Blog+response+1

I read Mira's blog post this morning, and my response is mostly - yes, yes, yes and yes. I've been blogging, tweeting and using other social networks for years now. When I need to know something, and my Google Fu doesn't deliver the answer, Twitter often does. Twitter makes great suggestions for technical questions, finds references for me when I can't find them anywhere and allows me to share my experience when other people ask. Blogs have taught me about social justice, living with disability, autism spectrum and lolcatz. YouTube has taught me how to knit and how to do needle tatting. Coming back to uni has been a bit of a rude shock. I've done all my learning mediated by people (IRL or online) for so long that the idea of actually attending lectures and reading text books feels so inefficient. When I was asked to research a kind of lesson, I asked a teacher I know. Why reinvent the wheel?

In that sociology course we did last semester we talked about cultural capital and social capital. Social capital has dominated my life for nearly two decades now, and I find working and learning in a social vacuum to be strange and tedious. So my advice to those new to the idea of learning networks (professional or otherwise) is to embrace them. Together, we are much smarter than any of us is alone, and learning is so much more fun that way.

The other thing that screams at me when I read Mira's post and think about my reaction to it, is that a huge proportion of a school student's life, and virtually all of their assessment is done in that social vacuum. All the theoretical papers we've read, all saying much the same thing with different labels, have had very little impact in most classrooms - and absolutely none on the Board of Studies. That woman who spoke to us from the BoS very proudly announced that the entire K-12 curriculum is worked backwards from the HSC exam. That statement alone is almost enough to make me want to chuck in the idea of teaching altogether. It seems to me that one aspect of authentic learning is authentic teaching, and it's hard to feel like I'm teaching authentically, when I'm teaching to a test, in a way that I would never choose to learn myself.