2010: two years on

I haven't posted for two years *blush*.
So what have I been doing since then? Learning a huge amount, actually, particularly about e-learning and mLearning tools and pedagogical uses. I guess sometimes learning is like life was like for Henderson The Rain King (Saul Bellow)- 'truth comes in blows'. The blows I've had have been in a good way -those OMG moments. Getting my iPhone was one of those - suddenly I could see how I could work more flexibly, be in contact when I needed to without being tied to a place or computer, and still be productive. Another blow has been hearing how Steve Wheeler uses and conceptualises Web 2.0 tools educatively. It's given me lots of ideas for changing what I do with my students - it's that lovely synergy of moving ideas on.

Perhaps too, this change in how I undertake my own pedagogical practice is what teachers do- that constant search to make learning more meaningful for learners. It's about constant experimentation, sometimes without knowing what will happen, how it will go, or if it will even be successful in relation to the plan. This means that teaching isn't always a safe thing to do. Instead, it can be destabilising -for me as a teacher, or my students. Sometimes it's the pedagogical design that makes it so, sometimes it's the nature of the experiment.

Experiments, by their nature, are about what you don't yet know. Last year, I tried to model to my secondary graduate students that you can still try out stuff, even when you know it all beforehand. In such cases, it's about learning as you go with your students, in an iterative process. I can't have done a good job of modelling this, because many of those students thought (going by their end of year evaluations) that they just thought I didn't know what I was doing, and was therefore ill-equipped to teach them. What I guess I hadn't done was make explicit - on a regular basis - that I did know what I was doing, pedagogically, but I was trying out tools I hadn't used before, in order to see what it was like to use them. This was about teaching as inquiry - judging the efficacy of the tool/approach through learning from both doing, and students' feedback. This then fed into ways to adjust and adapt what I would do next time. It's that process of development and refinement we engage in as educators, as we ponder the question 'is this helping my students learn?'

A big experiment this year was to re-design one of the teaching sessions (a 4hr block) and get these graduates and career-changers who wanted to be secondary teachers to examine some websites. it was about checking they understood the notions of 'truth' and validity on the web. Four of the six sites I provided for this task were spoof sites (treeoctopus, guineaworm, floral sculpture, Victorian robots) the other two were political- a Holocaust denial site, and a misogynist one. Questions they responded to (in small groups about one site each) were:

• In 1-3 sentences, explain what the site is about and what you're expected to understand from the content on first glance.
• What do you learn from this site?
• What do you think of the site: Would you recommend it to anyone? What leads to your decision?
• Note two key ideas to report to the whole class about the site.
  

Most of the students, I'm sad to say, were sucked in, taking the sites on face value. The groups examining the tree octopus were most likely to twig that it was a send-up. Some were concerned about the content on other sites, but few engaged in some detective work to find out more or verify the provenance of the site, its content or its creator.

The questions were designed to elicit critical thinking, but perhaps I should have also followed up with a session on how to read between the lines of questions...Perhaps I'll add that to next year's lesson. When they learned what the reality of the sites was, they were, generally, stunned. Some were embarrassed and probably didn't appreciate feeling that way.

However, the news is pleasing. Later on teaching practicum, some of these same people attempted to show their students how to be critical readers of web sources. So, while the 'lesson' I provided created some discomfort at the time, the learning appeared to be significant for them. Yes!

So, what does that mean? Perhaps it means that being challenged, discomforted or destabilised is important for learning to have more than a fleeting effect. Perhaps sometimes, even when you aren't sure what will happen, brilliant things you have no control over, can occur beyond the lesson you design, and you can take heart because you created the conditions precipitating a ripple in other people's thinking so they too, can help others learn something new.