Margreta Tveisme on 2009-02-06
A brilliant description!
This link has been bookmarked by 88 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Oct 2008, by Heather Dowd.
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02 Dec 09
Tom Daccord"In spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see below. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and technology in the classroom."
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29 Oct 09
Claude Almansi"There are many faculty around the world who have enthusiastically embraced the challenge to bring meaning and significance back into the classroom. I hope that they will comment here and enrich us all with their ideas. If you are interested in the specifics of how I attempt to solve the significance problem in the large class featured in the video and discussed in this post, check out the World Simulation, a project in which students explore the dynamics of how the world works in order to create a simulation recreating the past 500 years of history and exploring 100 years into the future. I discuss the project and my use of technology in detail in A Portal to Media Literacy, available on YouTube, and in the essay, “Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance.”"
wesch britannica youtube students education learning teaching Michael_Wesch web2.0
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09 Aug 09
Eric Calverthttp://mediatedcultures.net/worldsim.htm
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Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”
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We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us.
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30 Jul 09
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Mecca SadlerArticle written by the professor who produced the video where college students hold up written statements about themselves & today's learners.
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28 Jul 09
Philippe Scheimannuseful article , I need to finish it and look at this 'famous clip' that had 1 million viewers
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05 Jul 09
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01 Jul 09
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19 Jun 09
Daryl BeresThe room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.
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02 Jun 09
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28 May 09
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empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
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27 May 09
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including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
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the kids better turn those things off now and pay attention!
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10 Apr 09
Matthew DanielMike describes his new program and rational
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05 Apr 09
M McBrideClassrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
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Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
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31 Mar 09
stafford GregoireThe solution.
Fortunately, the solution is simple. We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions.
When we do that we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
There are many faculty around the world who have enthusiastically embraced the challenge to bring meaning and significance back into the classroom. I hope that they will comment here and enrich us all with their ideas. If you are interested in the specifics of how I attempt to solve the significance problem in the large class featured in the video and discussed in this post, check out the World Simulation, a project in which students explore the dynamics of how the world works in order to create a simulation recreating the past 500 years of history and exploring 100 years into the future. I discuss the project and my use of technology i -
18 Mar 09
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16 Mar 09
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03 Mar 09
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27 Feb 09
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06 Feb 09
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At times I feel desperate for their attention. I rush to amuse them with jokes and stories as I swing, twist, and swirl that gyromouse, directing the 786,432 pixels dancing points of light behind me, hoping to dazzle them with a multi-media extravaganza.
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Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
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What kind of environment is this in which “overthinking” is a problem?
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They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal (a true art form in the “getting by” game) and asked, “What kind of vicious game is being played here, and who are the sinners and who the sinned against?” (1969:51).
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Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
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13 Jan 09
Marielle PalomboCultural anthropologist Michael Wesch offers a provocative analysis of the mismatch between today's schools and today's students and discusses its implications for teaching.
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11 Jan 09
Nancy HenryIn spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see here. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging debate ...
education Michael_Wesch students learning teaching technology GenY youth_culture millennials
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09 Jan 09
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08 Jan 09
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18 Dec 08
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10 Dec 08
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We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world,
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03 Dec 08
Mark BlairThe solution.
Fortunately, the solution is simple. We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions.
When we do that we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
There are many faculty around the world who have enthusiastically embraced the challenge to bring meaning and significance back into the classroom. I hope that they will comment here and enrich us all with their ideas. If you are interested in the specifics of how I attempt to solve the significance problem in the large class featured in the video and discussed in this post, check out the World Simulation, a project in which students explore the dynamics of how the world works in order to create a simulation recreating the past 500 years of history and exploring 100 years into the future. I discuss the project and my use of technology i -
13 Nov 08
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Integrating technology into the classroom is window dressing on a more fundamental shift in “education”. Technology enables a more self-directed learning that is in conflict with the relationship between the teacher and the student. The real solution would be to upend the industry of the University and move to a more self-directed approach to learning that discards with the tyranny of psychometrics.
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12 Nov 08
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Such an achievement could not be won by an eager teacher armed with technology
alone. It has taken years of acclimatizing our youth to stale artificial
environments, piles of propaganda convincing them that what goes on inside these
environments is of immense importance, and a steady hand of discipline should
they ever start to question it. -
My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that
they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a
bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of
other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing.
Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the
list - 10 more annotations...
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Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over
half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like
learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar
results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris
Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The
crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And
yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning
and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We
hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we
love learning. -
new technologies are too distracting and superficial and that they should be
banned from the classroom. Others suggested that students are now “wired”
differently. Created in the image of these technologies, luddites imagine
students to be distracted and superficial while techno-optimists see a new
generation of hyper-thinkers bored with old school ways. -
reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They
are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it.
Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly
than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying. -
Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new
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versions of passing notes in class
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authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation
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walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms
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“the real world” which
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When we do that we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of
ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have
shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on
them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost
any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can
welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as
distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can -
use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems
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10 Nov 08
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Have you ever considered that students “just want to get by” because they don’t really want to take your class.
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But I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study.
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07 Nov 08
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06 Nov 08
Rem PalpittWhen we do that we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give t
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05 Nov 08
Peter BrombergHow do people learn? Is it by putting 100 of them in a room and talking at them. How do we best use the time at ALA and in between midwinter and annual to engage them? To move them? To connect them??
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03 Nov 08
Tania ShekoIn spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of
my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they
think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted
on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see
below. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was
the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting
thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed
the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging
debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and
technology in the classroom.education Michael_Wesch students britannica learning teaching 21stcenturylearning internationalplp21
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02 Nov 08
Jeroen BottemaIn spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube.
ict students_voice e-learning onderwijs onderwijsveranderingen youtube web2.0 technologie
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Gabriela GrosseckThere are many faculty around the world who have enthusiastically embraced the challenge to bring meaning and significance back into the classroom. I hope that they will comment here and enrich us all with their ideas. If you are interested in the specifi
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31 Oct 08
Guttorm HA Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) - M. Wesch utdjupar og kommenterer A vision of students today
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30 Oct 08
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29 Oct 08
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cristina costa on 2008-10-29
teh new technology for (old) story telling -Can the iPod be used as a new platform for listening to / learning from others?
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The problem is not just “written on the walls.” It’s built into them
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Hundreds of students would soon fill the chairs
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only be one person in this room to be heard
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cristina costa on 2008-10-29
the inequivocal voice of the ONe who is payed to know and show (off) he/she knows.
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narrow
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naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information
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teachers
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carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information
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no match for those blaring iPods
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students cruising Facebook, instant messaging, and texting their friends. The students were undoubtedly engaged, just not with me.
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getting by” is the name of the game
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cristina costa on 2008-10-29
Yeap - school is a game and if you learn teh rules you can get by - the more strategies u develop, the easier it get to get by the rules. The challenge of school is not to learn, it is to test and push those rules...(guess exam questions, memorize exam answers - do the minum to get the credit - get that damn roll of paper - certificate=prize - at the end of the game.
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What kind of environment is this in which “overthinking” is a problem?
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We love learning. We hate school
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What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning
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Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans
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our classrooms have been fundamentally changed
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Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found
-
they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms
-
we started taking our walls too seriously
-
our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls
-
We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world
-
begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions
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cristina costa on 2008-10-29
reality learning
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we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information
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nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted
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most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud
-
We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms
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but as powerful learning technologies
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engage students in real world problems and activities
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Heidi CalmaThis is a great article that discusses why students zone out and get by and how we can engage them.
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28 Oct 08
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rs sitting mindlessly fixated on the front of the room. A 600 square foot screen stared back at them. Hundreds of students would soon fill the chairs, but the carefully de
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27 Oct 08
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“Introduction to Cultural Anthropology”
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Fortunately, the solution is simple
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26 Oct 08
Debby KTexting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it. Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.
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craig rolandDr. Michael Wesch revisits the video "A Vision of Students Today" and reflects on the situation conveyed in the video that institutions of learning have lost their meaning and significance for students.
technology teaching learning education digital_natives readings
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25 Oct 08
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24 Oct 08
Barbara LindseyMy teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can "get by" without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA's continued with a long list of other activities st
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Despite my role in the production of the video, and the thousands of comments supporting it, I recently came to view the video with a sense of uneasiness and even incredulity. Surely it can’t be as bad as the video seems to suggest, I thought. I started wrestling with these doubts over the summer as I fondly recalled the powerful learning experiences I had shared with my students the previous year. By the end of the summer I had become convinced that the video was over the top, that things were really not so bad, that the system is not as broken as I thought, and we should all just stop worrying and get on with our teaching.
