Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Performance-based assessments share the key characteristic of accurately measuring one or more specific course standards. They are also complex, authentic, process/product-oriented, open-ended, and time-bound.

In this post, I extend this idea into the work Lave did with Etienne Wenger, which has become known as Communities of Practice. As usual, this is a simplified interpretation of the theory, so if you wish to learn more, please read the associated literature.

Education professionals are using social media to share, collaborate and network.

Google+ has become one of the best resources for educators. Just like Facebook and Twitter, Google+ offers the ability to easily share content and connect with friends, peers and thought leaders. One key difference when compared with other social sites is that Google+ has robust tools for creating and maintaining communities. Any user can create, moderate and join communities. Many educators, instructional designers and technologists have done just that, creating public repositories of quality information and forums for addressing ed-tech topics.

Teaching and learning in the 21st Century is changing rapidly and teacher professional development needs to keep pace with these changes in a way that sustains and develops new knowledge and practice.

Resources for: social learning, social media and communities of practice

Hybrid Pedagogy is an academic and networked journal of learning, teaching, and technology that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses of technology and digital media in education.

It goes without saying that technology is changing education. Children’s brains are being rewired, universities are being threatened with extinction, and we will be in serious trouble if we ignore the transformative power of new technologies. We live in an information/knowledge economy where we are constantly connected to networks of information, our experiences become more and more mediated. It seems that technology changes everything, including education.

Or does it? It seems to me that so-called innovations attributed to technology in teaching and learning are mostly pedagogical strategies cloaked in digital media. Specifically, current trendy approaches that proclaim the transformative power of technology in education are really no more than misunderstandings. The term “approaches” I use liberally. Some practitioners would prefer their perspective of choice to be labeled a program, theory, or framework. This in itself is interesting, but beyond the scope of these reflections. If educational technology rhetoric is misleading, what lies beneath the language of innovation? - See more at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Plea_for_Pedagogy.html#sthash.CIlDKZRE.dpufIt

Presented at the Be Bettr conference on hacking education, London, 2011-01-14 For the newspaper mentioned at the end of the presentation, see http://goo.gl/PIKp