Evolvement of Chinese Character

Shifting to 21st Century Learning

Shifting To 21st Century Learning

View more presentations from Silvia Tolisano.

Reflection on final project-Podcasting Chinese Song

Teaching Mandarin Chinese to foreign students has been always a challenge to teachers. As the alphabet language system is so different from the pictograph one. The students need to take quite a lot of time to be used to the character writings and the sentence structures.Normally foreign people, especially westerners are afraid of the complicated strokes of Chinese character and the four tones of inflection. It seems that they have already had many worries before they start to learn this language.

However, Mandarin Chinese is unexpectably easy in its grammar comparing to English, French or Spanish, of course, here I mean the modern Chinese language. Among the four language skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, the foundamental ones are listening and speaking. When you feel comfortable to have oral communication in a foreign language, you will have more self-motivation to develop your reading and writing skills. It is pretty hard if you do it in an opposite way. Many people speak their mother-tone language well without being necessarily capable of reaidng and writing.

Having these above observations, we can draw this conclusion: Being able to speak and listen to one language well helps shape our thinking in the target language. We pronounce the word silently when we read, we speak to ourselve in mind before we write it down. So how to let students listen more and speak more in foreign language class is very important. To make teaching of speaking and listening very interesting, engaging the students instead of enraging the students is a challenging task.

Traditional way of teaching these two skills is not more than asking students to ' read after me' or 'follow the tapes'...or do role play and so on...Most of time this become either very boring or quite we create difficult situation to students.

Thanks to the media tools in this digital age, Audacity is an excellent teaching tools for training students to get used to a foreign language spontaneously. Here is how I do it:

-Firstly, I find two popular Chinese song for teenagers.The song word sheet attached:

1) 没有人会比我更爱你; 2) 我们都是好孩子

The song words is beautifully written. It is a wonderful teaching material in which I can teach new vocabulary and sentence structures.

-Then I convert the song into mp3 format( Song 1; Song2) so that I can import it into Audacity, where I can make my podcast.

-Edit the podcast: create a new track under the imported music song track, click the 'record' button, then I start to recite the song poem, meanwhile the song is playing as background;

-Save the file as mp3 file and now you can listen to my podcast.

Students enjoy the song and music, meanwhile listening to my reciting of the beautiful song words. I especially choose the songs with the key sentences being repeated many times , so that students can remember these words and sentences unconsciously when they are indulging themselves in the fantastic musical world.

After class, students need to finish their own project: In groups, students present the podcast production " my favourite song " .The class learn all the songs produced by each group including the vocabulary, sentences, culture, literature....And Lastly, students can download the favourite podcasts produced by their classmates into their ipod. Isn't amazing?

Cyberbullying, Whose responsibility is it?

Cyberbullying is one of the nagetive sides of the digital age. Its being worse than f2f bully lies in:

1) You have no way to escape from the virtual bullying online group;

2) Because it is 'invisible' in our physical world, parents,teachers and school officials are not aware of this kind of bully going on in some teenagers' lives.

Most of time, the students who are being bullied try to keep it with themselves. They do not share this "humiliation" with family or teachers untill they could not take it anymore one day. The worst consequence for this could be individual commiting suicide or all of sudden a bloody campus massacre might happen.

It is serious thing in this digital-native generation. No one seems to be able to survive without cell phone. When Dad Banned Text Messaging, we understand this family's frustration in this situation.

What are the appropriate actions should parents take for this?

• Parents firstly should have the knowledge of how to identify the symptoms when the kid is being cyberbullied;
• Parents should report the cyberbullying case to the kid's school and the relevant institutions
• Student should keep all the evidences that the cyberbully is provable

The question here is whose responsibility for these young people to be safe online?

