Gabriel Metzger's Portfolio

I’m a Cyborg (or how the Internet Became a Part of Me)

My Relationship with the Internet

I laugh at myself because I was against the Internet as a tool of communication and I hated e­mailing. I used to wonder if I could actually call someone and say, “Hi, what are you doing?” Now as I move closer to finishing an entire degree online, the reality is that I have embraced the Internet and have sought a ‘closer’ relationship with it.

When I was at University of California at Berkeley, all the engineers had their email accounts and would communicate with their professors, but I still went to my office hours as an English major to just chat with mine.  What I see now is that I’m part ‘cyborg’ man and machine and I’m ok with it. I know how much human I am. I know that communication with my teachers can be ok even if we just join zoom sessions, live conversations on the Internet. I have changed as a teacher because I know where being a teacher is at and it doesn’t get all of its inspiration from the Internet.

My thinking does get affected as a result of this Masters but for inspiration purposes and to keep advancing as a teacher and becoming better. I know that educational changes happen very fast from so many classes and just real life changes and how I can take courses all online.  I have changed as a teacher from this Masters program because I want technology to help students learn and have myself to show them knowledge and let them find their own way, gathering other knowledge they find along the way. Learning happens not just from the teacher but a student who is motivated to explore on their own a topic or a concept covered in class.

I want to eventually have students do classwork on the Internet and homework on the Internet and report and go over items on the board using a computer in class. This might get them excited about how to use the Internet for education and keep communication human. This is because of our Masters in Educational Leadership Program. I feel more confident now and see now how I can use technology in the classroom in ways that are much different than before I entered the program. I know websites and how to use them for teaching persons and how to see as a student, how they might make learning interesting and fun.

I was unaware how to use technology in class beyond using the projector and using an online Math program I used for a year and YouTube. My knowledge of what applications and where technology can enhance my teaching and learning is different. My practice as a teacher will change when I work in a better school that has better coordination of teachers focused on a Western curriculum and a foreign principal and vice principal.  Now we currently use a Thai curriculum that covers a lot of major areas but they have a bit of a phobia when it comes to using too much media. They feel the foreign teachers are wasting time and wasting the parents money.

I know that to utilize my new skills in teaching and using technology in my practice I need to find a new job to fit my skill set. I need principals to risk what they knew about teaching and move forward using technology in a way that doesn’t rush students but aids in learning and teaching and makes students more independent.

The First Course That Made A Difference and When I Started to Feel as a Member of the msu.edu Student Body

Every since I left U.C. Berkeley, you were taught to question everything and check up on everything. This was a research principle that all students were taught. Some students stayed at home and did their ‘virtual’ studying in cafes. EAD 850, Multicultural Education Issues and Strategies, with Professor Shahjahan, was a course that felt like old Berkeley. The professor did his homework. All things in the course were there to talk about, we could talk about anything. So, we talked about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, in terms of how they may affect children and their ability to learn as a group in our classes. We had to talk these issues.

We had to speak about all factors that could hurt race relationships and could hurt a student’s performance in an American school of learning because the American Educational System is an unfair one and needs help. This course was great because I had to get into conversations that may have made many students uncomfortable. Most students don’t talk about important things most of the time, at least in many colleges in America. This is my experience, people spend too much time trying to be polite.

The power relationships based on family wealth was a great topic. I never talked about ‘social wealth,’ and never heard of the concept but this course provided a lot of new vocabulary and a new way to look at schools and fairness. ‘Social wealth’ is tied to ‘Social Capital’ and each student is 'invested' in the school. The professor gathered so many writings and books that made me see Education with a new ‘lense.’ It has been strange because in some other MAED courses I wasn’t suppose to talk about these controversial topics that much. They never had a course with him I assume. The professor did warn us, we would have to talk about all concerns in education.

Educational justice and equality became important because the books and topics in the curriculum had to be looked at first. Could everyone feel that they were being talked about in their classes? Could students see themselves first as a leader and not as an African­American leader.

How Learning to Teach an Online Class Made Me Feel Like a Real Cyborg, and using Cyber Intelligence

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a course about teaching online, CEP 820, Teaching Students Online, but I was excited. I wanted to know how could I make contact with students and feel that learning in this way was personal and that we could connect on subject matter and discuss topics without every being in the same room. I learned the old way, as this came up in Professor Weinland’s course early on EAD 860, Concept of a Learning Society,. In Weinland’s course many scholarly articles and the debate about online learning was studied.

I could see how some would fight online classes and the fact that you could lose the personal living person breathing in front of you, see their emotions, react in real time, talk in real time. I remember finishing my Weebly.com site for teaching creative writing and seeing, this could happen. The human interaction of face to face would be minimized in an online writing class for example.  I was always thinking about making the setting, the website, very personal, a reflection of me, and to think of all the ways that students could make it personal as well. Websites give us teachers and leaders in technology a place to create something that can be permanent unless others revise it.

History is suppose to be retold by each generation? Well, Websites rarely go anywhere. They can be shut down by Interpol or the Federal Bureau of Investigation but people fight for their information now and the website can have a secret link.  I was beginning to think like an online teacher and my mentor Trixi was wonderful. She taught me in my course “Teaching Students Online.” She would give me tools to make my site personal and make it feel like the Internet evolution in learning wasn’t a waste in space or time. We discussed how to make the communication a part of an online class and maybe the communication could be more reflective and well thought out especially if done by a student at home.

A Third Important Class in Our Program

CEP 818, Creativity Teaching and Learning, with Professor Richardson, was a course that helped me to re­imagine education and all topics to teach.
We learned to extract an idea and make it change its shape with art and writing and to re­think how to understand ideas and concepts. I used to a get bored in biology in high school. What if we looked at dissecting a frog from the wrong point of view? I don’t believe in cutting up the frog to get educated and what if we could map the organs onto our own body or some other way of exploring the anatomy of the body. We could make pictures of organs and dress each other to learn how our anatomy may be similar to frogs. to show what we share as humans. We could become human frogs.

This is what Professor Richard how us look at. We could re­imagine a topic and how to approach it. We could even change our classroom to a setting where everyone could learn better. The classroom to way to approach pedagogy could be altered make abstracting an idea and finding its core elements, perceiving it in a different way, etc.

Closing/Synthesis of the Program

As I noted earlier as a result of the program I have more knowledge as a teacher using technology in the classroom. I also have more confidence because I created a website and re­thought the concept of ‘recycling’ in terms of perception, making the concept an abstract. This practice makes me feel I can approach a topic in science or in Art or in English and try to see new ways to show and teach a concept that would be interesting to me. The subject has to be interesting to me or I have to change the way I teach it.

I also feel that I can approach any topic and look at it in different ways and see culturally how to approach in for students of different genders, sexual orientations, races, because I now wear my lenses with the ability to look at learning and teaching in a Socially Justifiable way. This is because of the class in this program. I am a changed teacher and will use all my skills will a better job that utilizes my entire skill set. I think at the moment I have utilized the idea of re­imagining learning in physical ways and others from my creativity class in ‘instruction’ and how to measure creativity. I have done this for lessons. I think about a topic and mold it for my own interest. If I was a students, in what way would I want to learn this topic, drawing and reading, singing and writing, etc.