Socratic Monologue
I’ve been reading Tony Bates’ blog post 5 higher ed trends not to watch in 2010, his reaction to 5 higher ed tech trends to watch in 2010 at Campus Technology. A couple of his observations has provoked a good amount of reflection on my part. A lot of my ideas are still bouncing around and recombining but here are some thoughts so far. Regarding interactive classrooms, Bates says:
What next? Lecturers dressed as clowns, doing juggling? Come on, guys, the space-based lecture classroom is DEAD (actually, a zombie, as it’s really still the living dead)
Here are his thoughts on technology integration in the classroom:
Why? If they have this stuff, why bring it to class? YOU HAVE TO RE-DESIGN YOUR TEACHING – OR RATHER THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT – TO BENEFIT FROM THIS, NOT CHAIN IT TO THE CLASSROOM!
So what I’m getting from this is essentially that teachers can’t compete with facebook, texting, twitter or even wikipedia for students attention. I don’t think this is entirely out of boredom; a factor to consider is that students may consider classrooms to be completely irrelevant to their learning. Many of the ways that learning in schools is organized and managed – classrooms and scheduling are two that spring to mind – could be completely subverted when a student walks into the school carrying a device which gives her immediate access to much of the sum total of human knowledge in her pocket. Classrooms don’t become a source of information and learning, as they might have been 100 years ago – they become a limit.
We talk about integrating technology into our teaching, but a more meaningful perspective might be that we need to be integrating our teaching into the technology. Considering new models of managing learning in schools might be the best place to start. What sort of school system could we come up with if we started from scratch with all the tools and technologies available to us today? I don’t think that classrooms and schedules as we now have them would be needed. What would take their place as techniques for managing the space and time we have available for teaching and learning?
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Rob, I have been doing much thinking along these lines myself. Recently I came upon this report from Sharon Friesen at the Galileo Network, “What did you do in School Today. Teaching Effectiveness: A Framework and a Rubric” in which she says, “Over the past 20 years we have learned that this model of learning is fundamentally flawed. If schools are to continue to exist in a knowledge society, they have to change. These changes, “do not represent the usual process of adding to and improving existing ideas: rather they represent a paradigm shift – a radical break with the past that requires us to stop and completely rethink much of what we do”. Is one ever ready for a complete paradigm shift? If not, can change ever really occur? I wonder? The short PDF is a good read – http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/WDYDIST_Teaching_EN.pdf
Hi, Rob
Many thanks for your thoughtful comments.
I don’t want to see the face-to-face classroom disappear, especially in the k-12 sector. My comments are addressed mainly to the post-secondary sector, where students often have to sit in lecture classes of 200 students or more.
What I’d like to see is the re-design of these classes so that instead of spending 39 hours a semester lecturing, a professor could meet at least once a semester with small groups of 25 students for an in-depth discussion, based on work already done online by the students. The lecture stuff would be done instead through a structured and designed set of online readings or activities.
In other words, I’d like instructors to re-design courses from scratch, thinking through what absolutely needs to be done face-to-face and doing the rest online or digitally. However, especially in k-12, substantial personal contact with the teacher must remain for most students, as much for social and personal as for academic reasons,
Best regards
Tony Bates
Donna, it is my sincere hope that schools and school systems can make the paradigm change. I think there have been some positive revisions in curriculum in Saskatchewan that indicate movement in that direction (and I’m looking forward to those changes filtering through to the sciences). I think the real paradigm shift will happen not when curriculum change but when pedagogy changes, and I believe that re-examining the way schools manage and allocate the time, spatial and teacher resources will go a long way to supporting that.
Tony, I think some of your ideas need to be asked in a K-12 context. You are looking at changes in the management and control over the same time, spatial and teaching resources that schools need to examine. I agree about the importance of teacher student contact, but I think we can improve the nature of that contact, especially in high schools.
Incidentally, I’m not sure if you’ve looked at Sam Postlethwait’s Audio Tutorial instructional system developed in the late 60s. Some of his techniques might be well suited to your goals. His original paper is online at http://jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/27/4/938.pdf