The Changing Past

When I started teaching at WOU in 2000, we would write and hand out to students very specific steps as to what to do on the computer.  Today I had the students set up blogs in blogger, I was not certain what they would find or if they would find the same thing based on their previous experiences with Google or Blogger.  So we did the best we could which not only got us to our objective, but we could be creative along the way.

Then we discussed some of the tools that evolved out of Web2.0 and recognized how much they have changed over the years.  I had become very comfortable with RSS feeds and Wikis.  Now major companies like Google and Apple don't include RSS and there are better and more fun alternatives to wikis.  Even college aged digital natives don't know what wikis are even though they use Wikipedia regularly.

Teaching technology has therefore become a process of understanding discovery and exploration and not following recipes and step-by-step instructions.  Fortunately digital natives are more secure in experimentation than us older cautious learners.

The Internet is a storehouse of information, much of it good, some of it not so good and some of it rather bad.  We need to be lifetime learners and understand how to differentiate between the good, not so good and bad.