ESSAY DRAFT

IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION

Education is an important medium of acquiring essential knowledge and skills. It is more than just learning from books. It is an effort of the older generation to transfer their life wisdom to their offspring. Our world is constantly changing and developing so it is very important to teach and bring up intelligent people who could understand the problems of modern society and solve them in a proper way. It is said that education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. So, why is it extremely important to get a proper education?

Education plays a vital role in shaping successful people. It gives us the opportunity to become a productive member of a civilized society by acquiring all the necessary skills. We learn how to meet challenges and overcome obstacles. We learn how to become an integrated personality and maintain the perpetuation of our culture. People learn basic norms, rules, regulations, and values of society through education. Moreover, high quality education enables us to lead a successful life, enhances our intelligence, skills, knowledge, and brings positive changes in our life.

Education lays the foundation stone for our future. An illiterate person can find it very difficult to cope with some aspects of life. Education expands our vision and creates awareness. It helps us develop a disciplined life and provides us with better earning opportunities. It enables us to know the world beyond our own surroundings. Education is also a prerequisite of the prosperity and modernization of any country.

Modern education is liberal, open, and exoteric.  It is the premise of progress, in every family and in every society. It teaches people to reason. It is based on the humanism, freedom, equality, democracy, and human rights. The content of education keeps pace with the needs of modern society and is a mirror of its goals, values, and priorities. The present industrial society has opened up a plenty of occupations which require people with specialized skills and knowledge. So, education is a necessary means of eradicating the unemployment problem. It is able to reduce poverty in a number of ways. But we have to remember that there is a great need for the growth of the vocational education so that every person could pursue a fulfilling career that ensures a satisfied life.

Education is definitely important in one`s life.  A gift of knowledge can bring us to the top of our dreams. It leads us to the right path and gives us a chance to have a wonderful life. Education makes people capable of doing new interesting things that can go a long way to improving human living conditions and standards. Our whole life is the process of learning and gaining new useful knowledge. We should always remember that getting a good education is imperative in today`s society as it is a foundation of our successful future. Our education is really worth investment.  Only if you believe and work hard you can achieve anything.

EIGHT TASK

DIRECTIONS: Read carefully “Writing argumentative essays” by clicking on http://www.logicstudent.com/intro/tutorial/preface.htm.  Make sure you carry out the suggested tasks for a better comprehension of the way you are expected to write an argumentative essay.

Decide on a particular debatable question you would like to focus on, and write in your blog an initial outline of your final essay.

Write in your blog a first draft of your final argumentative essay by taking the question and the outline you previously posed into account.

Guidelines for the final CCT essay:

• It must be an argumentative essay
• It must make reference to the main concepts reviewed throughout the CCT course
• It should be approached as “process writing”, i.e., with evidence of basic issues such as an initial outline, a first draft, peer editing and final version
• It must have a minimum of 2,000 words
•  It must include at least 8 credible, relevant and current sources to support your arguments and counter-arguments
• It must be typed and follow APA style style in regard to format, in-text citations and references
• Plagiarism will be penalized.

EL CONECTIVISMO COMO TEORÍA DE APRENDIZAJE EMERGENTE

Con Pavlov se da la entrada al conductismo realizando un experimento el cual consistía en entrenar a un perro para que al sonar la campana, el perro empezara a babear sabiendo que le iban a dar comida. Con Thorndike vemos la Teoría de Estimulo y Respuesta que es muy conocida ya, la cual se basaba en dar un estimulo bueno para que el sujeto del experimento hiciera una tarea ya dicha, luego continuamos con Wabson, Skinner y Piaget, los cuales ayudaron a reforzar mas estas teorías anteriores para el desarrollo pedagógico, todo esto impulsado en pro de un crecimiento social adecuado, cuyas teorías aun siguen siendo fuerte influencia y mas con Vygotsky con el coductismo social y se refuerza mas ya que en estos tiempos donde ellos empezaron con sus teorías el Marxismo era muy fuerte y esto dio a pie para dichas teorías. Después de ellos muy influenciados aparecen Noah Chomsky y Donald Broadbent los cuales deciden sacar publicaciones sobres sus estudios acerca del cognitivismo, y Ausubel desarrolla las ideas de aprendizaje significativo y tenemos a Bandura con el aprendizaje social que es muy importante dentro de estos aspectos cognitivistas.

