Introductions and Preparations

Our first meeting of "Web-based Technologies in Teaching and Learning" was a good introduction to the course, in that it demonstrated that what we get out of the class is really up to us as students. Professor Kim, undoubtedly, expects a fair amount out of his students, but what he expects seems to be fairly fluid. That is to say, the kinds of projects I end up doing may differ greatly from the projects Amrita or Jacob does, and that's kind of the point.

More than anything, I believe that the potential connections Professor Kim can help us make are enough to make the course worth it. I would almost say that the essence of the class is networking and prototyping. We are meant to try out ideas, that then allow us to figure out the all-important "who" of what kind of work we might like to do (whether that be for our internships, our final projects, or even our careers after Stanford). In this sense the class is somewhat laid-back - because there aren't extensive and difficult readings, or overbearing essays to write - but essential in that, the more effective and creative the effort put forth, the more able we will be to access and take advantage of the resources Professor Kim has made available to us.

From my own teaching experience, I find the pedagogy in the class so far refreshing, because it is much more in line with what I am used to trying to do. As a student, I would rather provide my own motivation, and engage to the level and in ways appropriate to my interests. That's not to say that we are meant to not engage if we don't want to, but rather, that the Professor takes for granted that we all want to take the class, and will engage. Many classes ask for contributions that, while helpful in an ancillary way - or helpful for the teacher - are not actually relevant to the kind of thought-processes that are, ultimately, the most effective or useful. I suspect this will not be the case in 391.

Seeing some of the projects students from previous iterations of the class produced was, as such things always are, helpful. The most immediate consideration, for me, was the balance between style and substance, and how we, as educators, have to find a way to provide both. Some projects were heavy on substance, but light on "bells and whistles" (I'm thinking specifically of the health project), while others were creative and funny, but conveyed a fairly simple point (for example, the Buzz Lightyear project). That balance is important, I think, because in some sense we might call "bells and whistles" the defining feature of technology. So how do we use technology to support learning? Is it best to teach technology for its own sake, or to use it as a tool to assist other learning? How can we do that without distracting students form the material?

A brief aside, on that last question. While working at Punahou - a private school in Hawaii - a couple summers ago, a friend of mine and I worked together to craft a GoogleEarth lesson for history students, with the eventual goal of helping them produce their own. While the software certainly helped them to visualize the planet, I don't know that it helped them with the more fundamental point: that the resources we use every day come from all over the world. GoogleEarth, in some sense, made this fact more immediate (at least, once they saw where apples and salt and steel and so on really come from), but it also distracted them from that kind of thinking. Instead, they were focused on how to link to pictures or videos, and how to make sure their tour worked alright when they pressed play. That valuable mental energy that went towards learning the program may have facilitated a higher level of engagement, but I don't know that it actually helped the students think through the questions and concepts they were meant to.

So what is worth learning? And how does technology help us get there? These broad questions are perhaps not the focus of any one class, but I feel that 391 might help me think about them more than my other classes.