Aug 01 2008
Stewing on School 2.0
I have been pondering the ingredients of School 2.0. The School 2.0 Manifesto wiki has me considering what makes a nutritious, hearty, and inviting mix for learners.
One of the elements of the learning stew I have been serving up in class is drama. I am really excited by the enthusiasm and deep learning that comes from enactment (drama) strategies. Jeff Wilhelm’s book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension got me going. All of his books do. The strategies he describes, like role plays, tableaux, and mantle of the expert, hook kids and connect them to content in an active and personal way; they play with the language, the ideas, the images. They explore the possibilities of what if? and get closer to the answers of how come?
In examining the question “Is Web 2.0 going to lead to School 2.0?”, David Warlick says in one of my favourite posts,
Students stop being mirrors, and instead become amplifiers. Their job is not merely to reflect what they encounter, but to add value to it. Content and skills are no longer the end product, but they become raw materials, with which students learn to work and play and share. Information is captured by the learner, processed, added to, remixed, and then shared back, to be captured by another learner/teacher and reprocessed. Each exchange and improvement not only runs on the energy of students (learner/teacher) curiosity and intrinsic need to play, work, and communicate information, but it also generates energy, which the teacher (teacher/learner) channels.
Warlick is not talking about drama strategies at all, but he could be. I find it powerful how neatly his ideas transfer from technology to other active, engaging methods that don’t necessarily involve or require a tech element. Project-based learning, inquiry, and math explorations come to mind.
So here is where my [limited] stew metaphor takes me, for now at least:
Technology is not the carrot that students chew own (technology as enticing add-in), nor is it the bowl that contains the learning (technology as sole vehicle for learning). Technology is one of the spoons that stirs the mix and lets learners serve understanding and experience to themselves and others.
Hmmm. Metaphors have a habit of getting away on me. Better get out while the gettin’s good.