Harassment occurred off campus so jurisdiction unclear

• Schools have the authority to suspend or expel students for bullying fellow students over the internet, in text messaging or by other electronic means.
• Anti-bullying programs are to be brought to schools and to integrate anti-bullying education into school curriculum.
• Students should have the awareness of the consequences of cyberbullying and to be educated on the appropriate online behavior.
• See ISB High School Cyber-safety Week

The Power of the Web lies in Connection of People and Collective Intelligence

credit to Nick White Photo by ShoZu
This morning I logged into my twitter (just registered last night!). I see Kim Cofino and Jutecht. From Kim, her latest message mentions the voicethread library from the other twitter librareanne; From Jutecht, he shares a travelling service web which is unbelievably advanced of any kind of travel agency. I can go on and on to those countless educator twitters connected to
Kim and Jutecht navigating the eye-opening webpages where I

found the breath-taking media tools for teaching and learning. So What is this you think? It is the Connection power of the Web.

The traditional business meeting can be held wherever you are via skype. This web-power has already caused great reform in our business life:

"...a software firm in Palo Alto, Calif., Last year they began using Skype, a program that lets them make free calls over the Internet, with better sound quality than regular phones, using headsets connected to their PCs. Callers simply click on a name in their Skype contact lists, and if the person is there, they connect and talk just like on a regular phone call. Better quality at no cost...Almost 90% of the firm's $2,000 monthly long-distance phone bill has vanished. With 41 million people now using Skype, plus 150,000 more each day..."

With the rapid growth of the web connection power, Collective intelligence has shown its profound impact on all areas of human being's society. Here are the changes taking place:
Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business

• New Economic Order
  --Online Customers' production design and marketing
  "...Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters.
  "More companies are starting to understand the logic. If they can get others to help them design and create products, they end up with ready-made customers -- and that means far less risk in the tricky business of creating new goods and markets. So businesses are accessing the cyberswarm to improve everything from research and development to marketing…" Corporate planners are even starting to use the wisdom of online crowds to predict the future, forecasting profits and sales more precisely..."

---Other information-based industries, such as entertainment, media, and publishing, that are rapidly going digital.

"People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs"

"The five-year-old online paper OhmyNews in South Korea has marshaled 36,000 'citizen journalists' to write up to 200 stories a day on everything from political protests to movies. Its popularity with 1 million daily visitors has made it the sixth-most influential media outlet in Korea, according to a national magazine poll -- topping one of the three television networks."

"Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds."

• New Region of Higher Education in web2.0
  University of the People is open for enrollment in April 2009.
  
  " What colleges should learn from newspapers' decline?"
  
  In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, "Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ...
  "According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year."
  
  Elite institutions like Stanford University and Yale University are giving away extremely good lectures on the Internet, free. Web sites like Academic Earth are organizing those and thousands more like them into "playlists," which is really just iPodspeak for "curricula." Every year the high schools graduate another three million students who have never known a world that worked any other way.
  
  "the public university still looks like something of a middleman here — and in the long run, the Internet doesn't treat middlemen kindly. To survive and prosper, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of lower prices.

• Government 2.0: Broadcast Democracy to Participatory Democracy

Harness the genie of Citizen Engagement By Don Tapscott
For far too long, we’ve been living in what I’ve called a broadcast democracy. Voters only count during election time. They have little or no influence in between elections, when the lawmakers and influencers are in charge and citizenry is inert. The “you vote, I rule” model was all that was possible, until recently.

What the system has lacked until now are mechanisms enabling government to benefit from the wisdom and insight that a nation can collectively offer — on an ongoing basis.Courtesy of the Internet, public officials can now solicit citizen input at almost no cost, by providing Web-based background information, online discussion, and feedback mechanisms.

There are lots of Internet-enabled ways to engage America, from policy wikis, citizen juries, deliberative polling, ideation contests, and virtual town halls. I call one of the most promising the digital brainstorm.
Also check out this web: Apps for democracy

The signficants of rethinking copyright laws in Web 2.0 World

It has always been extremely restricted issues regarding the off-internet copyrighted materials.
These include all the intellectual properties owned by those creators in every industry in the world. What is the purpose of the copyright?

