The library learning commons model provides us with a collaborative and experimental space, shifting students from their conventional classroom spaces into a dynamic and modular playground of potential. When we're seeking a new ideal from the standpoint of learning outcomes, it's vital that we shake up the linear and seek to both enhance and transform tasks, allowing students to create personal and meaningful layers of learning. The technology available in our libraries today creates many such opportunities for transformative learning.
The SAMR model outlines how technology can be used in meaningfully sophisticated ways that connect student creativity and communication to learning activities that our pre-internet world would have had trouble imagining. A learning activity that was once an asynchronous practice of submit-and-wait-for-feedback can now be collaborative, synchronous, interactive and multimodal. The seamlessness of our mixed-media internet-based world provides layers of opportunity for this interaction.
According to Youki Terada of Edutopia, using the SAMR model isn't about constantly seeking to move into the redefinition stage with every activity. Rather, it's about recognizing when it's appropriate to try and redefine an educational practice vs. when substituting or augmenting using technology would also serve the learning. In my own practice, I often have the tendency to "go bigger" with every idea, but in doing so I realize that I risk ostracizing people who need to find their comfort level with technology (both colleagues and students).
In the LLC, unique collaboration opportunities invite experimentation with new resources, but communication will be the healthiest modus operandi for finding the healthy medium space to ensure that everyone's needs are being met. By meeting people where they are, we can grow together.
Works Cited
Terada, Youki. “A Powerful Model for Understanding Good Tech Integration.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 4 May 2020, www.edutopia.org/article/powerful-model-understanding-good-tech-integration.
(Comment from Jessica)
Hi Christian, I like that you talk about how each step of the SAMR format is valid. Jumping right to Redefinition isn't always necessarily the right call is a tool that already does the job adequately exists. Technology can even over-complicate things sometimes. Why re-invent the wheel right?