Back to the Beginning..From Somewhere in the Middle

Periodically, I feel it is important to recall why I am even writing in this blog!

The title of the blog doesn't really explain my point. I truly believe that technology is changing the way people learn at such a dramatic rate that the entrenched educational system will have no choice but to finally change. I wrote a paper in grad school that talked about the changing nature of learning. I will link it up to this blog later, but basically it outlined 4-5 changes in how people learn.

One point that I didn't add at that time was how important immediate feedback is to people! Technology is allowing for faster and more detailed response to work. When you send an email to someone, you expect a response pretty quickly. When you post to a discussion forum, you also expect a quick response.

In the online class that I facilitate, we talk about how important it is for every post to have feedback from some member of the online community.

Here's my point...past practices in teaching writing are useless! We all remember our typical writing assignments. What was our audience? The teacher! Maybe if we were lucky, our teacher would let us peer review! We would write, revise, rewrite and publish. Writing a piece, whether prose, poetry, narrative, non-fiction, fiction or technical for an audience of one or two is not publishing!!!!

Publishing involves more than just making sure your writing is grammatically correct and contains "more detail"! You writing first needs to have an audience. Is there anyone that actually wants to read what you are writing? If a paper is written, printed, or hung up on the fridge but is read by noone, should it be considered published?

This blog is a great example! I have periodically shared my thoughts to the world but have received feedback from only one person. Is anyone really reading this? Is this really published on the web?

How do our students feel when they hand in their writing and only hear response from their teacher and a couple peers? When you think about the answer, also consider that many of them get responses from hundreds of people when they post a survey to their MySpace blog!