Embrace the Spirit of Sharing
In today’s Second Language Learning session, Professor Mike Beaumont arranged a few in-class activities to give us a feel of today’s themes — constructivism, social interactionism, social constructivism and social constructionism. One of the most memorable tasks, in my opinion, was as follows:
Individually, note down: three “values and beliefs” you have as a teacher; three “individual characteristics” of yourself as learner; and one “feeling” that I (the teacher) have conveyed to you (the learner) in these classes (not to be disclosed to me).
This task fits well in the paradigm of the lesson but also helps exemplify what social interactionism means, i.e. the view that we “are born into a social world, and learning occurs through interaction with other people” (Williams and Burdern (1997: 39).
What I found interesting is how I find myself as a learner. The three characteristics I came up were: 1) the spirit of sharing; 2) introspective and 3) proactive, in which “the spirit of sharing” carries the most weight.
Yes, as a learner, I have always believed that there really is nothing to hide. Once you’ve hit upon an idea, share it! Through sharing, you automatically get feedback that you could reflect upon and evaluate. The rationale behind is the fact that there is always room for improvement, hiding imperfect ideas is groundless and useless.
How, when and where should I share my Thoughts? — You might ask. Well if you are adventurous enough, please try to avoid big, established social network sites such as MySpace because your contribution to that bit of cyberspace will hardly be noticed and therefore discussed; rather, you should turn your eyes onto innovative, developing network site such as http://www.thoughts.com/ where you are bound to get feedback from people like you via engaging yourself in photos, videos, podcasts, and chat in the community forums. Moreover, you could create blogs for free and decide for each blog post if it should be public, private, or only viewable by your friends and family. In addition, it features free unlimited bandwidth… http://www.thoughts.com/ is literally all that you might need to create a well-rounded cyberspace identity which you could build on later for the purpose of sharing and self-improvement.
Embrace the spirit of sharing, folks, real learning takes place when ideas are shared and perfected!
Reference:
Williams, M. & R. Burden (1997) Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach Cambridge: CUP Chs 1-4