My First Night Teaching in @RMIT’s Prototype Project Space: #Eight22

So, last night I ran my first tutorial in the prototype project space in room 108.08.22. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you about the ‘good and the bad’ of teaching in a new space and how (or if) I am going to change my teaching practises as a result of being in it.

But first, some background:

RMIT have invested about $250m in building a brand new, state-of-the-art facility to house the College of Business. I’m going on a tour of the building next week, so I’ll be able to report more then, but by all accounts it’s pretty cool. Certainly the outside looks futuristic…

SAB (© Jason Downs)

One of the things I’m looking forward to is teaching in new spaces that have been designed to help students learn in a manner that will support collaboration, interaction and conversation. Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear the sound of my own voice as much as the next lecturer, and when I went through Uni I never felt I was an equal participant in the learning process; mostly I felt I was being lectured *at* or taught *to*. That model of education was pretty common back in the day and it mostly forms my experiential knowledge of Uni teaching practises (sad, I know). So deliberately trying something new and letting go of the ‘control’ of the class and taking more of a facilitation role than a didactic speaking role is going to be a new experience for me. Should be a whole bunch of fun.

The building has a mix of spaces including those that are described by phrases like: lectorial space; project space; conversation space; discursive theatre; interactive tutorial space; small business space; virtual enterprise space; enterprise and entrepreneurship room; virtual advertising agency; treasury training room; interactive lecture spaces… Some of these spaces are configured for class sizes of about 30 students, others are configured for up to 300 students. In some the furniture is total removable; in others it’s fixed to the floors but designed to be used in such a way that small groups can be formed out of much larger populations of students.

Inside #Eight22 (© Jason Downs)

The Project Space that RMIT have built in our old building to give us a feel for what to expect (which I’m calling #Eight22 after it’s room number), consists of 5 ‘pods’ around each of which six students can comfortably sit. Each pod is triangular in shape which means that the students sit facing each other. This naturally encourages interaction between each student within each pod. The good about this: last night was the first time that the students had met each other and they were going to have to work in groups for one of their assignments. Getting to know each other was easy when they could all sit and face each other rather than all lined up in rows like in a ‘traditional’ tutorial space. A great start.

Each pod has its own large screen and a traditional whiteboard. The theory is that eventually, students will be able to use super flash, new, wireless software to project straight from their laptops to the screens. Each pod can control their own screen and hook up any student’s laptop (or tablet or whatever) and the facilitator can elect to share any screen with all the other pods, or just some, or any combination thereof. Imagine, 30 students all working on their digital devices trying to solve a problem individually, then coming together as a group to debate the best solution by projecting it to a screen and further refining their ideas, then once they have decided, being able to share their solution with the rest of the class. Awesome. Count me in.

While this might be what we can expect, the space is so brand new that the tech hasn’t been installed yet (I’m told it’s coming REALLY SOON). So last night all I could do was project my slides up onto each screen. The good about this: the students are close to the screens and so they can see the slides easily. The bad about this: it still encourages this idea of the teacher being in control of the ‘knowledge’ and projecting it *at* the students who sit there passively (even if they are closer) to ‘receive’ my slides. Not very progressive.

And then there is still the fact that the facilitator gets to elect which screens to share with the rest of the class. I’m still a bit fuzzy on whether the STUDENTS can elect to project their stuff to other students (either via the screens or directly over the wireless network) so the move from teacher centric to student centric might still take a bit of extra effort from the teacher. If I really want to transform my teaching praxis, habits will need to be broken; control will need to be given over. That will be interesting.

So in summary: I liked it. The promise of what can be done in that space is great, and I love that there is plenty of space to get the students up and moving around. They can easily position themselves in front of any whiteboard, any screen, any pod, any student. My aim is to reduce the amount of time that I spend talking at the students and increase the amount of time I spend talking with them. I’ll have to re-think the way I create my slides (or even if I am going to use them at all) and start to think about teaching as a series of triggers to facilitate discussion based on theory, application, critical analysis and shared experience of the learning process. I know I should have been doing this already, but this space really lends itself to doing that sort of thing. I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to teach in it.