Para entender los aportes del conectivismo al aprendizaje en red hay que partir de la premisa de la complejidad creciente del mundo. El conocimiento tiene en la actualidad el reto de enfrentar problemas complejos como la sobrepoblación del planeta, el calentamiento global, la rapidez del cambio y la incertidumbre con que este se produce. Si antes el suministro de información estaba concentrado en pocas manos, hoy cualquiera puede crear y emitir información a través de las redes. El conocimiento se encuentra disponible, cambia y crece exponencialmente en tiempos muy cortos. El aprendizaje adquiere un carácter más autónomo, pero, a la vez, aumenta su carácter social, por lo que resulta imposible para una persona aprender sola, se necesita de los demás.

El docente es el experto que guía al alumno, para lo que debe conocer las herramientas disponibles, utilizarlas y aprender a hacer que las TIC trabajen para facilitar su vida en el aula. Esto requiere de un aprendizaje continuo y un cambio en las prácticas educativas, lo cual es un gran desafío que, si se logra, permitirá al docente contribuir a formar competencias y estrategias en sus alumnos que los ayudarán a seguir aprendiendo el resto de sus vidas.

Para la apropiación óptima del conocimiento se requiere crear redes de aprendizaje concretas, teniendo en cuenta los objetivos de aprendizaje, las características de los participantes y las tecnologías disponibles. La concepción conectivista resulta valiosa a la hora de diseñar una propuesta sobre el aprendizaje en red, pero se requiere complementar con el aporte de otras teorías.
Las redes de aprendizaje en esta era digital tienen como propósito fundamental aglutinar a la mayor cantidad de personas que inicialmente tienen un objetivo particular que los motiva a aprender, pero que luego se transforma en un objetivo común a otras personas, de modo que se forman redes de intercambio constantemente de información y conocimiento, por medio de múltiples y variadas conexiones. 

SEVENTH TASK

ABOUT FAKE NEWS AND INFORMATION

The fake news have taken a great strength with the arrival of globalization. Any person with a  spirit of sabotage, simply diffuses a fact, exaggerating it, energizing the social networks, until it becomes viral and without any veracity.

Nowadays we find a lot of information about many topics, but is our responsibility understand what is good and what is bad for us and even have to teach our students to have that responsibility

To start teaching that responsibility, we have to take into account challenges that we can face, one of them can be the fake information that we can found. 

On the teacher's side, there is a lot that can be done in the classroom. Being a facilitator of learning, a guide for students, a person who directs them to their own knowledge with doubt and the desire to go further, is more important than a grade. The critical pedagogy addresses those issues, and according to one of its main promoters Paulo Freire, who posited that the most important thing is to give the individual the possibility of looking for what he really wants to know.

This is a survey about this important topic, is in Espanish but is related to the task:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qiAPRBe93pU4oWn5_dANDYBDhD_rvOoDIE0gxyzE26s/edit

TASK 6

DIRECTIONS: Write in your blog a critical commentary of the lecture "Where is the OUtrage? Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAxj87RRtsc ) by enhancing the way education is being shaped by larger corporate and market driven forces, the role of critical pedagogy in the traditional spheres of schooling and in contemporary politics, the educative nature of culture and politics, the role of teachers as public intellectuals, and pedagogy as a project of a substantive edmocracy and as a form of resistance and educated hope.


Henry Giroux’s lecture points out the larger corporate and market main forces now shaping all aspects of education, politics, culture, and everyday life in North America. 

Nowadays, the role of the teacher has to be crucial for the society, teachers have to teaches critical thinking, good pedagogy, values, etc. in order to have the freedom of doing correct things, because that is the need of education, and we have to take into account that the union between critical thinkers and good social citizens, is the combination that all world need.

One of the most important challenges that education currently has, is basically teaching how to think. Some teacher are focused just on sharing information without following some relevant processes that involve not only having as much knowledge as possible, but also knowing what to do with it. The fact of owning a car not only implies boasting of it, but being capable of handle it, which is similar to the thinking process. Henry Girous also points out how relevant being a learner while teaching is.

