The answers are simple: Some of them have gone off to college, some have subtly retreated into a period of self growth, some have moved on with their lives.
The fact that teachers consistently remain where students don’t is painfully obvious. It’s natural that students move on and stop caring extrinsically about their grade in English or how to integrate blogging with their classroom. They’re able to blog and find their own life teachers for themselves.
Students come into the edublogosphere and then they leave it just as quickly.
So do students belong in the teacher eat teacher world of the edublogosphere? Can you really trust us to care for long enough?
I challenge you to show me proof. Send me links and email me with students you think are passionate leaders and doers. Students, if you’re reading this, speak up. Use this as your megaphone and tell the edublogosphere how you honestly feel.
Until then, this is an open pulpit waiting for the right voices.
I’ve been changing and, I hope, growing, and find my little corner of the universe a tight fit right now.
Soon I’ll be off to stretch my mind and my wings, following the lead of my young friends.
You will care, then wander off, then care again, as do we all, returning each time with more to offer and more to ask.
It’s hard sometimes not to feel guilty about moving on from a place you once loved so much. But you’re right in saying that we’ll come back again to that place once more.
@tiara
Web 2.0 tools are important for getting the message of alternative forms of education and learning out into the mainstream, though. Sometimes I feel like giving up on web 2.0 tools means giving up on the idea itself...sometimes it feels as if they’re almost the same thing. What has your experience been like?
Also, I come from a country where web 2.0 isn’t necessarily a big thing - blogs are massive (and actually did decide the election!!) and there is Facebook but otherwise there isn’t a huge use of Twitter or Plurk or whatever. And that’s only if you’re super urban, which is a tiny bit of the population. The more important issues are about supporting students in their educational pursuits - debate over the importance of grades and exams, holistic vs exam-based learning, encouraging other forms of schooling. Web 2.0 doesn’t even come CLOSE.
With a combination of apathy of all the students around me in my vicinity, the growth factor and the fact I’ve had some traumatic events in my life happen over the last six months I have closed down my blog temporarily to indefinitely.
Right now I have bigger more personal things, but inside I’d like to return, but I’m almost 18. And the nature of my interests in education, question the idea of an adult speaking out in the name of what I feel should be a student led movement.
I would sooner challenge teachers to encourage ALL students to be involved in something meaningful. Have an essay prepared? Change it to something else. Something meaningful, and open.
Change is a fact of life, you realize that. It’s inevitable that some people will come to this site and find themselves extremely engaged... for a short while... and then they’ll move on.
It’s disappointing, but this is where we stand... Because, the truth is that nobody is really participating on the internet that much, anywhere. While so much hype is being made about the user-friendly environment of the Web 2.0 Internet, nobody is really taking advantage.
It’s obvious that even our younger, more technologically inclined, generation fits nicely into a theory called the “1 per cent rule”. It suggests that, “if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2
I’m sorry Lindsea, but i don’t think we’re lacking in passionate leaders.... what we we’re lacking is DOers. The average individual internet junkie has an ocean of opportunity at their fingertips, but doesn’t know what to DO with it. They need to be taught.
I think that what we need is a way to encourage those 10 people who comment and 89 who consume to step into your shoes... but our public education system hasn’t been teaching students to develop the skills necessary to do this.
High school students aren’t being engaged with the online world enough in a productive manner. Why? The wheels of change in education grind slowly, they always have (there’s probably good reason for it), and high school students are more than just reluctant to pursue anything school related outside of the classroom. There’s no motivation for kids to become engaged in a positive way with the internet.
High school students lay in wait for 7 hours a day until the afternoon comes and the internet explodes at their fingertips at the sound of a bell. If educators are using the internet to teach, then student will start learning how to participate. The desire is there.
Internet technology isn’t going to disappear any time soon. School is the first place we learn how the “real world” operates… What about the Internet world too? It won’t take too much more effort to start this... At least I hope not.
I teach my kids to use technology as another means to accomplish an end but I don’t know how many of them continue blogging, podcasting, etc. once they no longer have to for an assignment. My fondest hope is that I can help them fall in love with all the possibilities of Web 2.0 and tech, but it’s only middle school and adulthood is a long way off to them.
I wonder what percent of the world’s people are like me - they want and need to connect, and the web makes it so much easier to do so. It’s possible the other personality types have very little need or drive to participate in either online or physical-world groups, communities, etc. like I do.
I hope you won’t write us off, just because kids move on, out and away from school. We’re still here learning, doing our best, trying to inspire hundreds of children every year. And finally, I hope we didn’t kill all your generation’s curiosity and love of learning with high-stakes testing. Ain’t no technology or internet anywhere that’d make up for that!
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2008/11/playing-for-change.html
If my fellows still read this site, let me know. Because I lost everyone’s E-Mail. (I think.)
Nice little post btw Lindsea.
George Hotz is one, he hacked the iPhone as a summer project. It got him all the “certification” he could have hoped for from a university degree. Where are the others?
If Student 2.0 is needing some help getting started, beyond twittering and naval gazing in a blog, then let me suggest some ideas:
The UN has a mechanism for people to ask for or become volunteers on projects. Joan Oviawe used it to start the Grace Foundation.
MIT’s ThinkCycle Project (currently offline Oct 8/08) is described here in the context of how the idea might play out in a land grant university.
Or you can find your own problem and build a community around it as Margo Tamez demonstrates in her work on the US-Mexican border.
Want help thinking this through? Ask. We’d like to see more Students 2.0.