What do the students think? Well, it’s still early days, but one of my favourite questions from a student when he walked in was: “Where’s the front of the room?” My answer: “Wherever you sit”.

He smiled.

Sir Ken Robinson – Animated.

I’m a huge fan of Sir Ken Robinson.  I think he is an engaging presenter and I often find myself agreeing with what he has to say.

Today I stumbled upon this video and I was struck by how his message seemed to be amplified by the animation.

It’s only 12 minutes long – invest the time.  You’ll be glad that you did.

Merry Xmas.

[•] jason

Merry Xmas: Time for Family

Just a short post to let you know that I will be taking a break from posting over the second half of December and the first half of January as I visit family and celebrate Christmas.

I’ll be back in mid-January with (probably) a slightly different approach to content and delivery.

Until then, I wish you all the very best and a safe and happy holiday period.

[•] jason

Why you should use maps to help your students learn…

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about maps and how they can be used to assist understanding.  Predominantly my recent interest has been in cognitive maps, but I have been interested in maps of a more general nature for some time.  I like maps; I find them interesting and I find that the more time you spend looking at a map, the more you learn about what the map-maker was thinking when it was under construction.

I love other people’s maps – I wish I could draw great maps myself – maps reveal and hide so much at the same time, they are a study as much in what is left out as much as what is included.

I am currently reading Mapping Strategic Knowledge by Huff & Jenkins (2002) (Amazon link) and I was struck by some of their observations in their introduction to the volume.  Although predominantly a book about strategic knowledge and organisations and how cognitive mapping (in its various forms) can assist in surfacing ‘hidden knowledge’ I was struck about how the various techniques could be used in an educational setting.  It’s this that I wish to write about today.

The book is arranged around the following six themes:

1. Maps can connect and organize dispersed organizational knowledge
2. Knowledge maps can facilitate organizational activities by simplifying inevitably complex domains
3. Maps also have the capacity to represent knowledge at various levels of abstraction
4. Maps can surface and organize concepts and relationships that are normally taken for granted
5. Maps also have the ability to facilitate communication in group settings and help aggregate opinions within a group
6. Maps have the capacity not only to catalogue but also generate knowledge

Maps can connect and organize dispersed organizational knowledge

Within any class of students, there is always a wide range of knowledges and experiences that the students could draw upon to deepen their learning of a topic or concept.  Getting students to gather around a large piece of paper to map their understanding of the concept under consideration is a good way to begin to surface this collective knowledge.  Initial discussions often seem to revolve around how the group are going to represent their collective knowledge on the map – and this is where I believe some of the best learning can begin.  Students have to decide which information is relevant, and which can be safely left out.  They only have a certain amount of paper to play with, so it becomes important for them to begin thinking about the form of their map and what they are going to include.  Whilst it is true that there are digital alternatives to a sheet of paper that offer the ability to have a (seemingly) endless canvas to utilise that also allow such things as zooming (representations at different scales!) e.g. Prezi (www.prezi.com) the restrictions of space afforded by the sheet of paper being used encourages careful choices about what gets re-presented and at what scale.  As groups discuss the what and how of what they are going to include, discussion will tend to involve individuals voicing their different interpretations of the concepts.  It is here that the various life-world experiences of the students can become voiced, shared and considered.  Knowledge and information that once resided in the heads of individuals is now available for examination and consideration by everybody.

Knowledge maps can facilitate organizational learning activities by simplifying inevitably complex domains

Developing a shared language and understanding of complex issues can help students to draw conclusions about what to do next with their knowledge.  Descriptions of complex ideas needs to be kept relatively simple in order to allow for re-presentation, for that is what maps do, they facilitate the re-presentation of knowledge into a format that can bee accessed by multiple users.  Decisions need to be made as to how detailed the map needs to be in order for it to communicate its central message.  Dennis Wood and John Fels in their wonderful book The Natures of Maps (Amazon link) argue that all maps are propositional, that they are constructed in such a manner as to promote one particular point of view at the expense of others.  Decisions of ‘scale’ determine which information is included and at what depth.  If, at the completion of the map the students feel that they need to go and learn more about a particular concept or  idea that they have been trying to re-present, this can lead to further learning activities/opportunities.

