July 6 third blog post

A whole lot of potential in this little girl!

Today we watched a really inspirational video presentation by Sugata Mitra. I was wowed by his experiments involving students in developing countries   In his work, these children could access learning when provided with nothing more than computers and Internet access. It was amazing to me how quickly these children took to the technology and were able to quickly and collaboratively solve problems and not only that- to retain what they learned in their inquiries.  Another interesting thing I learned from this video is power of the 'grandmother method'; by providing children with a ton of unbridled encouragement and positivity, and by asking them to show what they know, they can make great gains in their acquisition and application of knowledge.  I have always had an interest in education in developing communities. When we went to Ethiopia to adopt our daughter, I was struck by the plethora of children who do not or cannot go to school.  The video we watched made me think of all the little children we left behind in Addis Ababa and it made me more hopeful for the future of these disadvantaged children and others like them around the world.  Each and every one of them have so much potential if they are given the chance!

                                  ***

 In terms of a professional application of our class experience today, I wanted to share a little about an intiative I have been involved in over the past few years.  I have been working with teaching Hutterite students via distance learning. These young people live in sheltered colonies- and hold tight to their conservative religious values and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, these communities are acknowledging the value in providing educational opportunities for all their young people (at least to the end of high school) and are slowly embracing technology as a means to this end because they live in remote communities that often do not have enough children to warrant having a separate high school. I see tremendous potential for learning management systems and social media technology to help provide quality learning experiences for these children. Some colonies are more progressive and are employing web CT to connect colony schools within the province- while others are still wary of the Internet. At present, many of the colonies connect students with telephone conferences that support paper/pen correspondence courses which operate through Canada Post.

I taught German through the telephone conference course for a year- it was really frustrating on many levels. I often found myself thinking - 'if only I could teach this course on Blackboard- or just have Internet access- it would be so much more engaging!'. I continue to be part of the development team that is currently rewriting the syllabus for the German correspondence courses that these students take. It is my hope that eventually we can get these materials online and use various tools to help these students connect with each other in collaborative and communicative ways.

More Hutterite youth- especially girls
are getting high school diplomas
than ever before-
 thanks to distance learning!

Culturally, as outsiders, we cannot impose our values on their society- however the limitations presented by the archaic technology limit the learning experience significantly for these Hutterite students.  In time, I feel that this too will change. It is a constant challenge for these people to navigate a balance between allowing their children an education, while maintaining their culture and their way of life. For them, it isn't that they have no resources to access the technology -given that most colonies are quite financially secure. Rather, it's that the technology itself opens a pandora's box of ethical issues.  It is an interesting evolution that is happening right here in Canada. It has been a great learning experience to be involved in this endeavour.

On another note...
here are some useful things I learned today that I didn't know before:

• how to take a screenshot,
• how to make a wordle,
• how to download a document from google docs
• that moodle operates like d2l (which I already know how to use)* this encourages me to try out this free LMS

ps: My wiki is up and running  - feel free to check it out.
 Link to my wikispace