This is it! Tonight is my last official post for EME6414, Summer 2023. What to write about? If you had asked me a few hours earlier, my honest answer would have been "no idea". It's not I don't have anything on my mind (I may have too much actually), but I was not sure how to approach this last post. So, I've decided I'll do just as usual and draw a few personal reflections. To help me tackle this last challenge, I went back to Canvas and get an overview of our Modules Main Page. Gosh, what a journey it has been! The first image that comes to my mind is the iceberg metaphor. You know, this impression that for years, you had been exploring the World Wide Web with confidence, as if you were in your own neighborhood, with your own habits, hanging out with the same people, getting what you were looking for, not less, not more. And one day, you realize that you were just scratching the surface and that a whole world was lying underneath, inviting you to a whole new...
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Is produsage detracting education?
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This week's exploration put three critical topics on the table: the hive mind, the digital natives/digital immigrants theory, and the debate surrounding produsage. Readings, discussions and repeated dives on social media resulted in a personal complex mindmap where innovation and traditions are intertwined in a controversial framework.
On one hand, the affordances of computers and the Internet allow individuals to access readily information presented in various formats and offering multiple perspectives. Online spaces rapidly evolved into produsage environments that encouraged content consumers to bring their own input to the table, enriching the debate at a community scale.
Yet, on the other hand, advances in technologies are frequently pointed as being responsible for shaping a generation of digital natives, unfitted and reluctant to traditional instructional strategies and conventional settings, and self-developing through unverified information and uncontrolled communications channels.
In regard to this observation, the question surrounding the future of education rises. Does produsage detract education? Do so-called digital natives really need to be educated to produsage? Is the hive mind an inevitable curse in our social landscape?
Here are my current reflections:
- first, though Prensky's digital natives concept is appealing as it explains some gaps between youngsters and older individuals, his arguments do not actually serve his theory. In fact, his reflections, which are not supported by any verified data (check the bibliography section of his 2001's paper; oh, wait, where is the damn section?) rather points generational issues, mostly related to languages and the environment people have grown and developed in. It's no surprise that "generation C" is more familiar with technologies and online spaces as it has always been a pat of their life. But in the same way, older people were raised with other elements in their life that would let youngsters helpless. Through our resources this week, we can also see that individuals of all ages do not use sofware and online communication channels evenly depending on their personal, educational and professional purposes. All in all, my view aligns more with the one of researchers and academics highlighting that inter individual differences regarding the digital world rather refer to social economical status, cultural and internal "presdisposition" than age.
- second, while reading more about produsage, I currently understand that produsage environments are spaces where individuals have opportunities to develop and practice 5 capacities (aka the 5C's according to Bruns (2011) allowing them to be creative, collaborative, critical, combinatory and communicative. Overall, I realized that Bruns present produsage environments without necessarily focusing on digital spaces. In that view, I recognize myself evolving in produsage environments through both online and offline experiences, and more importantly, such experiences have a lot to do with my educational experiences. My participation in this course is a perfect illustration, though the instructional strategies employed in this course might be considered as bias example. However, other examples come to my mind, both as a student and as an instructional designer. As an illustration, I see how the 5C's make sense to faculty I support in my institution. I see how easily they integrate them in their curriculum to offer students' several perspectives of the same topic, happily leaving their role of "sages on the stage" for those of guides and "moderators". Relying on prodsage encourage individuals of all age to express their own view and produce their own learning materials, which both enhances the transfer of information and makes people accountable for their own learning and personal growth.
- what about the hive mind? As scary as this may be (see my previous post), I believe the hive mind rising and expanding through produsage in digital communities cannnot be eradicated. To me, it's like wishing to have the yin existing without the yang. But this does not mean that the hive mind should be considered as an inevitable curse.
Which leads me to my current conclusion: in my view, produsage is not bringing useless chaos to the equation. It's also not detracting education. Rather, produsage challenges education, which should actually be an obvious expectation as education is nothing but a changing and unstable world (a lot like Web 2.0 in fact). Nurturing a creative mind and critical thinking thanks to collaboration should be a major goal in the vision of every educational insitution, as such capacities are required in every aspects of our entire life, whether online or offline, whether for personal or professional purposes.
Dr. Dennen, you read my mind! Here is my Spotify playlist: be selfish ;-)! Celebrate yourself with self-centered songs, others don't count here! Add your own songs, guys! (and yes, there's a Taylor Swift song, so no hesitation here ;-) ). Important info: the collaborative feature of Spotify is not working great. Some online users suggest accessing Spotify on the desktop app to add songs to a collaborative playlist. It seems that the web player or a mobile app won't work. Give it a try, it might have been solved!
Education is no more restricted to institutions. We learn in multiple ways, either from traditional settings at school, group discussions on Facebook, or How-To's videos on YouTube. Thus, why not mix both and take advantage of the affordances of Web 2.0? That sounds like a natural evolution in the educational landscape, and many teachers have already implemented social learning activities (SMLA) successfully in their teaching strategies. Some of our readings this week and other studies published in the literature showcase the benefits of SMLA to developing, practicing, and mastering higher-order thinking skills, as well as engaging students in collaborating works and supporting them in learning in formal and informal ways. That being said, the successful implementation of SLMA in instructional strategies needs to be anticipated and thoughtfully prepared. As mentioned by Gülbahar et al. (2017), some common barriers regarding technology integration refer to issues internal and extern...
Source: Gloria Celeste Pérez Last week, as I started walking in the corridors of social media, I reflected on the power of analogies to describe those digital spaces, their rules, and the emotions human beings could feel when interacting with other human beings and hosted content. One analogy that came back frequently was the Hive Mind. At first, I thought this metaphor was essentially comparing Web 2.0 to a physical space hosting a group of people bringing their knowledge, ideas, and opinions and sharing them with others to bring new concepts and ideas. Yet, some of this week's readings helped to understand that the Hive Mind could actually refer to the "negative effect of an over populated Collective Intelligence, also known as Artificial Intelligence"( Living in a Connected World/The Hive Mind and Collective Intelligence ). In other terms, the Hive Mind appears when the flow of ideas and opinions brought in a given environment reaches a saturation point, overwhelming ...
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