Wright - Digital Natives

Reflection #1 - Tony says, "A major part of school is building social skills.  If we were to always communicate through technology and not in person, then the way we would view life would change dramatically."  As I'm reading that, what I'm thinking about is what I used to say to friends of mine who play World of Warcraft (or Warcrack as we also called it), who have this huge daily interaction with people they have never actually met, have no idea what they actually look like, and don't even refer with real names, just character names.  I always thought it was crazy.  Why spend so much time working on these "fake" relationships and friends when you have "real" friends you could hang out with and play games with.  I reckon this is a sign that I am more of an immigrant than a native.

As I was writing that above, I was struck by how we are at this very moment communicating via technology.

Reflection #2 - I saw two things that made me nod, both of them in the same vein as my WoW thought earlier.  T'Nisha says "When people focus too much on technology, they lose sight of the true purpose of technology, which is to facilitate learning in the classroom."  Especially as we think about how we can enhance our learning tools (especially thinking about what Gayla has planned), we still need to keep in mind that the technology has to work for us, not the other way around.  I guess we have to keep that balance in play, how much effort do we expend on keeping the technology up to date versus the effort we expend doing the teaching.

Anya says "...relationships are a driving force in the learning process."  I guess I don't have anything else to say about that, other than there it is.  I think that's very true, especially for tutors.  Because we operate at a one-on-one level with students, we have the ability to develop a more in depth relationship with a student, and hopefully leverage that relationship to help the student reach their educational goals.  I guess I did have something else to say about it.

Reflection #3 - Crowd-sourcing was the word that popped into my head as they were talking about this participatory class environment, deciding with them (Next Gen students) instead of for them.  Which I think is less useful for us as tutors, because we lack the crowd.  I think we can still use a variety of active learning methods to help students.  And certainly we can work with the student to develop that action plan, the way in which we tutor and help the student.