Learning Portfolio

If you didn’t catch the reference to The Offspring in the title of this post, I’d understand. In their song The Kids Aren’t Alright, the band sings about kids living on the same street that have, in their adult years, experienced some sort of downfall. Maybe I shouldn’t be so worried. But maybe the kids will be alright, after all.

We’re certainly aware of the negative effects that overuse or misuse of digital tools can have, but the challenge lies in taking a proactive, uniform approach to ensuring that issues are addressed before they become issues.

We’re beyond the point of needing literacy - the Pandora’s box that is the Internet requires competency: the ability to apply that which has been learned in a novel way.

I get the sense that negotiating identities according to either extreme (complete anonymity vs. the ability to be recognized by your offline identity) is problematic. The ideal answer, as with most things, lies in balance.

For Activity 3 in EDUC5105, we were tasked with creating a recorded presentation that reflected on our experience within the course. Not bad right? I record stuff on the daily. I know how to talk. What could be hard about that right?

So why am I writing about a funny one-liner delivered in a 40 year old film? Believe it or not (and at the risk of making a very tenuous connection), it’s because of its relevance to presence.

This was one of those times that it was okay to find out the exact ingredients of a sausage.

If I tell my students what they should be learning, how it should be presented, and how to provide the best answer, they’ll do an excellent job regurgitating that material on a summative assessment…but what of it? What comes after that?

While the TPI didn’t tell me which of the great houses of Westeros I would be part of, it articulated facets of who I am as a teacher, and made me consider questions of balance (and perhaps imbalance) in my approach.