"...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Though I have doubt about the accuracy of the above explaination of the purpose of copyright. I understand it explains part of the whole issue. We must also admit that copyright shows respects for the hard work and efforts of the creator and protect the work from being copied and shared without contributing financially to the original creators or companies. It is just that most of time, the traditional copyright owners or the laws make it impossible for the fair use of the copyrighted materials. What is the fair use? Simply allow the others to re-use the copyrighted works by the means of value-added, transformative, repurpose, remix of the original works.

"Many believe that the traditional approach to copyright protection is obsolete. As tools such as wikis and blogs are increasingly used for teaching and learning, black-or-white copyright protection inhibits the opportunities these applications provide...In some cases, individuals who have the time and wherewithal to seek formal permission to use intellectual property are unable to locate the copyright owner or even determine whether the work is protected" --7 things you should know about Creative Commons--Why is it significant?

21st century is the age of digital and collaboration. Creative Commons is introduced to the world just at the right time. What is Creative Commons : an alternative to traditional copyright...Creative Commons allows copyright owners to release some of those rights while retaining others, with the goal of increasing access to and sharing of intellectual property...Seeing the need for options besides 'public domain' and 'all rights reserved', the creators of Creative Commons sought to establish a middle ground of 'some rights reserved' that respects intellectual property while expanding the acceptable uses of protected materials.

And Who is doing Creative Commons : Higher Education is rooted in the belief that the free exchange of knowledge is fundamental to the common good, and faculty and researchers in large numbers have begun using Creative Commons licenses to facilitate a climate of openness and sharing. Granting explicit permission for certain uses of one's scholarly material expands opportunities for collaborative work and increases the professional stature of individuals whose creative output is used in other academic efforts."

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Other than the above benefits that educators and learners have, I think of a few other significants in the invention of Creative Commons:

• Everyone has the great potential for its work to get accepted and shared popularly.
  Traditionally, non-website( off-internet) intellectual property is published by the commercial organizations only when the creative works are accepted and recognized by authorities such as experts or professors in the corresponding areas, the values of the creative works is being identified or predicted before it is released to the public. Morever, most of time, such publications occured mainly due to the identity of the writer who is either a public figure or already had the sound reputation in his professional area, which therefore the publishing of their works can bring profits to the publishers, in another words, that kind of works have the market values even though some of those works are not written in good quality or do not have sound value at all, or at least not better than the work done by some unknown.

You can imagine, it is not easy for a new writer to publish his works as the market often recognizes 'Brand' and 'fame'. A new and young fellow's works hardly catch those eyes of authorities and publishers. The great revolution in 21st century information technology not only bring the convenience in the means of communication, but also provides people great freedom of publishing their creative works online and being shared widely within the virtual community. Many of the popular Chinese songs and fiction writings in martial arts are widely passed around in online world at first, then eventually come to the physical world.

• People love to see their creative works being put online and having the potentials to be used, appreciated or shared by the others around the world.

As described above, those well-known authorities and commercial monopoly groups love to hold their ' 100% reserved copyrights" as a mean of maintaining its profits. On the contrary, most of the unknown mass such as students, learners, explorers...would love to have their works shared and appreciated by the great amount of others. Internet provides the platform in which their works are displayed and tested by the public. They can see the potential value of their works, gain confidence from knowing that their works are being recognised, shared. They would be happy enough to be informed of its work being used, that is the most basic CC licsen called 'Attribution'.

• A robust interpretation of fair use will create new business opportunities.
  Creative Commons itself is an excellent example for this. CC covers the gray areas of traditional copyrights by offering different license choices( all licenses require attribution, and the least restrictive only requires attribution. Other licenses include 'No Derivatives','NonCommercial-No Derivatives'...) to the creators. The Creative Commons Website explains the license choices and provides a tool that walk users through choosing one. This website attracts people from all over the world to put their creative works on CC, it has become one of the most popular websites in the world. This created great business opportunities already.

It is not hard to imagine more business opportunities will be brought in when the

Intellectual property is allowed to be developed under the law of fair use of copyright.

As " Educators are not only followers, but also creators". During the process of teaching,

Educators are adding values to the copyrighted materials and re-purpose using of them.

