This week’s reading of The World Is Open left me with a few impressions that are both positive and negative. As the name of the book suggests, we live in a world that thrives on information that is delivered in ways that challenge convention. Whether it is learning using YouTube or broadening our horizons communicating with other cultures via Livemocha education and its reach has expanded globally. Globalization of education with Web 2.0 gives education tangibility never available in the past.
I absorbed the information from our reading this week and feel The World Is Open is optimistic about the new advancements created by Web 2.0. I am a big fan of technology and it has had a positive impact on my life, but I feel that the book is a little too optimistic about the use of new technological resources. Bonk (2009) stated, “Clearly, the top-down, expert-driven, and often boring lecture-based forms of learning have given way to learner empowerment and revamped notions of teaching and learning” (p. 328). I agree with that statement but I am also a little bothered by it. Traditional education may be less global and more limiting, but it has built in controls that safeguard the type of information presented. As we went over in class, the internet houses a great deal of misinformation and has little control over it. The book talks about Wikipedia and shines a favorable light on it but as a resource it is unreliable. The book presents several different resources to us but does not look at the possible dangers related to their use. I feel the use technology is educationally important but needs continual oversight to make it reliable and less dangerous to the educators and students who use it.
Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open. San Francisco: Jossey Bass
I completely agree that "The World is Open" only speaks about the benefits of technology in education. In our readings to this point, there has been very little light shed on the potential problems that technology can present in the world of education. While I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives in this case, every user needs to be fully prepared on the pitfalls and misinformation that are on the Internet.
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