In a world of over-abundance, how do we equip learners to make use of abundant content?
· There is abundant content, but the quality is
very mixed, often quite poor, and it is not suitable for different levels of
learning.
· In an English-language learning context,
learners need to be able to: -
o
Know what
resources to look for – what skill level, what aspect of language to target.
o
Know how
to embrace good quality materials and reject bad quality materials.
· So I think they need some extra things to help
them make the most out of the abundant content: -
o
Diagnostic
tools to let them know which areas they need to practise and develop.
o
Beneath
this is an assumption of some kind of roadmap or set of roadmaps – skeletons of
curriculums – that let learners know the direction they should be travelling so
that they can build their knowledge on the right foundations. E.g. in language
learning there is no point learning complexes communicative forms such as the
passive sense without first having a good working knowledge of some of the
simpler forms.
o
Some way
of filtering searches for content–
not sure how to do this when most materials aren’t tagged or sorted.
Some way of understanding
the quality ratings of different content – some websites with free content have
‘star rating’ systems, but often these are inaccurate, with poor quality materials being given high ratings.
I agree Patrick. Particularly with language students who have to wade through resources that are written in the language they are trying to learn. This is why I started curating material relevant for language students so I could have some prefiltered resources at hand and it's also an area where students can dip into for extra work. Some material is categorized into levels but as you say it's not always reliable and it's perhaps optimistic of us to hope for some process of standardization across the web that takes care of this problem for us. What we can do though as you suggest is provide them with the necessary tool kit i.e. digital literacies to aid them overcome some of these issues. This isn't an overnight solution but requires training. And depending on the language level of the students we can at first lead them to our prefiltered repositories and then gradually release the reigns.
ReplyDeleteTrish