Learning in a time of abundance #change11

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by magnusfranklin

I will admit to being very slack with my learning in the MOOC that I am undertaking entitled Change11.  Everyday I check my email and sometimes I will think "Geez that is very academic and well above me" and other times I think "This is pointless to my context"  The beauty of Change11 is the ability to 'dip in' and 'dip out' as you needed.  There is no need to work through the course in a liner fashion and when I saw the title of this weeks theme, I must admit to being intrigued.

The theme for this week is titled 'Learning in a time of abudance'  After reading the initial article sent out for this week, it got me thinking about some of the things that Eric Duval introduced to the community.  One statement that Eric made really resonated with me.  It was when he talked about 'filter failure'.  My simple man definition of this would be the lack of inappropriate or non existent ways of catching information as it passes through your learning stream.  The ability to set proper filters to catch the information or find out 'stuff' is an important skill that all 21st century learners need.

My good friend Rod Lucier talked about this on a recent episode of The Edtechcrew.  I have always been a big fan of Rod's and I encourage you to go and check out some of his work on how he filters his information.

Students truly do have an abundance of information / expertise at their disposal.  I truly feel that the ability of teachers to facilitate this process is one of the most important things to educating our students on becoming digitally literate citizens.  I also worry that kids inability to filter information can lead to failure as well due to the abundance of information at their fingertips.  Teaching students the appropriate way to access / source information is extremely important.  Another important notion is getting them to understand what is a relevant source and appropriate and what is not.  Young learners find this process extremely difficult.  I eagerly look forward to learning more about this concept from the community this week.