“The most important thing any teacher has to learn can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” – John Holt
The way we learn, share, and communicate has been impacted by mobile devices. In my recent webinar, Sharing the Narratives of Our Lives: Meaningful Learning with Mobile Devices, I shared examples of the different ways individuals are using apps and mobile devices to communicate, connect, and express themselves. We can take these learning rituals and help support our students in being authors, producers, directors, and creators. I also talked about the new ways millions of us are sharing the narratives of our lives, through trends like reblogging, memes, vines, animated gifs, emojis, and ephemeral apps.
Many of us are unaware of the way millions (including our students) create, produce, direct, summarize, translate, and share stories outside of learning institutions. All around the world, millions share the narratives of their lives through text, status updates on Facebook, tweets, images, and short videos. We share bite-sized chunks of our life stories in 140 characters, six second-videos, or memed images with a few words. That is why I created the 15 second video trailer below. This is the maximum time allowed to create Instagram videos. If you want to create a Vine video, you only get six seconds.
Summarizing a story into meaningful bite-sized chunks takes skill. According to David Crystal, students are writing more with technology than we could have ever written in the past (Spotlight-verlag.de/aktionen/pdf/spotlight/magazin.pdf). They are blogging, microblogging, reblogging, videocasting, and texting constantly throughout the day. Their daily rituals include scanning streams of bite-sized information and responding to these narratives and knowledge through likes, comments, retweets, reposts, or reblogs.
Crystal, D. (2008, November). The joy of txt. Spotlight, 16-21. From: http://ww.davidcrystal.com/David_Crystal/internet.htm
Travel around the web and observe the way people communicate and learn in different social networks like Vine, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. What trends do you notice?
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