Chapter 2: Pedagogy and Practice

I continue to look at these chapters in educational technology from the social lens. One of the things that the author speaks about is information gathering as a primary source of educational use. Being a school social worker, I have a broader concern for students as than just information gatherers. I see them as social beings, and school is the perfect place to learn social protocols or norms in our microcosmic high school society. Both information gathering and social learning is important to the education of high school students who are getting ready to embark upon a more independent life after secondary school.

In this chapter I became very aware of how many times the words referring to a meeting place within the world of cyberspace were mentioned. The words mentioned were: spaces, community, environment, and collaborative space. These words were used throughout this chapter. In my opinion many areas of the web have become social gatherings, per say. The interaction with blogs, blog comments, and chats are relational as well as information gathering. Collaboration and opinion sharing are interpersonal and educational.

Richardson writes "What's somewhat discouraging, to me at least, is that teenager use these sites more as social tools than learning tools than learning tools, and their behavior is sometimes reckless." This is an interesting viewpoint to me. I strongly believe that the web is already a highly social system and the problem is that our younger generation has been using it before more mature parents and teachers are able to teach web social skill. It is imperative that as adults, particularly teachers and social workers are able to learn the technology in order to keep up and teach a new form of social skills. This is something I am very interested in. I currently teach a new class called Interpersonal Dynamics and when working on the curriculum this summer we were sure to incorporate social networking social skills. This is very exciting to me.