in the previous three courses working on one task or other. It is not an easy thing if the people you are grouped with are facing challenges such as electricity or internet problems or are hindered by family issues here and there. However, it is fun being in position to collaborate with colleagues and sharing ideas. It eases the work and reduces the tension in fulfilling the task.

I have learnt to create a comic strip and it has been an exciting experience. I have always admired the people who created comics for newspapers. I have now discovered the secret. Presenting my understanding in a comic strip has been a bit of a challenge too but once one masters the steps it becomes very easy.

The potential this holds is that;

·        It creates room for social media to develop its own language of communication that will embrace all users of technology because of its ease and minimization of time and space.  

·        It encourages even those who would have been reluctant to join digital globalization to come on board, since they do not want to be left out.
·        It promotes understanding of how technology can be used to serve our interests and the interests of the learners and much more.

 

How a Changing Education Landscape is Affecting Me and My Teaching Practice

 
The Changing Education Landscape is giving me an opportunity to explore various ways of teaching so as to make a greater contribution to the education of my learners.  First of all, the education system has been so static that it has failed to address the problems of society, and yet so many cultural and social changes have taken place since the designing of that system. The system is so boring to the students, places the children of given ages at the same level and subjects them to standardized testing. This is wrong since children have differing abilities and interests.  The Changing Education Landscape is meant to address such issues and has awakened me to the fact that there is need to think differently about human capacity.  I have learnt that in order for effective learning to take place, children should be allowed to mix according to their interests, and they should be allowed to explore, and that learning is more effective when there is collaboration involved as Sir Ken  says; 

"Most learning happens in groups" and that "Collaboration is the stuff of growth".

Separating the learners and judging them separately is not the best way to educate. The Changing Education Landscape promotes Information revolution. As people comment on a given topic, more about that topic is likely to come up through investigations and research. As users of digital technology, we are still failing to differentiate between its intended use especially the students who engage in watching porn movies and entertainment mostly.    

With digital technology and literacy we agree that as teachers the process of dictating notes to students cannot be part of this program instead we should give them room to find out things for themselves. At the same time there is need to give them a conducive environment that would enable them to carry out their own research and to learn. Allow them to curate the relevant sites for learning. Encourage and give them room to freely explore and just watch them being captivated by their discoveries. Through collaboration, research and investigation the learners can get more informed about a topic or issue. Learners can make their own choice of their publishing platform since there are a number of them available already, and they can also use technology to create anything beautiful like a wordle.

However, all this is not without challenges. First and foremost, the learners may end up more knowledgeable than the teacher and this is embarrassing the more reason why teachers need to be on board. Secondly, the time allocated for the subject on the time table may hinder rather than promote progress in cases of face to face programs. Thirdly, some of the students come from poor families and may end up left behind because they lack the tools. Also, there is a danger of the learners being misinformed in case the sites have not been properly evaluated since this is a platform where everybody is free to post anything.  Lastly, the students can easily divert to irrelevant and destructive sites especially when they are working on their own or away from everybody else.

 View my wordle.