This first chapter really puts an urgency into rethinking our current education delivery method. I liked the term "flatteners" in regards to technology taking away old barriers and stratification around accessibility. This idea of changing from "command and control" to "connect and collaborate" is a huge paradigm shift for educators to make, I believe. In its simplest form, I compare this to individual standardized test taking vs multi-student collaborative projects. Which one "tests" the knowledge? Or is it more a question of what should we test? Does the ultimate product by many prove the mastery of concepts or must we do an individual evaluation of each person's level of mastery?
As the open source movement and the web 2.0 tools have emerged, it seems to have put all students on the same playing field, for the most part. The tools are there, so how will each student use them? Internationally, we are seeing students committed to their learning and using these tools to be competitive. At this point, educators are just beginning to discover these tools and school districts seems to be struggling with how to "control" them.
I've always had trouble with the gatekeeper mentality. This has prompted me to teach Shakespeare to all 8th graders and focus on vocabulary so they can skip being intimidated by certain academia. The idea that the web is not longer guarded by gatekeepers is exciting. This new change has put the control in each users hands for how much they want to interact, create, and share.
The section on blogs was of particular interest for me. After learning about RSS feeds, I added an RSS feed to the home page of my class wiki. Last weeks assignment was to review this blog (Young Adult novel recommendations) and discuss the idea of blogs. Is this something that they would be willing to do themselves. Overwhelmingly, the students described themselves as "not a blog person." As if this is an official description. You either ARE or ARE NOT a blog person. How strange. I have to guess that many of them do not understand much about blogs and how to find blogs of interest. Table 1.1 showed the blogger survey results as the biggest reason people blog is to express creativity. The next biggest reason is to document personal experiences and share them with others. I have to believe that students would be just as excited about these reasons if they understood more about blogging.
My favorite line from this chapter was, "Technology is second nature to them and then accept and use it without question. School lags behind."
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