Weekly Reading #10

The main points that I got from the webcast was that technology is not being used to its potential in this country.  Current education is limited; the focus is “looking good” through test scores.  We are focusing on the wrong things.  Just because a country’s education looks good on paper with high test scores, that does not mean there are entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.  Even though Asian Americans are achieving academically,  doesn’t mean they are achieving in the workplace.  America’s education isn’t getting worse; it’s never gotten better.  Even Albert Einstein said, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

I thought that Zhao made some very good points and agreed with his arguments.   I actually explored Zhao’s website; he had a list of conclusions, one of them that worded my conclusion of the argument made was this one, “To cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents is much more than adding an entrepreneurship course or program to the curriculum. It requires a paradigm shift—from employee-oriented education to entrepreneur-oriented education, from prescribing children’s education to supporting their learning, and from reducing human diversity to a few employable skills to enhancing individual talents.”  

When I think to previous readings this semester, several chime in with Zhao’s argument.  “Children (and adults) learn best when engaged in complex, socially constructed, personally relevant, creative composition and interpretation of texts that incorporate a variety of meaningful communicative modes or symbol systems (Sanders).”  This came from Weekly Reading Three.  Personally relevant learning is most important.  Beating a country’s test score is not a personally relevant goal.

It is important that teachers don’t just “use it to say they used it.”  Effective, powerful, and meaningful writing is the ultimate goal. “Knobel and Lankshear(2006, p. 91) suggest that for effective powerful writing to take place using blogs, the focus should be on ‘genuine affinity spaces’ that will interest and challenge students into writing effective pieces for significant purposes (Adlington 2008).”

Digital texts are not as linear as printed texts. They open up the creative mind.  "...the reading path of printed texts is well established, and although you can certainly move around a text, the trajectory is linear. With digital texts, however, the reading path is “to-be-constructed” by the reader (or by the image or nature of the multimodal text; Kress, 2003). When reading online, you do not know where you will end up at the end of the reading event (Roswell 2009)."

Zhao mentions that we need to be supporters not prescribers of our learners.  Students need authentic education.  "As our relationship with the technical world evolves, it is our responsibility as educators to find authentic ways to shape learning that encompasses this form of digital literacy because reading and writing is at the center of this practice (Carey).”

We need to teach according to the child’s culture, not the world’s culture.  "This analysis has shown how children introduce themselves through their writing, how they signal identity in their online communication and how they act as bricoleurs, borrowing discursive fragments from popular culture (GUY)."

If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go on its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Reference:

Adlington, R., & Hansford, D. (2008, July 6). Digital spaces and young people’s online authoring: Challenges for teachers. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from National Conference for Teachers of English and Literacy: http://www.englishliteracyconference.com.au/files/documents/AdlingtonHansford-Digital%20spaces.pdf

Carey, J. (n.d.). Instant Messaging: A Literacy Event. Retrieved June 30, 2013, from Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6DFAmexYq7vYWdXV2RacF9EVXc/edit

GUY MERCHANT (2004) Imagine All that Stuff Really Happening: narrative and identity in children's on-screen writing, E-Learning and Digital Media, 1(3), 341-356. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2004.1.3.2

Rowsell, J., & Burke, A. (2009, October). Reading by Design: Two Case Studies of Digital Reading Practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(2), pp. 106-118. doi:10.1598/JAAL.53.2.2

Sanders, Jennifer and Albers, Peggy. Multimodal Literacies: An Introduction. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ZnRBedCgj_IJ:https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/32142Intro_x.pdf+are+literacies+and+Discourses+used+interchanably&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjE9pBd2JmN_g_xuDVosAj01ImYkr6u-oyjriG0tREXG8fzwbyeuhcmDw0rrbTA1rug-bgizHwuiUlocJcQwdvcCiPOxZYWVExNgQ8BmulksyeRUcUX4LJmfxLlw7e8UTdG2TuT&sig=AHIEtbSZ7RHTNL_Rfe2bglUQRg9zzCD2JA