Maps also have the capacity to represent knowledge at various levels of abstraction

Have you seen those wonderful maps that are often included in the National Geographic?  Often they will have call-out boxes and other text-based mechanisms in order to expand on interesting or crucial points.  It is the ability for maps to be able to link conceptually very different pieces of knowledge that makes them so powerful.  An overview sketch (such as the one in the image above) may be enough to ensure understanding between members of a student group, but, on the other hand, more detail may be required in one part of the map to explain a particularly important concept or idea.  A well designed map can facilitate the accommodation of detail and still provide an overall context within which the knowledge is located by utilising a coherent structure.

Importantly, mappers’ ability to be able to represent information changes with age and experience.  Downs* and Stea (1977) talk about cognitive mapping as “an abstraction covering those cognitive or mental abilities that enable us to collect, organize, store, recall, and manipulate information about the spatial environment. … Above all, cognitive mapping refers to a process of doing: it is an activity that we engage in rather than an object that we have.  It is the way in which we come to grips with and comprehend the world around us.” – (emphasis is theirs)

Depending on the diversity of the student group working on the map(s) and their ability to be able to mentally manipulate and re-configure information in order to make sense of it, it is feasible that multiple maps could be produced around any complex set of issues or concepts.  By providing differeing levels of abstraction, students can demonstrate various levels of engagement and learning – the metaphor of an atlas is strong here.

Maps can surface and organize concepts and relationships that are normally taken for granted

Generally maps are thought of as representing spatial information, and often of a geographic nature, however mapping of ideas and concepts is also common and various types of (online) tools are being used to help students to understand complex relationships.  Using different tools will, result in different results and as W. Martin Davies has shown (forthcoming) using the right tool for the job is crucial.  The ‘rules’ of mapping can mean that students are required to make explicit that which they know, and with a map they can begin to show relationships between internalised sets of information.  Of course, blanks on a map are also instructive.  With a little probing from an instructor, students can be asked to ‘explain the blanks’ and with the use of open-ended questioning students may be able to arrive at insights about their thinking that were previously unsurfaced.

Maps also have the ability to facilitate communication in group settings and help aggregate opinions within a group

Within a group setting the task of representing knowledge on a map becomes one of negotiation (if properly facilitated).  More than just aggregate opinions, map-makers are required to negotiate and choose the types of representations that they make.  Research suggests that using multi-modalities when teaching can help students access deep learning and that when students are focussed on a task and meaningfully engaged that their ability to store information in their long-term memory is improved.  However, it is not just the storage and retrieval of information that good teachers should be concerned with, but the way in which students meaningfully construct their understanding of the concepts under investigation.  This sharing of information and opinions helps activate both hemispheres of the brain which cognitive research would suggest can deepen learning, understanding and facilitate creativity.

Maps have the capacity not only to catalogue but also generate knowledge

Maybe the biggest benefit to come from engaging students with mapping techniques as a means of facilitating learning is that the finished product is a static re-presentation of their knowledge at the time of creation.  Upon reflection, if students had to re-draw their maps (perhaps for a different audience) often they would be unable to produce a faithful reproduction of the original map as they have the benefit of time to consider what they have produced and build these considerations into the next version of their map.  In this way, maps can become living documents, possessed of the quality that they can be updated, changed, disputed, argued over and totally re-drawn as knowledge and assertions are tested and updated.

Searching for ways to engage students in the classroom can be time-consuming and frustrating.  The advantage of using mapping techniques is that most students will have a working knowledge of maps and how they ‘work’.  What most students won’t have, though, is experience in drawing maps, of being map-makers.  The challenge of making meaningful visual representations of knowledge in map form activates many different types of student literacy – students need to be able to work with visual information, analyse and argue over data/information, explain relationships between concepts (spatial awareness), be able to explain their maps to others and last but not least, draw.

 

Notes:

*  No relation – although I have become to think of him fondly as “Uncle Roger”.

