Teaching and Learning Fused through Digital Technologies
The invisibility of the many in university classroom instruction sounds anachronistic in the age of the Internet, where learning is made meaningful by personal drives, personal choices, and personal possessions of learners. Reported here is a reconstructive effort at integration of teaching and learning by exploring the open nature and availability of the read/write Web in a pedagogic, hybrid course in China. This chapter is based on three key ideas: (1) learning community, (2) iterative learning process, and (3) reconstruction of personal conceptualizations through the dynamics of social discourse. By embodying target knowledge in the learning process, intuitive and reasoning powers of individual learners were shaped into primary driving forces through selective reading, classification tasks, and essay writing. In the intensive multi-level dialogues that followed, students reconstructed their personal conceptualizations of target knowledge, learning, and self-concepts, which were consolidated and developed further through monthly reflections and a term paper.