I went to the Harrisburg campus with Cole and Brad yesterday to talk to the Harrisburg faculty about using wikis. During part of our discussion, Cole mentioned that YouTube is the second most used educational tool in Penn State classrooms. (#1 is PowerPoint). So true. Andrew uses it all the time to show his class everything from the structure and lifecycle of viruses to public health campaigns from around the world (the South African commercials for Pronto Condoms are really cool).
Today, for one of my classes, my group did a presentation about green/environmental issues in relation to globalization and lifelong learning. We used about a dozen videos from YouTube that demonstrated different kinds of green issues from around the world: Uganda, Kenya, China, Kiribati, Canada, Singapore, and a few from the U.S. It was pretty rewarding to put all of that together because it is something that I care about and I got to learn a lot while working on the presentation. We asked the class to break into small groups a couple of times to answer questions that were related to the videos to ensure that there would be a lot of discussion. We also incorporated some props: some packaging material and some organic and Fair Trade chocolate.
At the end of the session, everyone wrote some feedback, which I just finished reading. Overall, the other members of the class really liked what we did, especially using videos to breathe life into our presentation. The class discussion was very lively. We encouraged people to talk about green issues that they know about personally (nearly all members of the class have lived outside the U.S.).
Based on the feedback, several people wrote that we could have made a stronger connection between our topics and lifelong learning. I was hoping that the connection would have been obvious based on the examples we were showing. One video from the U.S. and one from Canada were talking about teaching people to grow community gardens in urban neighborhoods. Another two U.S. videos were public service announcements about environmental issues from the 70's. The video from Kenya was about the Green Belt movement, in which women teach other women how to grow and plant trees (35 million of them!). We also asked people to think and talk about how they learned about environmental issues from the first time they were aware of those issues to how they get their information now. On the other hand, some of the other videos (China, Kiribati, another from Canada) didn't really talk about learning - but I think those videos were still important because they were addressing the globalization part of the focus of this course.
What would I do differently? I'd probably cut down the small group discussion a bit and then have a very explicit conversation about how all of this fits in with the themes of the course. I think that's important because a lot of the lifelong learning literature that I've been reading focuses on formal education and work-related training, but not education that is related to non-vocational purposes (citizenship, community cohesion, politics, religion, environment, etc...).
Today, for one of my classes, my group did a presentation about green/environmental issues in relation to globalization and lifelong learning. We used about a dozen videos from YouTube that demonstrated different kinds of green issues from around the world: Uganda, Kenya, China, Kiribati, Canada, Singapore, and a few from the U.S. It was pretty rewarding to put all of that together because it is something that I care about and I got to learn a lot while working on the presentation. We asked the class to break into small groups a couple of times to answer questions that were related to the videos to ensure that there would be a lot of discussion. We also incorporated some props: some packaging material and some organic and Fair Trade chocolate.
At the end of the session, everyone wrote some feedback, which I just finished reading. Overall, the other members of the class really liked what we did, especially using videos to breathe life into our presentation. The class discussion was very lively. We encouraged people to talk about green issues that they know about personally (nearly all members of the class have lived outside the U.S.).
Based on the feedback, several people wrote that we could have made a stronger connection between our topics and lifelong learning. I was hoping that the connection would have been obvious based on the examples we were showing. One video from the U.S. and one from Canada were talking about teaching people to grow community gardens in urban neighborhoods. Another two U.S. videos were public service announcements about environmental issues from the 70's. The video from Kenya was about the Green Belt movement, in which women teach other women how to grow and plant trees (35 million of them!). We also asked people to think and talk about how they learned about environmental issues from the first time they were aware of those issues to how they get their information now. On the other hand, some of the other videos (China, Kiribati, another from Canada) didn't really talk about learning - but I think those videos were still important because they were addressing the globalization part of the focus of this course.
What would I do differently? I'd probably cut down the small group discussion a bit and then have a very explicit conversation about how all of this fits in with the themes of the course. I think that's important because a lot of the lifelong learning literature that I've been reading focuses on formal education and work-related training, but not education that is related to non-vocational purposes (citizenship, community cohesion, politics, religion, environment, etc...).
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