Week 6 Response

On learning technologies for social studies and history . . . I really enjoyed this week's readings, and kept thinking about all the ways they are applicable to the activities that media specialists engage in. For example, the O'Neill paper discussed the authors' creation of a "library of practice," a collection of digital media designed to show students of history how actual scholars and historians do their work. For schools that aren't able to purchase such software, the school's media specialist could be a resource for putting students in touch with the work of real practitioners. This also made me think some about how one aspect of my future career as a school media specialist will be collection development, and in selecting and purchasing materials for the library, it will be important for me to acquire materials that reflect the real work of real practitioners, whether they are historians or scientists or writers, and so on. In Scardamalia's paper on the CSILE project, I was very interested in the 11 principles of cognitive-based design the authors outlined. For one, the principles they identify are informing my thinking about my "conceptual framework" for this course. Since I want to develop some kind of checklist or index that will help me evaluate learning technologies that I come across in the future, I think that the concise principles in this paper will help me focus my thinking. (Same goes for the Bass paper - the questions the authors pose about using technology for teaching social studies will be equally useful for me.) But I also liked the Scardamalia paper and its 11 principles because I was really excited reading about the CSILE project - it sounds like such a neat program. So many of the software programs that come to mind when I think of "learning technologies" - as well as a few of the programs we've explored in the class so far - just haven't appealed to me that much, because they don't seem to do anything all that differently from or better than what a capable teacher can do. But the CSILE project seems like something that actually augments student learning and teacher instruction because of the way that it focuses not on the task and the individual, but on the process and the group. The way in which students post, tag, share, and edit each other's notes is not too far off from some of the most exciting things happening on the web now. While the paper focused on the cognitive aspects and benefits of CSILE, I found its social aspect to be really exciting, because I expect that the social dimension is an excellent way to motivate students to engage with the technology.