Turning the teacher-student dynamic on its head...

Firstly, it's after 6 pm.... again. 

From here.

So after watching The Independant Project and reading Hamilton (2014) these are my thoughts...

This is talking about turning the teacher-student dynamic on its head. When reading things like this I keep thinking okay but where do we, as teachers, fit into this? If this is the future, do we still have a place? If the purpose of teaching is not about your subject matter but about encouraging and motivating kids in their own becoming of who they want to be, and who they are meant to be, we still have a place in this new world. But as they say today many teachers are limited by standards, to me that means curriculum driven, and that is simply not enough. IF we were to teach children in the way children learn, and the way the children of today are on iPads before they can even properly walk or talk, I’d say that yes, there is a potential for technology-mediated self-directed distance learning. NO doubt about it.

Just looking at the Independent Project (2011) as such a pure example of the burning desire, within our children, to learn that is in so many situations oppressed in the school systems with their rigidness and rules, and these kids went and turned it upside down and started an initiative because they wouldn’t let flawed school systems take away their joy of learning. And as teachers in the becoming it is our calling to awaken the joy in children again, how do we do that? Speak their language. Give them the tools of their generation. Give them the opportunity to create their own tools, ask them what their ideal digital pedagogies are, and let them teach us how they learn so we can provide them with what they need in their becoming. If this is not our purpose, I don’t know what is.

A component of this student-directed learning must be making; creative and imaginative repurposing and renewing of old tools, concepts, and methods, and invention of new tools, concepts, and methods. Driving this relentless progressivism is the question: what technologies don’t exist, but could?

- Hamilton (2014) -

I think that tech-mediated self-directed distance learning does not mean taking away classroom teaching completely, but I think it is a way to go beyond the curriculum and encourage students to engage with new content on their own turf. It would be a way to bring back the joy of learning and breed creativity on a whole new level, and a way of cultivating the minds of tomorrow in a dynamic ever-changing creative whirlpool of approaches. Approaches that won’t necessarily be up to us, as teachers, but to the students as our teachers. I say we should be what they need, not what the system says we should be. Go beyond the curriculum. Go beyond our turf to theirs. So that we would live in a world where kids were taught how they learn and you would see it in the world and in humanity, because awesomeness, awesomeness everywhere....