Digital footprint and habits of mind

Flying Kites "Play safe. Fly kites, balloons and model airplanes in wide-open spaces, and particularly avoid power lines. "--unknown

• What is Digital Footprint?
  
  "Digital footprints are traces left by someone's activity in a digital environment. There are two main classifications for digital footprints, passive and active. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected about an action without any client activation, whereas active digital footprints are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing info about oneself." -WiKi
  
• What does your digital footprint mean?

People normally feel uncomfortable with being exposed to the public regarding the sides of their personal lives whether they do pleasant friendly chatting or offensive objectionable attack or slander...We don't want the unknown to pay attention to us. So people have different kind of privacy, that should be respected, I believe. Do you think what you typied and put in your cyberspace is your privacy? Do you feel absolute private and safe when sharing your thoughts and ideas with your friends within your virtual community? Well, most of people feel so.

But, watch out this:

"...In good times and bad, people are always looking for jobs. But as more and more people have entered the job market, employers can afford to be more selective. A lot of times the choice comes down to who has the cleaner digital footprint."

" Many private things have become far more public with the internet so close at hand. Rohatinsky said it’s not something of which to be afraid, but it may be something you want to manage. " --Protect your digital footprint

http://www.kutv.com/content/news/local/story/Protect-Your-Digital-Footprint/TVzOV0wc8EybEGZSPSED0g.cspx?rss=991

"I recommend that you start a blog highlighting your professional skills. Write posts on your field to show off your professional knowledge. List your full name at the bottom of your posts. Include links to the positive comments you found. And be sure to list your accomplishments in your bio."

" Companies like ReputationDefender and Reputation Hawk specialize in improving online reputations. These services can be costly. In some cases, you'll pay thousands of dollars. Others charge $30 or so for each post they remove."

"Cleaning up your reputation can take months. So, start now — whether you're job hunting or not."--Your online reputation can hurt your job search
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/2009-02-19-online-reputation_N.htmcsp=34

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So digital footprint doesn't sound a relaxed thing after all. But on the other hand, what does it really mean to keep cleaner digital footprint? Do we have to betray who we are to release deliberately active data with the world? What about just honestly being who I am, even though that is passive?

Here, I start to think about this: Do we really know who we are? Or We come to know who we are by the facts that how the others appreciate, evaluate us; how cabaple of us handling troubles and solving problems; how much contribution we do to our family, our work; what kind of friends we have in life circle...and so on. So all these help us to form the picture of who we are. Actually we do not exactly know who we are untill something happens.

Same goes to this question: Who I am in the Internet world? What digital footprint should I leave behind?

• When and where should we be teaching our students about their digital footprint?

-The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ~Feodor Dostoevski

-Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. ~William James.

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all. ~Georges Gurdjieff
Again here we go. Habits tell who we are. Regarding teaching students the digital footprint, we definately should train our students to form good habits of using their online tools. It should be started as soon as the students begin to use computers.Say even from K2.

Because people recognize you by your digital footprint within the virtual world regardless of wherever you are in the physical space, we should always miantian our good manners over there, and this automatically relates to our mind habits in the real world.

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Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Vision

Is there such a thing as privacy online?

I have been thinking how people's online behavior look like. There is great freedom over there. Oneself can chat with his/her friends about almost anything. Anyone has the right to post pictures and articles expressing his/her own point of view on any topic prefered.However, It does not seem that there is any restriction on online freedom. What would a resentful office worker say about his boss within his virtual community? What nicknames would some rebellious students give their teachers in the chatting room? What kind of video shows or pictures would a desperate man publish on his ex-girlfriend online?...Are these people enjoying their freedom that is based on the others' sacrifice of their own privacy and freedom? There should be always responsibility coming along with freedom.

Samantha MacConnell post Don't overestimate privacy of online information

"Employers hiring potential employees and firing current employees based on
their online social networking profiles is an issue that deserves attention,but the bigger dilemma is the lack of privacy online." " I have to disagree with hiring and firing employees based on profile photographs. Shouldn't your personal life be left at the door? A person working five days a week deserves a little down time on the weekends. What a person does on his or her own time on days off should not be used to judge work ethic because that person may be serious and hard-working when they enter the workplace. Employers know that Facebook is popular and that our generation is utilizing it, but business and personal lives should not coincide."

