Learners as knowledge creators

A new generation of Web 2.0 tools is now making it possible for people to directly engage in the process of collective knowledge creation.

Web 2.0 tools give us the power to participate/interact/co-create/converse with others anytime/anywhere in the world. We can be both the designers/creators and user/consumers of each others' creative content, to make/view movies, write/tell/read stories, illustrate/develop ideas, find and organize stuff or just do things. Think social networking sites, wikis, blogs, team learning/meeting systems, short message services such as twitter, bookmarking...and more.

But instead of using these tools in the classroom we teachers perform a traditional role of “knowledge tellers”. We have come to believe that what we know is universally important, even though we also know that this knowledge may be out-of-date by the time our students reach adulthood.

We are discovering that this current generation of "interactive kids" is very quickly bored by the sounds of our voices. We become “behavior controllers” to prevent them interrupting or disrupting our classrooms. We block the use of the very same language/gesture tools that would otherwise help young people develop their brains for a successful life. We ask them to sit still and say little or nothing for most of the next 12 years of their lives, except when we say they can.

Yet what most of us really want is to create learning environments, where relating, and thinking skills, particularly dialogue and dialectical discourse, help our young people develop their brains, ready for an increasingly complex 21st century world.

Question: What could we do, starting today, to help learners design and facilitate their own learning activities/"edutainments" and so become active knowledge creators?