Youthwiki

I chose Teachers Teaching Teaching on the Edutech Talk page, for the educational technology blog I wanted to listen and respond to. You can find it at: http://www.edtechtalk.com/taxonomy/term/58

Episode 79 was a collaboration of many teachers and students that are using Youthwiki http://youthwiki.wikispaces.com/ . They have formed a partnership in discussing “culture”. Many social studies classes are on the wiki to write about their culture and reflect on the culture of the other students. From what I listened to, they were giving suggestions of possible discussion topics. I gained much from this discussion. We reflect often in this class how we can use technology to bring the world closer together. That is a desirable goal, but how do you go about doing that? For this teaching community, they set the task of defining culture in a community or a larger area.

Once students knew what culture was, they could post a definition of what their culture involved. Students could go into the wiki to look at all regional communities. It gave many teachers an opportunity to speak to their kids about the customs of their homes and the homes of kids from around the world.

Students from Virginia saw that a class of Alaskan students listed hunting as being important to them. Alaskan students wrote they often miss school to hunt. The Virginian students thought that was odd. The teacher then asked the kids "When do people miss the most school here?" After some discussion, the kids realized that attendance is low, in their own school, the first day of hunting season. What could have been a difference in customs, was actually a similarity.

This leads me to a point from Woddy Woodgate, a teacher in Alaska. He told the other educators that he wants his students to share culture without giving up their own culture. He went on to say he feels you gain less from the experience if you look for differences first. If students are looking for the differences in their cultures, they not going to see that we are all essentially the same.

Imagine a collaboration between students from schools in geographically different areas. Which will bring more of relationship: realizing that they both play soccer after school and fight with their sister, or a culture change such as the role of the family in society? I think we as educators separate cultures by their differences instead of seeing what we all share. As one of the students on the podcast said "We have so much we can learn from each other."

-Emily