Chapter 6: Community Building with Technologies

When I saw that the title of the chapter was “Community Building with Technologies” it sounded like an oxymoron to me because I feel that people become more distant when technology is being used. As I began reading I realized that I had never considered the option of building communities between different communities. I never realized that there were so many ways for people to stay in touch across the world. When I was younger remember there were pen pals that you wrote to across the waters and would take weeks before you received an answer. By the time I was old enough to have a pen pal we were able to e-mail each other and have a more rapid response. The students of this day and age have things like wiggio, wikis, blogs, and even videoconferencing or webcams. All of these are things that I couldn’t have even dreamed of using with my pen pal. I think that this opens doors to exploring better cultural awareness and appreciation, encourages students to want to travel, and just gets students inquisitive overall.
This chapter also informed me that not only do students like participating in education through technologies but they actually expect to. What this says to me is that I have to be ready to implement many avenues of technology into my classroom. After changing my specialization to Education Technology this is definitely something I hope to be able to do. Technology and the internet allows room for students to produce their own knowledge database in their own knowledge based community. This means that they are building their own knowledge, rules, boundaries, etc. In order for this to happen students must be active learners and thinkers so the act of doing this alone teaches the students something new. I feel that the technology world will continue to develop and support more critical thinkers and I am excited to see what all it can do for the world of education.
*B.C.*