Do I Foster a Participative Culture In My Classroom?

     A common thread of lament that will run through my blogs and discussions is that math is a different animal to teach.  When I observe other classes in my school, I see students engaging at various levels.  It appears to me that the level of engagement is a product of both the understanding of what is being taught and the quality and quantity of background knowledge that the student brings to the discussion.  In these classrooms, students can be what Dr. Kalantzis referred to as knowledge producers, helping move the learning forward through their own contributions.
     The problem I face, however, is that, while my students often have a reasonable level of understanding of what I am teaching, they almost never have any background knowledge that can help them be producers.  For the most part, all teaching comes from me.  On a rare occasion, someone will offer a comment or idea that will be productive, but that is usually the result of that student having learned that concept before.  It is typically not the result of the student connecting the current topic to something else they have experienced in their lives.  So, while I would love to see myself as someone who promotes a participatory culture in my classroom, for now I do not.  I promote participation in the traditional sense.  "Mary, what is the next thing I want to do to isolate the variable?" That is the best that I can do for now.
     If I could do something truly participatory, I would like for it to be in the vein of Henry Jenkins' project involving Wikipedia.  To have my students attempt to navigate the vetting process and actually change the information contained in a Wikipedia entry is the most authentic and participatory endeavor that I could hope for.

"The most important reason to understand online teaching and learning is...."

       Understanding teaching and learning in general is what I do.  It's what we all do.  The difference now, for me at least, is that the game is changing fairly rapidly.   I am old.  Not doddering or slipping, but I am definitely a digital settler at best and the technology curve seems to be getting steeper every day.  I have to be pretty active to avoid falling behind.  
        People are online.  Students are online.  It turns out that online is a place.  It is a fairly strange place where people act differently than they do in other places.  None of my friends walk up to me in the grocery store and give me their relationship status.  They do that online, however.  
       Online is a big place.  But, again, this big place is different from other big places.  If I go to a football stadium, very few of the others in the stadium can hear what I am saying and when I finish speaking, my words don't linger, they simply melt into the susurrus of the crowd.  Online, my words are heard by everyone.  Everyone I know.  Everyone who knows everyone I know.  And they last forever.  So I should probably try to be selective about what I say.  
     Unlike most old people, I do not scrunch my face and wonder why the kids of today want to spend so much time online.  Rather, I want to understand how to understand them and to find a way to find them.
     I need to understand online teaching and learning so that I can understand online teachers and learners.