Week Seven Reflection: Not Quite A Wrap

In the movies, the director hollers, "and....it's a wrap!"

ILT 5340 is not quite a wrap.  However, we are getting close.  Week seven has been wonderful.  I have begun to reflect back on this last seven weeks and I really think that what we have experienced is a mashup between a sprint and a marathon.  I'll work on a visual for that prior to my last reflection. Each week, I have been drawn further into the ideas of literacy and what that looks like in a digital community of learners.  I have reconsidered the ideas of time and space and learned about a vital concept that will become a permanent part of my own research interest: the collapsed context.

This week, I spent all week long working on a new high school concept.  It has been challenging to build a new team with educators who are reluctant adopters of technology and who are largely resistant to change.  This has been hard--because the frustrated leader in my has often found itself inwardly screaming, "For God's sake, take a flipping risk!"

Our kids need to know that taking a risk will often lead to huge rewards.  Our kids need to know that risk taking is an important 21st and 22nd century skill and that the kids coming into our schools today will quite likely be navigating a 22nd century world.  We need to develop that kind of forward thinking risk taking.  We need to stop thinking about today--and tomorrow--and start thinking about what lies just slightly beyond our singular limited experiences.

We need to teach ourselves to dream.  It occurs to me that our stories and the stories we tell need to reach back to the idealism of Dr. King and look forward to a shared experience and collective understand empathy that looks forward to an existence where every story shared is an experience of created and nurtured co-existence.  Digital collapsed contexts allow us to share those experiences across time and space and cultural contexts.  In many ways, they encourage us to dream.  They also encourage us to never forget and to become the curators of multiple shared experiences.  Alton and Philando will become a part of those shared experiences.  Hopefully, we dream about those experiences--and hopefully we can share those experiences across time, across culture, because to be human is to know we are not alone through shared experiences.  "We read to know we are not alone," words by C.S.Lewis--We share our stories to know that we can live better, more fully when we share experience and understanding.

So, my reflection this week is more metaphysical.  But, it is also one which reveals how much the stories we share and tell intersect with my own experiences and the experiences of my children to create something much fuller, much deeper and much more important that my singular story.