Teaching and Learning in the information age
Monday, January 20 2014, 19:00 – 20:30
Mass-produced products were the central commodity of the Industrial Age. When these products were replaced by information as the focal-point of the economy our era became the Information Age. Though in this sense economic issues are the defining element of an "age", information, and the digital technologies that make it so readily available, affect all aspects of society – including, and perhaps especially, education.
Acquiring information has always been a central aspect of education. In previous eras information was scarce and acquiring it was difficult. Today's digital technologies make it ubiquitous so that "knowing" something has become knowing how to find what we need rather than remembering or memorizing. This fundamental change compels us to ask what is important to know today, and also how we can best learn what we have determined is important.
This webinar will attempt to give a broad overview of the ways in which digital technologies are influencing education. It will examine how our understanding of literacy is changing, and will question whether "knowing how to find the answer" is today sufficient, or whether we still must learn to "know the answer". It will ask how having "information at our fingertips" influences, for better or for worse, the learning process.
The webinar will examine the ways digital technologies affect the ways teachers construct learning environments – both teacher-centered and student-centered – and will ask when each of these might be preferable. It will also examine the role of "big-data" in education today, questioning how data-driven evaluation, made possible through the ubiquity of digital devices in the classroom, may be changing the "art" of teaching into a "science".
Jay Hurvitz holds an M.A. in Computers and Communications in Education from the School of Education of Tel Aviv University.
From the mid-1990's he has taken part in many of Israel's first internet-based learning projects, including developing some of the first courses for the Aviv Virtual School. Throughout the decade of 1999 – 2009 he served in the Department of Elementary Education of the Ministry of Education as the "resident expert" on learning with the internet.
Today he works as a didactic advisor for the development of online courses at the Institute for Online Learning at the Achva Education College, and trains teacher educators in the Information and Communications Technologies Professional Specialization two-year program at The MOFET Institute.
He blogs extensively on issues dealing with internet in the learning process on his Hebrew blog.