Construct Knowledge or Consult an Expert?

After reading about everything the participants did at the High Schools New Face conference with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on the TechLearning blog, I hope I get the chance to experience something like that! I'm doing okay trying to teach myself everything, but it sure would be easier to involve myself in intensive, guided exploration of the tools available to me. I want to be taught - I want an expert there!

Hmmm. Is that the result of years of schooling? I don't know. Having an introduction to a topic by an expert is not counterproductive - it helps focus my beginner floundering-around to a few useful paths. So yes, seeking experts is still one method of learning. I guess the seeking is the important part, versus having an expert forced on me by some class I was required to take. 21st Century learning seems to emphasize the responsibility of learning being on the learner; of letting people (children) choose to learn what interests them. Constructivism - that's the ism I'm thinking about now. I could construct my own knowledge of 21st century tools (and I am), but it sure would go faster if I received a little pointed guidance during my early explorations! That's where this thought is leading me; pure constructivism is frustrating and time-consuming, and many students don't have the time or inclination to follow learning through to the end, to become experts themselves. Teachers have to provide a basic introduction, a direction, some tools and how to use them, generate some excitement and energy for what could be discovered or learned, before students can take off and build on that foundation.

While cruising through the rest of my feeds, I found a perfect example of the kind of learning I'm trying to describe. Will Richardson, writing about the learning at BLC that occurred outside of the sessions, said

"...and then he took literally two minutes to show me how to begin to play. Not how to take a certain picture in a certain way. Not how to prepare for every shot. But how to play and experiment and take a picture, look at it, make an adjustment, try it again, reflect, reshoot, etc. until I finally got what I wanted...I learned just enough to teach myself. Pretty cool."

Yeah, that's it - teach our kids just enough of a new concept for them to begin teaching themselves. In science, introduce a tool, dabble in using it, brainstorm how the tool could be used to explore a personal topic of interest, research the tool's use by others, design an experiment to use this tool within your topic, and publish the results on a wiki/vidcast/blog...I picture students using these tools and the science surrounding them to analyze aspects of their personal interests - horses, hockey, painting, video games, underwater basket weaving.

Doable? For me? It's a huge stretch. I'm a traditional learner, struggling to create nontraditional ways of learning. Part of me is excited to get into a classroom and start experimenting, and part of me just wants someone else (an expert!) to figure it all out and tell me what to do ;-)