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Yes, we need to drawn a clear line in between business and personal life. And yet, there is also close link between personal life and potential success or failure of that person's future career. Here, I am thinking: what kind of online profiles make employers fire those employees? If your online information is just about usual chatting of normal daily life...that everyone is doing, why is there worry for that? _________________________________________________________
Husna Najand post the following article titled Beware: the Internet could own your future

"The candid camera shot is the ultimate example. If you have never been personally confronted with this embarrassing problem, look no further than the latest public example - Michael Phelps. The photo of him smoking marijuana is the epitome of the candid camera shot gone wrong. He went from an exalted American hero to a petty criminal, thanks to one picture.As a result his professional life took a hit and he could be facing an arrest. It is a scary realization that a single photo can be your undoing and it is worse to know that you have no control over how that photo might be used. Sure we can ask our friends to remove a tag or take a picture down. But with ever-changing privacy terms, that may no longer be sufficient in getting rid of a potentially damaging photo"

Does this mean that person would be all right if he could hide the evidence of committing a criminal?I personally feel 21st Digital Age does do good to monitoring those public figures' personal lives. Nobody has the privilege to play double faces even being a celebrity and
important public figure.

At the same time, the concept of privacy and right is a very separate thing to a demand for total ananymity in all things. We are not only individuals but also groups. We can not expect to be invisible. At 21st digital Age, It is especially important that our students are to be educated to become integrated individuals. By only doing so, technology serves as tool instead of purpose.

learning dispositions--reflection on planning project sketch

" learning encompasses understanding ( your subject-matter objectives), skills (fundamentals such as reading and writing and "new" 21st century literacies), and learning dispositions. Learning dispositions are important traits, attitudes, habits, and feelings we encourage but usually can not teach directly, such as confidence, curiosity, resourcefulness, cooperation, motivation, persistence, and courage." --Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

I do love the above perspective! Indeed, education as a whole, its task is not only to teach students certain academic contents existing in those subjects. After graduating from school, We probably forgot what particular mathematic and history questions taught in classroom, we perhaps even can not remeber what subjects we learned in school, but these things remain in our entire life: The pattern of leaning, the mind set of an educated human being, the thinking skills of re-solving problems... those qualities mentioned in 'learning dispositions' will permnantly shape our personal character and the way of our doing things.

Tradition education only focused on the direct academic teaching, and students only care about their test results. Students with high academic achievements are normally lack of life skills. Someone has a lot of knowledge about food nutrition, but cann't cook a simple dish.

I love 'project-based learning', in which teacher combines understanding of the taught subject, skills with learning dispositions.

I have this consideration in mind: Normally, 'Project-based learning' includes multi-activities. In this model of teaching, more facilities and space are required. It means that schools, MOEs, governments should invest more financially in education so that not only wealthy pupils in International schools have the privileges. Thus our world will be consists of more and more integrated individuals.

Learning, Knowledge and Connectivism

Science technology has been the greatest dynamic force to move us from the primitive state to the modern society. With all the revolutions of modern science-technology occurred since 19 century, changes in all areas of human being’s life has been taking place enormously. Miracles come to the reality and dreams come true. We cannot imagine what our life would be without the modern transportation and communication tools. Human being's life is being changed permanently.

1. Learning
   21st century is E-time. It is digital age. We are now facing the challenge that we need to re-consider the traditional learning pattern: Behaviorism---cognitivism---constructivism.
   This change will be totally different from those changes happened before. This change is going to reform human being's learning manners.
   Some significient trends in learning:
   --George Siemens http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm--
   
   " Technology is altering our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking."
   "Many of the processes previously handled by learning theories (especially in cognitive information processing) can now be off-loaded to, or supported by technology."
   
   Is technology rendering certain innate capabilities within us? of course, it is. Apparently there is no need to maintain the abilities that technology can perform on behalf of us, such as typing words in computer instead of handwriting, relying on the database stored in computer instead of memorizing them in our own brain...you can list on and on...
   

