It All Leads To Teamwork...

This article by Tony Wagner, Rigor Redefined, is about how we need to try harder to prepare students for everything in the 21^st century.

What does “rigor redefined” mean, anyway? It means that we need to re-look at how hard everyone works and how hard we need to work because everything that we are learning may turn out to be completely useless in the long run.  For example, there are jobs out there that we would never have thought would exist. But, there are going to be millions of jobs that we are not ready for that are just around the corner. Being the student, we cannot blame our educators. We have to take the blame as well. It has to do all with teamwork. One senior executive from Dell said, “Yesterday’s answers won’t solve today’s problems”.  This is what we will be saying once we are employed in these nonexistent (yet) jobs.

The three main ideas to take away from this article for the students is that we need to ask good questions; question ourselves, the provider, and the world even.  The teachers cannot tell us what to think. Once we grow up to be employers, we have to ask our OWN questions, instead of having people tell us the questions FOR us. We need to engage in good discussion and use teamwork; without teamwork, we cannot get great discussion. Discussion and teamwork will help us in the world when we are older as employers, when it’s not an option to be a good communicator; you have to be. Asking questions leads to teamwork, which leads to great discussion.  This article, in only the first page, inspires us to work hard and that we can really get anything done if we put our hearts to it.

The only part of this article that I question and think was not right for Wagner to say was when he mentioned how “…Young people’s poor grammar, punctuation, or spelling- the things we spend so much time teaching and testing in our schools...”  I feel as if in the last sentence of this quote is a bit harsh. These writers, who write about 21^st century jobs and such, need to realize that we, the students, are trying our hardest to get our grades up. I just got the impression from this paragraph that they do not have any faith in us.

Later in the article, Wagner started preaching about the ties when he went to many schools with very high test scores and observed the students.  What I took from these stories, is that these “AP” students are not very good at communicating or questioning.

In our English class, Mrs. Comp always tells us to question, question, question; question everything. We, the students, do not understand how important this concept is. For me, however, I learned that when Mrs. Comp questions us, it stretches our learning so much and it’s the same case when we question things.

All in all, Wagner is getting the point across to us that we need to focus really hard on “…the importance of critical thinking, communication skills, and collaboration.”

WE are the Web

In Michael Wesch’s educational video, Web 2.0 … The Web Is Us/ing Us, really makes us think about how the web has changed so much in so little time. This video covers a lot of topics and I had to watch it at least times, forward, rewind, pause and take notes on it to really grasp and understand the message of this video.  The concept is how we are the ones stretching out the web.

To start, the content of this video was awesome. There was so much going through my mind when there were not even direct words given. When Wesch added that music, it just makes you drawn into the video and even more interested in the subject. When we are trying to learn something, we assume that we need words and direct words. But this showed us that we can learn so much by just watching!

Through all of the things I learned from watching this video, there were many subjects that really stuck with me.  One of these being that this shows how they can go through everything done in cyberspace all the way back to when the web was created. This was showed when they went to the website called The Wayback Machine. This website was that you could go back to any webpage in history and all the same information and formatting will be there. Michael Wesch also proved that we used to have to go to so much work just to make a page or a document. We had to go to formatting and know all of the abbreviations such as <p> for paragraph, <i> for italic, and <b> for bold, etc. Nowadays, we just type in what we want, and we can find or publish it in a second. We pretty much have to do no work compared to when the web was first used. The web became so modernly-accurate because we were the ones who taught it. When the Wesch showed The Web 2.0 on Wired, I understood that if we think of the web as a child (even though we all know technology is very smart), we will comprehend this better. When we teach children little things, it sticks with them for a long time. Therefore, when we feed stuff into the web, we are teaching the web an idea so that it stretches out second by second each day.

This video makes me wonder, is the web taking too much of our time and taking away our traditions of learning through text books?  Obviously, the web has a very positive impact on our learning, but it is taking away our history. Some people do not believe in technology because they want to keep our traditions. If they think about it though, we are learning more than we ever would have dreamed of through the web.

All in all, I loved this video because it made us think hard about how the web was created and how it continues to stretch every day when over 100 billion times a day, a human clicks on a web page. In my opinion, if the word saw this video, it would change many perspectives on the web.