References:

Davies, W.M (forthcoming) Concept Mapping, Mind Mapping and Argument Mapping: What are the Differences and Do They Matter?, Higher Education

Downs, R & Stea, D 1977, Maps in Minds, Harper and Rowe, New York.

Huff, A & Jenkins, M (eds) 2002, Mapping Strategic Knowledge, Sage, London.

Wood, D. & Fels, J 2008 The Natures of Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Weick, K 2009, Making Sense of the Organization, vol. 2, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester.

(Today’s image courtesy of : http://www.flickr.com/photos/pelisipia/377830503/sizes/o/in/photostream/)

How the where of teaching informs the what and the why (or; Affordances: what are they and how can I use them?)

Fixed furniture doesn't have to mean poor learning

“We can only teach it this way”

“Why?”

“Because the furniture in the room is fixed”.

I’ve heard this argument many times and I still get frustrated by it.  Many academics still seem to think that the way the room is set out is the primary determinant of teaching quality and because the furniture is often fixed, then the quality is equally fixed.  Well, today I want to talk about affordances and how they have an impact on teaching and how teachers can think differently in order to create richer experiences for their students.

But first, some background…

Gibson’s concept of affordance is a key proposal.  The idea is quite straightforward. In any interaction involvingan agent with some other system, conditions that enable that interaction include some properties of the agent along with some properties of the other system. Consistent with his emphasis on understanding how the environment supports cognitiveactivity, Gibson focused on contributions of the physical system. The term affordance refers to whatever it is about the environment that contributes to the kind of interaction that occurs. One also needs a term that refers to whatever it is about the agent that contributes to the kind of interaction that occurs. I prefer the term ability, although Shaw et al. (1982) preferred to coin the term effectivity for that concept. I believe my use of the term ability is also synonymous with Snow’s (1992) use ofthe term aptitude.

Affordances and abilities (or effectivities or aptitudes) are, in this view, inherently relational. An affordance relates attributes of something in the environment to an interactive activity by an agent who has some ability, and an ability relates attributes of an agent to an interactive activity with something in the environment that has some affordance. The relativity of affordances and abilities is fundamental. Neither an affordance nor an ability is specifiable in the absence of specifying the other. It does not go far enough to say that an ability depends on the context of environmental characteristics, or that an affordance depends on the context of an agent’s characteristics. The concepts are codefining, and neither of them is coherent, absent the other, any more than the physical concept of motion or frame of reference makes sense without both of them. – Greeno, J 1994, Psychological Review, Vol 10, No 2 p.338

As he says… quite straightforward.

The important phrase here, I think, is that “(T)he concepts are codefining,”.  The ability for someone to see the possibilities in a room full of fixed furniture is partly due to affordances of the room, but also the facility of the person to understand ‘the room’.  Without the person, the room is just, well, a room.  With a person, the room becomes a realm of possibilities.  Without the room, the person is, well, a person.  For there to be some creative use of the space, the room needs to suggest affordances to the person, and the person needs to be able to suggest actions for the room (based on past experiences or other conceptualisations) and BOTH need lead to “an activity that can be supported” such as ‘different teaching’.

So, how do we go about exploring the affordances offered by the person-room interaction in such a way that it might be useful in our own practice?

One of the mental frameworks that I have found useful in thinking about the affordances of different objet/situations that I encounter is one that I have shamelessly ripped off from Kalantzis and Cope and the Learning by Design Project Team.  Within their work, they expand on the idea of teaching students to learn within a contemporary world and that the thinking skills required can be taught effectively by teachers with the right skills.  They have developed a framework of Knowledge Processes, and it is this framework that I find useful.

An example:

Of the room, I might ask “How is this room similar or the same as other rooms that I have been in/seen/experienced?”  This is essentially a locating strategy – I’m really asking myself:  ”Is this a room?”.  From there I begin to search my experience and stored knowledge (including memory) for situations I have been in that are similar but different to the room.  I am looking for adjacent experiences in order to begin to conceptualise the room.  ”Is this a room, or is it a theatre?  Is this a room or is it a colosseum?”

