Quote:
“Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 54) I chose this quote because after reading it I envisioned the collective as a living and evolving entity taking on a life of its own drawing its nutrients from its participants. Up to this point I had not interpreted a collective in this manner.
Question:
My question relates to the description of peer-to-peer learning as “relationships that are the result of shared interests and opportunities”. (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 50) This to me sounds like participants become part of the collective by choice. In math it is very difficult to get some students “interested” and engaged in the content. So, my question is, how can the collective dynamic evolve when the participants are interacting begrudgingly?
Connection:
The connection I made when reading this chapter is based on observations I have made during group work in my class. I have noticed that students are more likely to ask a question of their peer during group work than they are to ask me a question while I am teaching the lesson.
Epiphany:
The statement “In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 52) was my aha moment because it identified the distinction in motivations of people joining a community versus those joining a collective.
Chapter 5 - The Personal with the Collective:
Quote:
“... technology has now made connecting personal interests to collectives possible, easy, fun, and playful because people are inspired to think past the boundaries and limitations of their current situations.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 72 )To me this quote summarizes the essence of a new culture of learning. Based on witnessing my daughter's participation in such a collective and her enjoyment and desire to participate as well as the skills she has acquired through her engagement with others in the collective.
Question:
Having seen the value in this avenue of learning, I am wondering how to translate this to the
classroom for my high school mathematics students?
Connection:
I have been inspired by my daughter's interests in a TV series called The 100. She has participated in discussion and fan fiction forms whose participants share the same passion for the show. She now spends her free time writing episode variations by creating characters of her own and inserting them into the story line. As of yet, she has not posted these stories to the form because in her words “she is still mastering her skills as a writer”. This is an example of learning through a collective based of her personal interest and outside of the standard high school curriculum.
Epiphany:
My epiphany for this chapter occurred when reading the story about the graduate student who was credited with discovering Supernova 1987A “...the personal observations of a few astronomers (out of thousands) were fused by the collective (the combination of most amateurs and pros) into a meaningful set of data to interpret an event. (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 61) This example of a collective illustrated the significance of collaboration beyond the classroom.
Chapter 6:
Quote:
My quote selection for this chapter is the author's’ definition of Inquiry. “Inquiry is the process by which we ask not “What is it that we know?” but “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 83) I see moving to this form of instruction to be a gradual process that could be started in the earlier grades. It will take time for students to transition to this way of approaching a problem.
Question:
This inquiry based approach will take a significant amount of time to implement in a classroom environment. How can this be balanced with meeting the content requirements? It seems to me that it will require a great deal of time and effort on the part of teachers to develop inquiry tasks that can encompass sufficient content.
Connection:
I connected to the section entitled Inquiry. It relays a story in which one of the authors was teaching an undergraduate honors class and was stunned by the responses he received when he asked his students what they were passionate about. “... student after student answered in roughly the same way: I don’t know. No one has ever asked me that before.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 80) I found myself struggling with the same question and realized that when we are students we are looking to our instructors to tell us how we are supposed to think about the topic. As students in the traditional model we assume we do not have knowledge and expect our teachers to give us that knowledge needed to solve a task.
Epiphany:
I was very intrigued by the section on Learning as Inquiry. Specifically the statement that described inquiry as “an extremely powerful technique for learning because it provides stockpiles of experiences” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 83) that can be drawn upon in future inquiries. This altered my perspective from thinking of problems posed to our students as independent in nature to a process with a variety of possible outcomes. It drew my attention to my expectation of a specific result or process for a solution to be “correct”. Describing the knowledge acquired during inquiries that lead to a dead end as learning that can be applied for future tasks helped me to see the value in students taking alternate pathways to their solutions.
Thomas, D., & Brown, J. S. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. S.l.: S.n.