"To inspire them to realize more and more of their capacities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning to life."
-John Coltrane on Uplifting Others

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Digital Scaffolding


As I think about final projects for this class, my mind goes back to scaffolding. Scaffolding in learning means that a group of students with different levels and skills in a concept will, if placed together, learn the whole idea faster than alone. An example of this would be three students living in a foreign land. None of them know the language fluently. However, Student 1 is good at identifying cognates, Student 2 knows verb conjugation, and Student 3 has an ability to understand sentence structure. If they work together, they will learn the language faster and become more fluent than if they stayed alone. Now, this is common sense (at least to me), but how does this transition to Personal Learning Networks and Digital Literacy?

I have a few ideas of how this correlates, but I would like to hear from you. What do you think?

Photo from the Commons on Flickr.

2 comments:

  1. Fascinating! I like the application to Personal Learning Networks and Digital Literacy. Could there be another dimension to education in the exchange of information by social networks? My immediate thoughts are reactions to experiences. In dialogue with a friend, Doug, about thoughts written on each other's blogs, I've seen thoughts completed that I didn't have basis to develop, which enriched my understanding of the subject. We both defend our works too, which I think has been the key for me in developing ideas. I'm interesting in what other perspectives can be applied to this question of perspective.

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  2. This reminds me of my days back in the MTC. My companion and I were able to excel off of each other because of unique strengths like you have mentioned above.

    However, although its true that people can be of support to one another in their areas of specialties, there comes a time and a point when each individual has to learn language learning methods for them self. Fluency, in the end, is a personal accomplishment.

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