I just watched the two TED Talk-esque videos Ms. Fletcher posted last week on this blog. The first one, by Sugata Mitra, was about his experients in placing a computer in a remote area with a camera and observing how the kids reacted to it and what they learned. His conclusion was that children can teach themselves in groups. Some children in a remote area in India taught themselves and each other English (with no access to an English teacher whatsoever, just the Internet) in order to be able to do more things on this computer they now had. The second one, by Sir Ken Robinson, was about how the "ADHD Epidemic" is coming from how children are educated and what it does to their development. The emphasis on the negative effects of standardized testing match what we've been reading about in our education unit.
The conclusion I drew from these two presentations is that most of the things that are considered cheating in our current education system should actually be a part of the curriculum. Googling answers on your phone under the desk is cheating in standardized education, but being encouraged to learn new things through looking up something that interests you on the Web can turn out to be an effective method of conveying information to students if such activites are implemented correctly. Copying each other's answers is simply collaboration if it's allowed, and I'm sure Shirky and Johnson have made the benefits of that clear to us by now. If any of you know of some other form of cheating, you have found a new solution to a problem. Obviously, we still have a standardized education system, so cheating is definitely not okay, but with a different kind of curriculum, cheating would not be cheating; it would be achieving.
I don't exactly agree that copying should be considered as collaborative. Sure, it's alright once in a long while if you were unable to complete it for some odd reason but otherwise, it's wrong. It's wrong for the fact that there are some people that will take advantage of it and learn nothing at all while copying the given information.
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily think he means directly copying your friend's answers in a school system. He means taking ideas from one another's and building upon that. He mentions how with tests and copying a peer's answers is wrong which it is. Think about it this way--taking one person's ideas are considered plagarism whereas taking many peoples ideas are considered research. Direct copying and mindlessly taking another's answers is not beneficial for anyone, but taking and working with others to build better ideas is still taking from others but it is in a way in which it is not mindless copying.
DeleteI don't necessarily think he means directly copying your friend's answers in a school system. He means taking ideas from one another's and building upon that. He mentions how with tests and copying a peer's answers is wrong which it is. Think about it this way--taking one person's ideas is considered plagarism whereas taking many peoples ideas is considered research. Direct copying and mindlessly taking another's answers is not beneficial for anyone, but taking and working with others to build better ideas is still taking from others but it is in a way in which it is not mindless copying.
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