Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Blog #6

In the Jenkins piece they discussed collective intelligence and convergence which were the major concepts that stuck out to me. What I took from this is that Jenkins argues the reasons that popular sites such a Youtube are being banned from schools are because most do not think it is conducive to a learning environment. Jenkins believes social networking and other popular sites are typically banned should not and are not all that bad and can in fact help. 
Weinberger and Jenkins are similar in that they believe in the same basic principles that knowledge is everywhere and deciding that certain things exist in only certain places is not true on the modern web. We (the user) affect the way the Internet can function by collaboration. Traditional education tools are becoming dated and the Internet can act like a bridge to bring newer more effective means to teach (Prezi, Wiki, so on).

3 comments:

  1. Even a few hundred years ago pastimes like going to the opera, reading literature, watching plays were taught in schools and encouraged for many young adults and adults. Now days going to see a movie, watching youtube video's and television in general are frowned upon unless you are watching a news site, or maybe a play or something considered educational one hundred years ago. There is a gap between what we do for fun and what is considered educational these days. The internet holds possibility for education, from online books, to classes online, to short clips, blogs about modern society, pop culture. Online collaboration can help nurture discussion and i think that even classes on how to manage a social networking site can help kids and young adults to manage there image so it won't damage there future. Many middle school kids will put up inappropriate pictures or things that may harm them later in life when job searching. An adept understanding of how to manage the internet would help people treat the web like a learning tool also and encourage kids to use it to broaden there learning.

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  2. I thought Collective Intelligence and convergence was important in the Jenkins reading also. You make a good point about traditional education becoming dated. A personal example I can give for that is with math. I suck at math, am taking it right now, and I find sometimes just watching you tube videos from mymathteacher.com is way more useful than listening to my teacher. Our country has never been all that highly ranked in math and I know there is a big push for it these days so I think the more online math help that's out there the more successful in math the U.S can be.

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  3. Heh, I like that Lauren says, "I find sometimes just watching you tube videos from mymathteacher.com is way more useful than listening to my teacher." I totally agree! This is why sometimes I show y'all videos instead of talking, because I just realize there are some people who can either do it better and/or have already put something together (thus it seems silly for me to reinvent the wheel).

    I wish you had defined collective intelligence and convergence. You provided the "so what" here, which is cool, but it's unclear to me if you "get" the terms when you don't define them. I would've also been curious to hear a bit more about the connections you see between W and J. Thanks :)

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