• What is left behind after we hand over almost all our internality to technology?


• What is actually left for us to learn?


• Are we heading for half robot-half human type of community?

Pointing out the limitations of traditional learning theories 1) 'is that learning occurs inside a person...do not address learning that occurs outside of people; ...2) are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the value of what is being learned...

• What are the essential differences between individual and social learning?


• How does individual experiences differ from one to another?


• What are the criterias for evaluating the worthiness of certain learning?

2. Knowledge

With all these tremendous changes contributed by science-technology, one thing is the core value--Knowledge is the strength and power. Here 'knowledge' can be transformed into productivity, mainly means 'Nature Science'; As for the concept of knowledge as whole, it also includes the knowledge of social science. There are various of knowledges regarding its depth and width. We need to obtain certain knowledge that helps us lay a soild base on which we can move further to and dig deeper of the unknown, then the new ideas and thoughts are created, constructed from there.

What is the defination of knowledge?

" Knowledge is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief". There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.
Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate. See Knowledge Management for additional details on that discipline."

From my understanding, one kind of knowledge must apply to a particular system or environment. For example, the theory of gravity works on Earth, but not on Moon; The four season's weather exists in temperature zoo, but not in tropical zoo; Most of time we are only interested in the knowledge within our system. It is unnecessary to know what exists outside of our system. Perhaps we can call knowledge at this level 'L1 ' knowledge;
However, we must also understand why gravity does not function on Moon, and why there is only one summer season in Bangkok, and four seasons in Beijing. Those general principles work universally. We can use these common principles to explain the differences and changes. One day Clobal warming might change Bangkok to a city with four seasons, and we must understand how this happens, therefore we can predict the trends of ongoing events. The general principles is at level of 'L2 ' knowledge. So there are different layers of knowledge.
Also there are so much new ideas and new phenomenons being created at rapid speed.
"...the shrinking half -life of knowledge...the half-life of knowledge is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete."-George Siemens. Are these so called half-life of knowledge worth learning or exploring? Personally speaking, I would rather not see 'half-life of knowledge" as a kind of knowledge, I would rather see this as a process of forming a kind of knowledge, then later on relatively solid principle comes along. It would be more professional to teach our students those L2 knowledge before leading them to the Chaos.

3. Connectivism

“nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p.106). ..Nodes that successfully acquire greater profile will be more successful at acquiring additional connections. In a learning sense, the likelihood that a concept of learning will be linked depends on how well it is currently linked. Nodes (can be fields, ideas, communities) that specialize and gain recognition for their expertise have greater chances of recognition, thus resulting in cross-pollination of learning communities"
" The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. "

• Having amount of solid knowledge base makes connectivism significient.


• Individual quality in possessing valuable knowledge determinds the quality of the connection formed by the individuals.

My thoughts on personal learning networks

My perspective as a literature and language teacher, personal learning networks is like a coin with 2 sides, advantages and challenges always come together. We have seen a lot of the positive impacts that the powerful networks has on teaching-learning model in 21st century, here I am trying to see the other side of things . The below is my personal thoughts on this.

