This morning my mind is filled with these thoughts. There are currently 35 wars being waged on the planet. My country is aggressively involved in all of them, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Every day 50,000 children die of starvation. Iraqui's, when asked by a delegation of non-violent activists who met with Iraqui leaders and civilians what we could do to promote democracy in their country, said "Stop killing us". More than a million Iraqui's have been killed in the name of bringing democracy to them.
If education does not result in social change, what good is it? If students do not understand themselves and society and the world at a deeper level than when they undertook their studies, what value is there? Regardless of the area of study, the world self-destructs without the opposing constructive force, waged, if you will, by the educated privileged.
Online education has the potential to offer this privilege to people who otherwise would never have afforded it - people whose destiny it may be to be great peace makers or great educators, or whatever fulfillment their life path describes. Online education is one of the most powerful tools on the planet!
So....I must learn these lessons of fostering online learning community, and course design, always with this in mind, that the responsibility for delivering education includes the responsiblity to remember who those students are and where and in what circumstances they live, and to ask them what they need and want to learn, and to listen to them - to give them the opportunity to participate at a deep level in the design and development of their course of learning.
This is just a log of thoughts, put down rather spontaneously and passionately. I welcome discussion around them.
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2 comments:
Hi Judy,
Love the pink ;)
I often feel quite helpless so I do things with my blogs, wikis, social spaces to at least put out the word that this is on my mind. My experimental wiki is about changing the world - http://letschangetheworld.wetpaint.com
This type of me-publishing, social interaction allows me a forum to contribute and have some personal hope. It's this kind of "power" many of our kids already have but don't necessarily use it in such ways, which is why we need to do this and model/demonstrate positive uses of social computing tools...
just me rambling,
:)
~julz
People should read this.
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