Drive Questions From Mr. Nelson

Discuss a time when you’ve seen one of the seven deadly flaws of carrots and sticks in action. What lessons might you or others learn from the experience? Have you seen instances when carrots and sticks have been effective.

As you think about your own best work, what aspect of autonomy has been most important to you? Autonomy over what you do (task), when you do it (time), how you do it (technique), or with whom you do it (team)?...

Visitors and Residents by Dr. White--Write a blog post reflecting on where you are in this continuum and how you see your future on the Internet. Please share on Twitter with the appropriate hashtag(s) and comment on your peers' posts as well.

First of all, I appreciate how White describes the way that most people view Prensky's Principal of Natives and Immigrants. White explains that most people view natives as young people and Immigrants as old people (like me). More accurately, Prensky had a more subtle difference in mind--something like immigrants have accents and natives do not. While this framework is interesting and probably helps to explain most of our differences in attitudes and use of technology, it does not tell the whole story. Each person views technology differently and has a different relationship with technology.

White's framework about technology attitudes and use is very interesting and probably captures the various nuances more accurately than Prensky's. Using the metaphor of Visitors and Residents, White describes how different people interact with technology, how often, with what ease, and the extent of their online presence or visibility. White is clearly aware that a person's "status" may change over time. He states that a person's presence may "erode" and "fade away."

Where am I on this continuum? I am somewhere between a visitor and a resident. I have a "persona" on the web because I use a number of social networking sites. I am also connected with a number of online websites because of my work in San Diego Unified School District. I am generally motivated to learn new applications and tools, so I try to stay pretty current. I would expect that my online presence will grow in the coming years as I learn and become more comfortable with marketing our department and myself.

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The second major theme that I noticed in the TED Talk by Michael Wesch is that the way we "educate" our students needs to change. It is no longer sufficient to simply give "knowledge" to our students. It is more important to provide them with the capacity to solve problems and to use their knowledge in ways that are relevant to their lives, their community, their country, and the world around them. I agree in theory with Wesch, but learning how to teach this way is not easy. I think about my daughter who is currently taking AP Statistics. She is required to learn many statistical models. She applies her knowledge to fictional scenarios. I wonder what her teacher could do to make this work more relevant to my daughter and the other students in the class. Perhaps he could have students collect data sets on a real life problem that affects students at the school. Students could analyze the data using descriptive and inferential statistics and then offer findings and implications to the administration.

I noticed two major themes in this TED Talk by Michael Wesch.
First, Wesch posits that how we communicate can essentially change the way people relate to one another. Relationships can be and have been altered by the use of technology and social media. I absolutely agree with this theory because I have seen the changes that have taken place as a result of the widespread use of mobile devices. Texting, social media, and other forms of non face-to-face communication and interaction have created a world that is very different from the one that I grew up in. For example, people can quickly communicate with others in short sound bites. It would be interesting to learn how this form of communication affects relationships over time. It would also be interesting to know if people who rely heavily on social media actually become more isolated than those who do not.