In conclusion we have to realize that education is the key for everything, and even though we are being trained to be under others thought, we have to raise our voice and take into account that aour thinking is a big explotion of knowledge, culture, pedagogy, among others

TASK 5: STEREOTYPES

Now a days people are categorizing colombian as a drog dealers or tiff, but not body see that mostly of colombian are hard workers, I mean of course that in our country are drog dealers and we figth with that every day since Pablo Escobar ages, and this man stain our reputation and the people whose make good for the country try to show our best qualities, another stereotype is that we are thieves, I mean everybody outside of Colombia think that, in fact we know some cases of colombian people robering in other countrys.

Emphasizing Colombia, we are well known for stereotypes such as drugs, weapons, in summary, Pablo Escobar; people around the world, have to realize that we also are sports, science, literature, among other things. People can not continue judging us, just for our past, now we are more than that and also, we can not get affect for these things that are said about us, we know what we are made of and that in most of the cases, we do things in correct way.

Stereotyping is just an attempt to link everyone’s characteristics which is impossible. Some people could fit on some stereotypes, nevertheless not everyone does. Coping with it only requires being brave enough and letting people know by your own actions the real person you are. Categorization is not always worth it, and humankind is dynamic, we are constantly changing that is why stereotypes lack of reliability and validity

Fourth Task: Critical Thinking Skills

Point Of View:

Here is a quick quiz for you:

• In the biblical story, what was Jonah swallowed by?
• How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?

Did you answer “whale” to the first question and “two” to the second? Most people do … even though they are well aware it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story.

Argument:

Psychologists like me call this phenomenon the Moses Illusion. It is just one example of how people are very bad at picking up on factual errors in the world around them. Even when people know the correct information, they often fail to notice errors and will even go on to use that incorrect information in other situations.

Explanation:

People are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic. In what’s been called an era of “fake news,” this reality has important implications for how people consume journalism, social media and other public information. The Moses Illusion has been studied repeatedly since the 1980s. It occurs with a variety of questions, and the key finding is: Even though people know the correct information, they do not notice the error and proceed to answer the question.

THIRD TASK

DIRECTIONS: Watch the lecture of Stephen Brookfield on Creative and Creative Thinking and make a summary of it in your own blog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8umk4w8kB8

Brookfield says that someone who thinks critically, is the one that is able to identify assumptions behind thinking and actions, someone who check assumptions for accuracy, and validity; someone who take informed action. Also, he talks about that someone who thinks creatively is able to view ideas and practices from multiples viewpoints, is the one that is able to move outside of their typical mental framework.

In the lecture he says that when a person think critically, they can:

• Identify assumptions behind thinking and actions
• Check assumptions (accuracy and validity)
• Take informed action.

Brookfield also explained the kinds of assumptions, those are:

• CAUSAL: Explains a sequence of events
• PRESCRIPTIVE:Assumptions about how things should happen and how whe should behave
• PARADIGMATIC: Framing and structuring assumptions that may look obvious.   

Brookfield also explains the four common traditions that feed into critical thinking, these ones are:

* Analytic philosophy (the strongest, and ist say that a student who thinks critically, its good at constructing and  deconstructing arguments)

* Natural science (application of the scientific method, the hypothetical  deductive method)

* Critical theory (traditional critical  theory)

* Pragmatism (the most intersects with creativity

Finally he talked about how Critical Thinking is learned: 

• Ending discussions
• Speaking in tongues
• Drawing and musicalizing discussions.

Reflection: emotional self-management

For me, the emotions taht are most difficult to manage when others disagree with me are:

Sympathy: In case that we have critical disagreements
Stressed: Becasuse people are to close mind and they don't like accept other arguments
Tense: Sometimes the people that we use to disagree are hostile and we feel the necesitie to deabte with the person.
Frustration: It happens to me when I try to let myself understood. When I give my argument in somehow I feel insecure and I expected that someonelse is going to attack me by contradicting my own beliefs.

 When something is disgusting to me, I just express it, and I expect the same from people. If somebody disagrees with me I try not to cause any trouble, but of course it depends on the situation.

INFLUENCES ON MY THINKING 

The influences on my own thinking that I need to be most aware of so they don't prejudice my thinking are my emotions, I tend to be an emotional person, and in some cases, I have thought more with my heart instead of my head.
The  dependency, and the desires about looking good for keeping appearences is insane.