Pedagogy 2.0 for teachers

[Room5ians may ignore this]

From an interesting article in Innovate,

Volume 4, Issue 5

June/July 2008

An official publication of the Fischler School

Future Learning Landscapes:

Transforming Pedagogy through Social Software

Catherine McLoughlin and Mark J. W. Lee

"Pedagogy 2.0: Teaching and Learning for the Knowledge Age

In striving to achieve these goals, educators need to revisit their conceptualization of teaching and learning. Educators need to engage meaningfully with the world in which students live and strive to integrate technologies and tasks that are meaningful and relevant to the demands of today’s networked society (NMC 2007). The connectivist model is particularly promising in the context of Web 2.0.

Connectivism describes learning as a process of creating a network of personal knowledge, a view that is congruent with the ways in which people engage in socialization and interaction in the Web 2.0 world—a world that links minds, communities, and ideas while promoting personalization, collaboration, and creativity leading to knowledge creation. Such processes lead to an interdependence of ideas, individuals, communities, and information networks, all supported by technology; a Web 2.0 pedagogy will capitalize on this interdependence. We call this approach Pedagogy 2.0. Pedagogy 2.0 is defined by:

• Content: Microunits that augment thinking and cognition by offering diverse perspectives and representations to learners and learner-generated resources that accrue from students creating, sharing, and revising ideas;
• Curriculum: Syllabi that are not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of bite-sized modules that are interdisciplinary in focus and that blend formal and informal learning;
• Communication: Open, peer-to-peer, multifaceted communication using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;
• Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes that are iterative, dynamic, and performance and inquiry based;
• Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are rich in media and global in reach;
• Scaffolds: Support for students from a network of peers, teachers, experts, and communities; and
• Learning tasks: Authentic, personalized, learner-driven and learner-designed, experiential tasks that enable learners to create content."

The magazine has many interesting articles and staff may be interested in reading online as they consider new ways to educate.