I begin conceptualising the room by naming the things I see in it – walls, roof, floor, chairs, tables, carpet, lights, air-conditioning etc.  I continually test these named conceptualisations against my experience of roomness.  As this is an iterative process, and as I am keen not to lock down my thinking on this idea of “room” just quite yet, I begin to theorise about how the concepts can be (re)-conceptualised.

In order to do this, I need to analyse the space (and all the concepts within it – including the concept of ‘space’) on two equally important levels – the first is the functional level.  How do the ‘things’ (concepts, remember?) in the room work?  What are their functions?  Physically, how are they constructed? What is their purpose?  What are they made out of? etc.  The idea here is to get a sense of how things work – either intentionally or unintentionally.  I might say that the flatness of the desks provide a good writing surface, but equally I may think of them in terms of height, hardness, area, colour, taste, reflectiveness, spatial orientation/distribution, sound transmission qualities etc etc..  I begin to break down the concept of “desk” into its functions.  This is important if I wish to begin thinking about the desk as something other than a desk in the future – it is here that the affordance of the object and my ability to be able to act in relation to that object may begin to coalesce.

The other dimension that I need to analyse the room in is that of the critical (human) aspects in the design of the room.  What was the purpose of the room being constructed in this manner?  Was it to keep the teacher at the front as the centre of all knowledge and to dis-empower the students?  How does this ‘room’ reinforce or create power relationships with all who use it?  Whose interests does it promote?  What are the implications for the environment?  for justice?  for freedom?  for truth?

At this stage, some possibilities begin to surface about how the room may be used:  The most obvious one is as “a room” or “lecture theatre”.  This would be an entirely appropriate application of the conceptualisations and analysis done so far, and most people would be able to do this fairly easily – unfortunately, this is where the idea of “roomness” gets further entrenched and teachers fall back on what they have always done.  The other approach is to apply all the thinking that we have done to a creative way of using the room.  This is harder, but is transformative.  ”How can I use this room differently?”, stops being about ‘the room’, but begins to be about ‘how can I use all these concepts differently’?  What does the room afford me as a function of what I am able to do/know?

Recognising that it may be true that the furniture is fixed, but that does not mean that there is only one way to use it has a direct impact on the choices that you make as to what you choose to teach and why.

It takes time to learn to think in terms of affordances, but with practice it gets easier – and then that’s when the opportunities to be a better teacher seem to come much faster and, seemingly, with much less expended effort.  This is a good thing.

So, the next time you walk into a lecture theatre, take a few moments to reflect on the affordances the combination of you and the room provide for more engaged teaching.

(Today’s image is courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewscott/2330212397/sizes/z/)

Are you a mediocre teacher? Would you know it if you were?

Ok, let’s get this out upfront:  I read this blogpost from Seth Godin and it RANG.ALL.MY.BELLS.

Here is the text (for those of you who don’t like following links)

College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.

When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions (“1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?”) I think you have an obligation to say, “Sir, I’m going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way…”

When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, “perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class…”

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually changed your life.

The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.

“This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!”

I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time now – it seems to me that we very rarely provide an avenue for experience (at least in our College) – we just seem to teach complex concepts and ask students to think their way through them.  To be fair, we have some courses that are designed to provide some real-world experience for our students (placements and some-such) but then the experience that they have is located outside of the university, distant from where the concepts are “taught”.  It seems that we constantly underestimate the ability of our students to do real, meaningful work, and we underestimate their willingness to try it.  ”This Lecturer is boring” is a well known refrain, but I suspect when the students are saying this that they aren’t really talking about the lecturer (although they might be!) but the content, style and mode of engagement that the lecturer uses.  Setting a course that requires a combination of experience, conceptialisation, reasoning and thinking, and application to real world problems is difficult and you run the risk of the students thinking that it is harder than the other courses in their programs, and so as a teacher you risk getting poor evaluations.  It’s easier to stick to the path, it’s less risky.  It’s safer.

But that’s not education.

That’s mediocrity.

