Computer Teacher, Teach Thy Self!

Since Jeff Utecht’s post about reflection (that spurred me to invest more time reflecting) and the fabulous post of David Hamilton in “Principally  Yours” about refelection I have been thinking a lot……about reflection!

I have been furiously ripping through my aggregator as of late to re-visit some key topics of Web 2.0’s impact on education and I found my self reading Mark Prensky again.  I love Mark’s take on education reform (or the lack there of) and the change in the student mind. But what I found very interesting was this quote:

One key area that appears to have been affected (in regards to the effeciency of the teen hypertext mind)  is reflection.  Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to genralize, as we create “mental models” from our experience.  It is in many ways, the process of “learning from experience” in our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people.

It doesn’t just come down to adaption to digital the “shift” that our students are spearheading, but also reflecting on change.  Better yet, we should be reflecting on the change in our thinking.  Metacognition  is not a buzzword to be thrown about to sound learned in a staff development session.  Awareness of one’s own thought and learning process is a skill that needs demonstrated and modeled for our students. In my mind, the best way to teach toward the goal of metacognition is to practice the skill of reflection on our thoughts. The best way I know how to do this is to blog, and to use my aggregator to read the thoughts of others.

Observation of our learning process both individually and as an educational society is paramount to technology being transformative.