January 29th, 2009
From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: How to Teach Students to Teach Themselves
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!
One of the objectives of my course Social Media in Business, Development and Government is to help students learn meta skills like how to learn to use new social media tools, how to use filters to make sense of social media, and how to curate news and knowledge. Essentially, it’s about helping the students learn how to learn, or teaching the students to teach themselves.
At one level, it’s about getting students to think about media literacy, filters, and the negotiation between what is public and what is private. At another level, it’s about using social media as a collaborative research tool. At yet another level it’s about running an open classroom, and trying to strike the right balance between sharing what I know and facilitating discussions to learn what the students collectively know.
Dr. Michael Wesch at the Kansas State University has also been struggling with the same questions and he summarizes his work-in-progress answers in a great paper in the Academic Commons, titled ‘From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able‘ –
I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students.
Here’s a great video of his presentation on the same topic at the Educase Learning Initiative Conference.