It’s difficult to see mediocrity when you are swimming in an ocean of it – and there’s always an excuse for it.  The only way out of it is to take some personal responsibility for designing meaningful, challenging courses.  Yes, it is hard to do; yes, it takes more time; yes, it might be different to what everyone else is doing; yes; you might fail.

We’ve just written a paper on how good pedagogy design can also be used as a vehicle for managing change within conservative institutions – and while that particular article was focussing on Universities, the lessons can easily be extended to other types of business.  By carefully designing the conditions to facilitate the experience that your students are craving requires you to think abut all of the same sorts of things that businesses have to think abut when they launch a new product or service.   If you are trying to provide an experience that is the same as everyone else (but just cheaper – after all you need some kind of advantage to differentiate yourself) then chances are you are a mediocre teacher.

If, on the other-hand, you are constantly trying to innovate, you update the content of your lectures (if you still choose to use this out-oded method), you care about how the students are challenged and what they have to DO in order to enjoy and learn from experience, then you are on your way out of mediocre-land.

It’s really easy to be a mediocre teacher, but no-one values it.  If you think that they do, you’ve missed the point.

(Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iwouldstay/50016265/sizes/m/)

Let’s focus on the learning first – the tech will sort itself out.

The following post is a response to Chris Sessums’ post wherein he responds to Trent Batson’s post in Campus Technology.  You can find Chris’s post here, and Trent’s article here.

Let’s get it out in front.  The technology is not the problem, the teaching is the problem.

There.  I’ve said it.  Now, let’s look at it.

Both Chris and Trent have years of experience behind them and without a doubt they have been working in the trenches tackling the day to day reality of implementing technology into university settings.  They know it, they work with it and they work with others as they try and grapple in this rapidly changing space.  But despite Chris’s blog sporting a quote from Dewey on uncomfortable ideas (a good one, by the way), I think he missed Batson’s wider point.  These guys are looking at the problem from two entirely different scales and I think that a slight re-alignment of perspective might provide some insights that can serve both positions.

At the risk of telling more experienced people ‘how to suck eggs’, I think that in focussing on the technology that Chris missed the fact that students still need to learn, and that universities, like all industries, will need to provide their service in a manner that the community demands of them or risk closure.  Here in Australia educational reform is underway including (in part) the idea that Higher Education may move to a voucher system wherein Government funding will follow the student, potentially creating a semi-privatised marketplace for higher education.  If you can’t attract students, you wont get the funding.

Students will be looking to get outcomes from their education experience.  They will be looking for more than just an undergraduate degree that (hopefully) eases their way into employment, they will want to know that they have developed the skills and knowledge of how to solve problems that will benefit them for the rest of their life.  Technology just plays one small part in that process.

Batson was talking about how students used to come to uni in order to get information and that part of their learning was about having relevant information delivered to them via the lecturer (what he terms as aggregation).  The other aspects of that education experience are the filtering of information and the interpretation of it.  But in the situation where information is everywhere, the lecturer becomes the bottle-neck to learning when students rely on just that one source of information (incidentally you could also insert:  the lecture, the textbook, the power-pointdeck, the internet…).

Chris was talking about how the ‘College is Dead’ (or at least dying..) and that the silos of specialised knowledge ultimately contribute to this death.  He says that the education technology department is the site where “the field of media and learning” is central and where, if given a chance, can help resuscitate the quickly cooling corpse of higher education.  Well, I disagree.

Students, now more than ever, need the skills and knowledge to connect their life and experience with new and emerging domains of knowledge.  They need to know how, when information is everywhere, to make sense of that information.  They need to know how to conceptualise it for themselves, how to generate theories about this information.  They need to know how to analyse what they are learning (and what they know) in order to decide how this information and knowledge can be interpreted and whether or not it can be trusted.  They need to know how to apply what they know in order to be able to solve common problems, and they need to know how to apply the information and knowledge in new ways in order to ask new questions.  Technology can only ever serve to be a support to this process, not replace it.  Academic disciplines help to locate this process of learning in a certain field.  By focussing on micro-biology (or glacier studies, or business, or nursing, or quantum physics, or whatever) the student is able to take the learning process and apply it to a field of interest in order to help generate new knowledge about that field.  Professors, who are (or at least should) be undertaking research in their chosen area can help guide the students by focussing on the process of inquiry – the how of a problem – rather than on the solution (the what).  Students know that getting an education involves more than looking up a Wikipedia site and accumulating info.  They also know that the secondary education system doesn’t adequately prepare them for the complexities of adult life.

