Week 5 Class Reflection

I am a rock, I am an iiiiiiiiii-i-island...

I really like the idea of engaging students with a "hook" as an introduction to a lesson. Our reading last week discussed this method in detail, but in class I began to understand how critically important this is. I saw a quote from Jeannie Fulbright posted on a teacher-friend's Facebook page, "If the purpose for learning is to score well on a test, we've lost sight of the real reason for learning." I don't necessarily agree with this faith-based, homeschooling mom's other views, but I think she hit the nail on the head with that bit of wisdom. I believe that I am a product of "teaching to the test". I can honestly say that I know just enough about most things to be a mild threat on Trivia Night, but I have no real expert knowledge on any topic. School never 1) taught me to think for myself, 2) encouraged me to transfer whatever knowledge of ideas or processes I might have to other contexts, or 3) prepared me for anything other than allowing me to get a pretty darn good score on the ACT. That pretty much pisses me off. Though I always enjoyed school, I never had a passion to learn. This is why it took me so long to figure out what I really wanted to be when I "grew up".

I appreciate what Jane McGonigal is doing- not necessarily because it involves gaming, but because she is focusing on transforming an activity that many people happily engage in for entertainment into something that these same people can learn from and help others with. She understands that learners must be passionate about what they are doing or the knowledge being presented to them will not be absorbed and transferred in order to create any meaning from it. Gaming is her "hook". I need to figure out what mine will be.

Our in-class bonus blog discussion was interesting. As we shared who we followed, I realized that all four blogs that I picked overlapped with other members in our cohort. Haha- what does this mean about me? Interesting. My biggest take-away from our talk was our question of who is the blogger blogging to? It used to be that bloggers had some sort of cache when not absolutely everyone was doing it. Check out this paper on the influence of early political blogs: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf

My favorite quote from the paper is “Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few.” (Katie Hafner, “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops,” New York Times, 27 May 2004). I totally agree with this, because for many, blogging is merely a method to "self-publish" in a manner of speaking- forget vanity presses. I have a friend who is blogging about greening your condo association with the goal of publishing his blog into a book- not really a mainstream topic of interest. I am his only follower so far... I think I'm the only one who has the link to his blog actually. Sometimes, as I followed my library land bloggers, I felt that I was the only reader of some of their posts as well. Again, librarians are not very good at promoting themselves, and though some like to think of themselves as "rock star librarians", they are only kidding themselves. I'm not saying that librarians' blogs don't have relevance in the blogosphere- far from that! I have found most of the blogs extremely interesting and informative, but we need to understand that we are a small part of a huge virtual world, and it will take more than blogging about issues in librarianship to other librarians to address real-life situations that affect our daily working environments and our futures.

Week 4 Class Reflection

If the average gamer plays 10,080 hours by the time he is 21, then my 11-year old must be WAY above average. Let's see, 24 hours in a day, multiplied by 365 days, multiplied by 21 years...is 183,960 hours of total "living"time. So by my calculations, my son has already played about 6,570 hours, at 3 hours a day on average (even though his "limit" is 1 hour a day on the weekend and a half-hour a day on weekdays) since he was 5 years old (when my brother gave him his first gaming device, a Nintendo DS). So, if Evan keeps at the same gaming pace he will have "gamed" for 17,520 hours total by the time he is 21, that will be 11% of his life. I think I'm going to be sick. Of course, AFTER I graduate I will have all the time in the world to be the attentive mom that I was before and restrict my son's screen time to the aforementioned limits, or at least encourage him to play the "educational" games that will enhance the learning he does in the classroom. Yeah, right! He's having the time of his life right now...he will probably encourage me to pursue a doctorate degree after graduation;)

I totally agree with Jane McGonigal's TED talk, many gamers find more enjoyment in the virtual world than in the real world. It is easy to be disenchanted with a world that is not of your own creation, one that constantly puts limits on you, prevents you from getting to where you want to go, and demands things that you can not easily obtain...like credit, time, health, and energy- but this is where we live, in the world and we have to start improving it. Like right now.

Maybe we need to assess the real world in comparison to a gamer's virtual world to understand how we can make our real world a better place. Infinite life? Not so much. Unlimited materials? Nope. Infinite money-earning opportunities that involve simple bodily movements like running through bags of gold hanging in mid-air? That would be nice. Heck, maybe I should up my gaming time from about 2 hours a month and take a virtual vacation. If we could get all the gamers at SI to play the games developed by the Institute For The Future, just imagine what could be accomplished!

Speaking of assessment, I had some interesting experiences at my elementary placement this week. I taught a few lessons that included a student writing component. Every time as each class was wrapping up, students began to hand me their work, and every time I told them, "No, we reviewed it in class- you can take it home with you." During the course of a lesson, as they were doing their work I would ask them to share it with me and suggest improvements if necessary. By doing so, I suppose I was engaging in a type of immediate formative assessment, but I always had the feeling that students wanted more. It could be just a reflex that students expect to hand in their work at the end of the day or the end of a class, but it seemed to me that many of my students were looking for some other assurance that they had completed the task sufficiently. Maybe my quick "assessments" would have been more effective if accompanied by a gold star?