Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Tourist or Resident: A Perspective on Teaching

As an educator are you a tourist or a resident?

A tourist is a sightseer, a day-tripper who is there for the short-term pleasure and the novelty of new experiences.
A tourist usually chooses not to make a full committment to participating in the educational process. He may know about lifelong learning and have some understanding of educational systemic change in the 21st century but does not see the connection to him and prefers to continue with a detached approach.
A tourist is always running out of time to become too involved in change in education. He is only passing through, after all.

A resident however has already made a committment to the time and place.
A resident has bought into the situation and is willing to accept ongoing change and can adapt accordingly.
A resident knows the value of spending time on a task as he wants to be around to see the results.
He is in for the long haul, and like a marathon runner knows he must pace himself but has the energy for the occassional burst of speed.

I used to be a tourist. I started teaching to fill in the time between music gigs. I used to be one of the first out the door on the last bell each afternoon. But as a tourist I realised I was missing out. I was not seeing the bigger picture and how each smaller picture helps to fill in the collage of the larger one. As a tourist I did not make the time to traverse some of those learning curves in order to move to the next level of expertise or confidence.

As a teacher, leader and participant in the development of educational technology I am at home being a resident and hope to encourage other tourists to take residency in the wonderful
world of eLearning.

My challenge to all readers of this blog is to face your fears and become an educational technology resident.

On another note.......As usual I have been reading other wonderful blogs around the world and would like to share my favourites with you.

Who do I read almost everyday? My absolute favourite bloggers, in bloglines alphabetical order are:
There are many others......I will share more later but I encourage you to dip into the above blogs and find out what discussion is going on about the use of technology in education and how it is changing the way we think and what we do and how we do it........

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