Week 3 Responses

Of the three articles for today, the Brown, Collins, & Duguid article resonated with me the most. Their metaphor for thinking of knowledge/concepts as tools helped me to really grasp the fact that if knowledge is pulled out and abstracted from its context, it cannot truly be understood. I especially like this notion because it illustrates how knowledge, as a tool, is not only best understood within context, but it also has the power to change the context. When we understand and use knowledge, we change our world, just as when we understand a tool and use it, we change the world around us. This just made sense to me - it's a way to think of knowledge and ideas as almost tangible things that we actually use to shape our world. The authors' theories on knowledge as concepts embedded into context impacts our discussion on learning technologies in a number of ways. For instance, one way is that their notions suggest that learning technologies would only be effective when they are used in instruction that situates the concept to be learned, or problem to be solved, in a real-world experience that applies to the lives of students. (I suppose this is what is meant by "authentic learning" -- a term I have come across in a number of readings for other classes.) Along with this, Brown, Collins, & Duguid touch upon what it might mean to teach students to be like "Just Plain Folks," regular people who creatively tackle ill-defined problems in real life. This too makes sense to me because this is what life is like: problems are not well-defined, and we often have to resort to inventive, resourceful heuristics to try to solve problems. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but real learning can take place. As for the other two articles, by Roschelle, et al. and Kleiman, these articles seemed to be compatible with each other in that Roschelle, et al. highlighted several successful math and science oriented computer technologies while Kleiman discussed the best ways to incorporate technologies like these and others into classrooms. However, I thought that the claim made early on in the Roschelle et al. article that because information is exploding, students will need to learn to "master calculus and other complicated subjects to participate fully in an increasingly technological society" (Roschelle et al. 77) was dubious. Is this really true? I consider myself to be a full participant in society, yet I have never taken calculus and I still think I'm a pretty good problem-solver. If this is the premise that Roschelle et al. are working off of -- that learning technologies are important for teaching students tasks such as calculus because there is information overload in our day -- I think that this is faulty reasoning that would situate the learning of calculus in a misinformed and inauthentic context for students. As a future media specialist, I think there are more important and better ways for dealing with information overload (as opposed to learning calculus) -- such as learning how to navigate information sources (like the World Wide Web), access information, evaluate it, and create and use it responsibly.