The discussion we had last week upon our feelings toward “changes” had me thinking of my life in the past year. My life was determined to change in so many ways since I made a decision that I must come to Canada for further study after graduating from my bachelor degree. With no doubt I was willing and was prepared for these up coming changes. And I was always an active role during the preparing procedures. As it was expected, I went through many changes in the past year: my life style, way of thinking, the learning style, perspectives in values, etc. It was just that some of those changes were not friendly embraced. No matter how reluctant I was to face them, they still happened and I went through them. So I think “changes” in our lives are like this. Like it or not, somehow you will find a way to face it, conquer it.

Above is a little piece of reflection of last week’s topic. This week’s reading of “ Learning in Collective” had led me to the thinking. I was trying to understand and compare the difference between “collective” and “collaborative”. The question at first derived from the literal meaning of these two words because as a second language learner sometimes I mix up the meanings of words that look similar. Later I understand that “collective” is something related to our cognitive model and “collaborative” is one of the ways to support “collective”.

To have a better understanding of “collective” I dug a bit on the Internet and found the article “Dialogue, Collective Thinking and Organizational Learning”, which really caught my eyes. It was published in 1993, which is quite old, and it is not talking about the education field but I still think it is worth for reading. It was about organization management and leadership, which gave it a solid ground discussing about collective thinking because organizations, international or domestic, require collective intelligence to create conversations in order to maintain functional. Thus, the author proposed the notion of “dialogue”, which made me reflect our society today. The developing technologies make our daily activities more interactive- creating dialogues. Two decades ago, people get information from newspaper and they can only share their thoughts when meet with people. Dialogues were also created but restricted in time and places. With the newspapers, magazines prevail online and the flourishing BBS communities, dialogues can be created anywhere and anytime and with people all over the world.

The word “dialogue” had also made me reflect on our blog posting. The author said: “ Dialogue can be initially defined as a sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions, and certainties that compose everyday experience. Yet this is experience of a special kind- the experience of the meaning embodied in a community of people.”  For the blogs we had created for this class, we are creating dialogues among classmates. We are the community of the specified course “Technology and Society”. People not from this class may understand our posts but do not have a deeper reflection because the experience are not the same. For the blogs of other fields, they are also creating dialogues among people. The type and size of its communities depends on their topics and audience scale. Some of them are locally and others internationally.

To conclude this short writing with the first paragraph of “changes”, I was amazed that writing entries for blog post is also a change in my life. I can’t imagine what would be like if this posting is homework for one of my high school subject. I believe the dialogue I created would be the one that between the teacher and my parents. HAHA…

Isaac, W. M. (1993). Dialogue, Collective Thinking, and Organizational Learning. Center for Organizational Learning’s Dialogue Project. Retrieved from http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1255442475484_1908258935_21662/Dialogue,%20Collective%20Thinking,%20and%20Org%20Learning.pdf. 2012, February. 

The new CULTURE of learning

I was captured by Thomas and Brown’s idea of the new culture of learning. Before reading this chapter, I never had deemed the learning environment as a culture that is cultivated through the interaction among teachers and learners. My perception to learning environment has always stayed in a traditional educational venue due to my learning experiences back in China for 18 years. Even though I had taken some of the courses here in U of C of which expanding my knowledge in education, I still have a hard time to essentially break through the critical point of my prior knowledge in teaching and learning.

This chapter has really prompted me to think back on my learning experience in school. The mechanistic view of learning they mentioned is the way I was being taught for the whole time. In Chinese school settings, learning indeed is treated as a series of steps to master the knowledge of each subject. In this case, tests and examinations is the only way to measure our learning outcomes. I found Thomas and Brown’s statement supports my perspective. They said: “In this teaching-based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result.”(p.35) As a result, I had tests for NINE subjects in total in every other week at the last year in high school. The purpose of this was getting us ready for the final entrance examination for university. That is sort of our ultimate examination that what your future path will be is depending on this one.  We seldom have projects or collaborative learning methods because the final university entrance exam (FUEE) is mark individually. In educator’s point of view, everything that does not contribute to boost the scores for the FUEE is considered unnecessary.

That means, before taking master courses here in Canada, I never truly experience a learning environment which is served as a community that learners, learners and teachers can interact with each other and together to build the knowledge schema. This makes me think of our blog post for this course. Why are we posting our thoughts and comprehensions of the reading instead of having our own course note? What is the purpose of this? Along with my study progress in the Edtech field, I can now understand. What we are doing is to set ourselves in an open, collaborative learning environment where we are not only responsible for our own study but also for the whole group of people. With sharing our own ideas, commenting on others’, we are building a community. We are cultivating a new culture of learning. Like Thomas and Brown remarked: “… The new culture of learning focuses on learning through engagement within the world.” With the aid of technology, we collaborate through the online platform such as Google docs, Prezi, Wikis. These are the new learning environment that I ought to study about besides for the traditional, tangible educational venues I have always looking at.
                I am really exhilarated that with my graduate studying going on, my mind travels further and further. Bit by bit breaking through my old perception of education now I am embracing new notion of learning in this technological advanced world.