1) Traditional VS modern approaches in teaching and learning

21st century technology enable us to reach and use the authentic, the latest info online for free, anywhere, anytime. We see textbooks are not updated as fast as the actual change of our world. 'Truths' are constantly changing. Textbook is no longer the only teaching material; Paper is not the best way to share our work and facts, publishing are made so easy in this digital age.
However, "...the challenges of this moment are significant. ...deluge of info produced by millions of amateur authors without traditional editors and researchers as gatekeepers. ..." (Will Richardson) .
So at what extent, we rely on those online information, abandon our belief in the traditional way of obtaining knowledge?
Thus I have this following critical thinking:
To certain extent, the speed of information and the range of new ideas that come from new media may seem to make it more useful than it really is. In comparison with slower traditional methods of knowing things, new media appears to help us make a giant leap forward in our knowledge base. At the same time, the value of new media may be seen as dubious simply because the usual scope of vigour that traditional methods bring with them might not apply to new media.
Whilst the way of classical knowledge systems may seem narrow from our new perspectives. There are acknowledged human values applied to traditional knowledge. For example, the academic honesty is very much valued in 'face to face' classroom environment; The true relationship built among classmates, workmates in real life situation teaches us how to be sensitive, considerate with the others' needs, how to get along well with the others to appreciate the bond within the community where we locate. The ability of discovering a whole new thing through the tiny details observed in people's manners of daily life is important. There are values that new information does not necessarily have. For knowledge is to be " knowledge", it must survive analysis, reflection, comparison, accuracy, and lastly culture and social acceptability, all these are the tools we use to judge what is valuable and what is not. Thus it takes efforts, arguments, censure and many trials of validity over time. From time to time, new media provides information the way TV news provides entertainment. Entertainment is to be enjoyed whereas knowledge is to be trusted.

In terms of language teaching, we all know that within language are also inherent cultural meanings. We all know that new words enter this bank of understanding each day. We know that new technology is useful in inspiring students and ourselves to know more, to search more and to be more understanding, and at the same time, have more critical thinking: for it is only through that understanding and healthy criticism that real learning can come along.

New media is, in this way, useful.
A glance at new media in terms of language teaching quickly shows that online information provides very flowed knowledge indices, wrong pronunciation, wrong character writings, wrong expressions and quite often totally wrong meanings, especially when we have not been qualified enough to properly evaluate those information.
As for teaching students to appreciate the beauty and the arts of langauge in a literature work, to analyze the particular meaning of the context and so on...these make it very important that we should select the suitable materials to show the learners the right approaches, and the top works represented the highest achievement of the arts of language and literature. As only when you see the best work in that area, should you know where your way is leading to.

For this prediction of the future role of teacher as connector first and content experts second, I would love to have this confidence in this. However, in order to become a good connector, I wonder--
a) how much editorial effort and skills are needed in teachers in order to make sure that online resources are properly represented?
b) How widely should teachers search/navigate/collaborate via the collaborative spaces in order to create the high quality of the teaching and learning resources?
c) How precisely we know the community formed online from people whom we might not know, may never meet, is consists of qualified professional people?

"The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators? What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality? "--will Richardson

And lastly, How much time and energy shall the teachers invest in the above matters in order to become both right connector and right content expert?

What do I hope to get out of this course?

When I was mentoring my students' project works on Chinese literature/philosophy or history in Singapore, I was always suprised at their outstanding presentation skills by using the digital media tools and their rich searching experiences via network, although I played a critical role of guiding them regarding the contents, the curriculum concerns, the reliability of the information, the aims of the project...and so on. One of the projects of my students won the top rewards of the National Project work Competition. Indeed I was so proud of my students, and even thank them for presenting my ideas and thoughts in such a creative way that many people came up to congratulate me on this achievement. On the other hand, I knew that my students contributed equally as I did to this success, or to certain extend, they did more than what I did to make this project more attractive /understood and interesting by using the digital media tools. I can say, those of my students help me learn together with them, and yet, I must admit that they are far more better than me in the area of Information technology. I do not feel I am a powerful educator in front of them any more.
From then onwards, I wanted to equip myself with such knowledge so that I can apply these modern educational technology not only to a more qualified project mentor, but also to my own classroom teaching.

That has been my very motive of learning Educational Technology and Information Literacy since then.

Lately I came to realise that a foreign language teacher's limitation in using this technology in classroom. For example, the online reading in target language is impossible to the foreigners; the authentic learning experience can hardly obtained without enough vocabulary and fluency of speaking of the target language. But I do hope some new approaches to make learning of a foreign language more interesting, to engage students more in learning process, by taking the advantage of the digital age, will be discovered along the way.

After all, I love this statement:

" We start with no assumptions about your past experiences, your students' ages or backgrounds, or the technology tools you have available. Regardless of your role or background, we assume only that you are open to new ideas--and that you like learning."

That is why I am here. I love learning.