It's the online course I've been working on through the University of Edinburgh that has kept me away from my blog this past six weeks. The course itself was called "e-Learning and Digital Cultures" and was via Coursera.com, a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Whilst I have studied online previously I have never participated and worked alongside 40,000 others at the same time.
The final assessment for the course is a digital artifact and mine is a provocative piece.....a reflection from the future, created in Prezi. My aim in this presentation it to to force the viewer to think about the future whilst reflecting on both the past and current education systems.
The course itself exposed me to many new ideas such as Utopian vs Dystopian arguments around technology and for me I always referred it back to the education system. Week One was about arguments I hear on a daily basis and upon reading Prensky's paper again (see below), it also allowed me to reflect on the following quotes from Woodie Flowers, Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, who also attended the Adaptive eLearning Conference at UNSW in July 2012. He was interviewed about digital opportunities in higher education and had the opinion that if properly embraced will profoundly change university education.
His last line of reflection and the journalist premises the quote with 'the biggest hurdles are inertia and human weakness':
" Teachers are human beings who are happy picking up last year's notes and walking into class and repeating the same thing..... To do the new thing requires that you focus less on research and create new worlds in which students can learn. Across all education sectors, the role of the teacher and lifting expectations are causing "disruption"
I hope that upon reading this you will see the inspiration and influence behind my presentation. The "digital opportunities" gained through this course has been truly valuable and whilst I work in the field of eLearning it's important we continue to dip in occasionally to the world of a student, to experience what they experience. I just hope that they enjoy the freedom that a course like this allows, to study when I want to study, to participate how I want to participate (in this case Google+ and Twitter, rather than the Facebook option) and to pursue my interests through the further readings and research that was available.
(Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf )
I like the way the message was presented: simply direct to the point, the visual images slightly more powerful than the text and the background music implying the future. Good composition.
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