Monday, September 16, 2013

#m641: My Grad Class the Modern Way?


Due to the limited number of people who could attend our class on Tuesday night. Our professor decided to hold class on Twitter. I was skeptical at first, but was going to reserve my judgement until the end of the session. We were scheduled to sit down for two to 2.5 hours and discuss topics on Euclid and proofs.

The class started out working with a Google docs answering questions regarding the class and its format. This lasted about a 1/2 hour. Then we jumped to Twitter and the conversation flowed seamlessly. We used the site http://tweetchat.com/ which streamlines our chat into a traditional chat room from the AOL days. So I guess you are wondering why would we use twitter instead of that old chat room. The beauty of twitter is anyone in the world with a twitter account could follow our insightful conversation. I am not an expert and didn't know if a middle schooler from Tokyo was paying attention, but when you approach conversation with the idea that any could observe you, you tend to speak different.

After conversations took place about Euclid, proofs, and Geogebra.org I was very pleased with the amount of knowledge gained from this experience. I believe much of it was gained because our discussion moderator was an expert technician on Twitter. Our professor was able to guide our learning to it's intended goals.

Now I don't believe the future of education is in front of a computer screen. Education is relationships build on trust and respect. From this we can deliver any knowledge to a body of students.

1 comment:

  1. Feedback you'd like?

    5Cs
    Clear - yes
    Coherent - had an objective and moved towards it
    Complete - for me I think I would like to hear more. You feel like it worked - why or what did you get out of it. How did it avoid the problems you expected. What would have made it better? Or a deeper explanation of what you did to make it work for you. (Sharing your process.)
    Consolidated - mostly tied it together at the end; not sure where your last sentence is going.
    Content - talked about a mode of learning and some of the thinking it inspired. Check.

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