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A Community of Learners
Posted on July 19th, 2012
AKA= Being a digital citizen in my world.
I’ve spent most of this evening helping my online students, helping a fellow Calculus 2 classmate with finding centers of mass, integrating by parts and substitution. Someone please remind me why in the gods names I thought taking Calc 2 as a refresher course this summer was a good idea? Then I’m trying to reteach myself integrating using trigonometric substitution.
Back to digital citizenship. Participating in the digifoot12 MOOC this summer has spurred me into thinking about where teaching and learning are going? I know the majority of HS students in my State would not be too successful being thrown into a MOOC without a lot of support on the ground (an ox goad?) . Hopefully as a course progressed, they would become self sustaining learners, and be able to dig the understanding out for themselves. That is what we want: life-long learners.
How do you get help when you’re out in the aether by yourself? Youtube videos, Purplemath and Paul’s Calculus notes are all good resources but more importantly, learning to interact cooperatively with people at the other ends of these wires is the best skill to acquire. Knowing how to ask for help in an appropriate manner is a good skill to learn. It is really easy to blame someone else for your failures, but in online learning, the drive, time and commitment MUST come from the student. When all students are coming together with this kind of drive, then the online classroom is a beautiful place to be!
One thing to note about my own learning this evening: It is nice to see that how I teach students to find derivatives of inverse trig functions applies directly to the technique of integrating using trigonometric substitution. Thanks Stu Swartz! <link>