A modern student can come to uni in order to have new experiences, to meet with other students, to debate with professors and to challenge the status quo.  That’s (in part) why they study different courses.   The stuff they learn in accounting 101 can help them to think in terms of system dynamics much later in their degree if they are taught how to think rather than taught what to think.  The educational technologists have a role to play in helping students access different experiences, but ultimately it is up to the teacher to help the student to learn.

The Australian Qualifications Framework says (in part) that the role of an undergraduate degree is to provide learning outcomes that include:

• the acquisition of a coherent and systematic body of knowledge, the underlying principles and concepts, and the associated communication and problem-solving skills;
• development of the academic skills and attributes necessary to undertake research, comprehend and evaluate new information, concepts and information from a range of sources;
• development of the ability to review, consolidate, extend and apply the knowledge and techniques learnt, including in a professional context;
• a foundation for self-directed and lifelong learning; and
• interpersonal and teamwork skills appropriate to employment and/or further study.

In order for this to occur, professors will need to change the way that they currently teach.  Discipline boundaries will need to become more permeable as hyper-linked students jump from subject area to subject area comparing and contrasting knowledge from one discipline with that in another.  Professors who understand that an education is not about the answer, but is about the questions and the process of discovering an answer (or at least, one possible answer) will find themselves popular and in demand.  For this to occur, the professors will need to engage in the multi-literacies at the same rate as which the students do, something that both Chris and Trent agree doesn’t happen nearly enough.  The students will still need to acquire a body of knowledge, but more importantly, they will need to know HOW to deal with this knowledge.  That’s where the value of a Higher Education lies.  As professors we don’t just teach content, we also teach process.

Chris feels that technology is the answer – if only the technologists could get heard.

Trent feels that changing the way we teach is the answer – if only the profession would listen.

Well, I believe that there IS a need for deeper engagement with educational technology that can open up the experience of learning for students, but I don’t believe that this is the whole answer.  At the same time, I don’t believe that doing away with the traditional discipline structure is going to help either.  There is a need for professors to have a deep knowledge of their field AND they need to know how to share it.

The technology is always going to change.  This will demand a response from the Academy.  We need to learn how to deal with it, but we don’t need to panic and worry about losing our jobs.  If we focus on the outcomes (the learning) then the technology will look after itself.

(The image above is courtesy of the wonderful Creative Commons Project and can be found on Flickr, here).

Let’s Begin with Something Controversial – Who Knows? We Might Learn Something.

For my first post of this new blog, I thought that I’d begin by setting the tone as “controversial”.    Of course, many people who watch the following video will not find this content ‘controversial’ – but you’d be surprised at how many would.

I’ve maintained for some time now that Universities need to move much faster than they are at the moment in order to remain relevant in this digital, connected world.  Students are used to being able to find information at the press of a button; they are used to sharing the best of what they find with their friends; they are used to having a voice.

Our job as educators is to help them to build on their unique, diverse experiences and talents in order to help them make sense of their world – and to encourage them to change it.  Sure, along the way we can help them to gain specific insights into domain-specific fields of knowledge, but our goal should not be to see how much stuff we can cram into their heads, but to help them connect disparate pieces of knowledge in new and unique ways in order to make something good and beautiful.

Recently Seth Godin was interviewed as part of the ongoing hoopla about his new book:  Linchpin.  Below is a small pice of the interview about education and what’s wrong with it that has found it’s way to YouTube.

Tell me, do you agree with what Seth says?  If you could begin the task of reforming the Higher Education Setting, how would you begin?  Given that we are all responsible for what we can do in our own little sphere of heaven, how could you begin the change that’s needed in the classroom?

I’d be interested to know.