Echo Chambers

I took part in an interesting unconference session yesterday as part of my Learning 2.008 experience about echo chambers. The echo chamber is something that we always talk about in the blogosphere in a not particularly positive way. In a nutshell, when people talk about this, they are usualy referring to the fact that we often talk amongst ourselves a lot and the danger of not having enough outside perspective or enough critical friends.

But yesterday we took a different tact. As most of the people involved in the session were not bloggers, we ended up talking up classrooms as echo chambers. About the danger of not having enough outside, international perspectives on our teaching and our information. This circled around the idea first of information, about using the same sources repeatedly and not encouraging kids (or teachers for that matter) to consider new points of view and different perspectives. This is especially important in international schools for international teachers who most likely work with kids from many different nations who bring an unimaginably vast array of life experiences and social contexts with them into the classroom.

The second thing we discussed was the concept of teaching itself becoming an echo chamber. Many teachers teach how they were taught. So the balancing act of teaching faces the danger of being an echo chamber itself. The methods we use, the strategies we employ, the way we organize, set up and run the day to day business of our classrooms faces this danger because teachers don't often get the opportunity to see others in action. We don't get to spend time talking about actual practice, and schedules, lesson plans and the thousands of other details that being a teacher can mean.

Finally, our last discussion was about the echo chamber in a positive way. About reframing it as "home." The echo chamber may be the place where we retreat to in order to salve our wounds and salvage ourselves. It can be very hard trying to lead a charge into new territory so sometimes we use our echo chamber, our discussions on home base as a place where we can take the time to regroup before heading out to break new ground again.

This was a great discussion and it helped me to look at this issue through a new lens.

Tags: echochamber, blogosphere, learn2cn

Comments

[Tania Sheko]

This is such an interesting idea; I hadn't even heard of the term before. Except in David Bowie's song 'heroes'. Now I'm thinking that I need to get out of my own echo chamber. thanks.