Working in the elementary grades, I am a huge proponent for integrating informal learning through games and experiences rather than direct instruction and lecturing (when it's right!). Not only do students have the opportunity to take in their own learning, they also have the chance to gain shared experiences with other students by working together, turn taking, sharing and building episodic memories to rely on later to reflect on personal learning. Working with students on the Autism Spectrum it is especially important for these students to gain shared experiences with peers not only for learning content but also for building and practicing new and learned social skills. An Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is neurological behavior disorder where people on the spectrum will be "wired differently" than their typical peers, making it difficult for them to interpret and carry out various aspects of our "social norm", presenting, at times, with behaviors that seem to be of a much younger age than what is expected for his or her true age group.
This week as I have been digging into information about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), I read an article about the direction Informal Education can be following through PLEs. With PLEs students have the chance to guide their own learning through the Internet and other web based applications guided by the community of learners a students may be in.
A 7th grader explains how she works with her own PLE in her science class. It's pretty cool thinking about how fluent she is in her work and how she admits that being in charge of her own education though her PLE can be distracting (hey, it is the internet), but since she has the chance to choose where she's going to get information from, she is able to carry out her responsibilities.
When I think about my own current status as a student - working solely online thus far - I think a PLE would be an awesome way to integrate organization and a more fluid process of self-guided learning.
I went on and read an article by Stephen Downes entitled,
New Technology Supporting Informal Learning (via
Mohamed Amine's PLE bloglist).
In the article he discusses the incorporation of the Internet and PLEs in a course he taught at the adult level, where students continued to learn the learning network even after the course was complete.
In thinking about integrating such a high-level of internet and technology based learning in the elementary grades I have a hard time deciding where the line should be drawn between the immersion of technology and real time conversational learning.
In it's most basic sense a class that would rely solely on internet based learning (even in real time meeting spaces) can be defined as parallel play. In this form, students will be working beside each other over the same activity but they will not be trying to change the other's behavior or their own in order to coordinate their actions for a common goal. Using a PLE is moderately similar, though students would have the opportunity to be influenced by other's input and use the information to guide their own thinking elsewhere, it does not necessarily mean that an interaction will take place directly in order to influence each other (which is fine because most of us HAVE learned how to converse in "real time" with appropriate reciprocation from all participants.)
Where I stand as an educator now, working with students in younger grades and with students with Autism, I think it is important to maintain the opportunity for students to engage in real time learning, face to face with someone to share the experience with.