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The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.
- 16 more annotations...
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My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
-
Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
-
But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal
-
Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans.
-
Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.
-
Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
-
Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”
Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.
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We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.
-
When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
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One of the difficulties I find in teaching this way is that each semester I start from scratch. Students need to learn how to learn this way, just as they learned the passivity of the lecture hall over years. By the same token, we need to learn how to teach this way. It does mean changing the role of the teacher. It does mean a shift in the relationship between knowledge, student, and professor. There are difficult institutional-ideological issues coming from all sides there. As such, we are not just talking about changing teaching or learning practices but about changing institutional cultures.
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And won’t you concede that there’s some things that simply need to be communicated and digested, period? Is there really a better collaborative, social-network paradigm for learning noun endings in Russian or the multiplication tables, or for how best to craft a sentence, which takes the human touch of a creative, talented teacher? Some things just have to be, uh, “learned,” memorized, practiced with pencil and paper, pen and pad.
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For that very reason of “envelopment,” we need to preserve a few spaces on campus in which the cloud is dispelled and students must engage in the “old dynamics of knowledge”–if only as an exercise in mental flexibility. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what is lost as things have “shifted”?
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“I agree with some of what he says, but I don’t think I would offer the implicit absolution to students that he does. How are they failing their educations? … Wesch seems to believe that if students are disengaged from the learning process, it’s the fault of the professoriat.”
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If we assume that students can access information either before class (via textbooks, for instance) or during class as needed (via laptops and other devices), then we need not spend class time transmitting information to our students. We can, instead, spend precious class time helping students make sense of that information, taking advantage of the fact that class time is the only time when we’re all together (face-to-face, at least) to interact with each other around that information.
One method of doing so that scales up very well to a class with hundreds of students (to address David Carson’s concern) is what Mazur calls “peer instruction” facilitated by a classroom response system (”clickers”). The teacher poses a challenging and interesting multiple-choice question. (There are such questions as Michael points out with his anecdote about a student “overthinking” a multiple-choice exam question.) The students think about the question and submit their answers using their clickers. If the results generated by the classroom response system show that there’s disagreement about the question (which is likely to happen if the question is sufficiently challenging), then the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbors. After some time for this “peer instruction,” the students vote again with their clickers. Often, this second vote will show some convergence to the correct answer (provided the question has a single correct answer, which isn’t necessary). Either way, the stage is set for a productive classwide discussion of the question or a mini-lecture by the teacher.
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I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study. It also gives me a much more diverse group of people to work with and engage with in collaborative study, which can be much more powerful than simple self-directed study.
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Are you right that “knowledge is made” in a “cloud of ubiquitous digital information”? Or, is this precisely one of anthropology’s significant contributions to the life of the mind, to a mindful life? Common sense cannot be trusted. Information, even in the highly evocative cloud-form, is *not* knowledge. Whatever knowledge is (i.e. as the philosopher’s ‘true justified belief ‘ or some even more exotic formulation), surely it is an actionable individual possession. The cloud is not knowledgeable, it is informational. And, I wonder how you might respond to a claim that our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.
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educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene
-
sparking a wide-ranging debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and technology in the classroom.
- 12 more annotations...
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The problem is not just “written on the walls.” It’s built into them.
-
The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information.
-
My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.
-
And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
-
Some simply suggested that new technologies are too distracting and superficial and that they should be banned from the classroom. Others suggested that students are now “wired” differently. Created in the image of these technologies, luddites imagine students to be distracted and superficial while techno-optimists see a new generation of hyper-thinkers bored with old school ways.
-
While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods.
-
In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
-
so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools.
-
We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions.
-
We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.
-
We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off.
-
When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.
-
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Martin LindnerThere should be a book about "Walls" (see discussion!). Michael Wesch about traditional learning technologies (architectural interfaces) designed for institutional f-learning (learning in the flesh), and why they don't work - "Some time ago we started ta
classroom20_star5 uni2.0_lecture _uni20 classroom_walls deli
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22 Oct 08
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21 Oct 08
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Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
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But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal (a true art form in the “getting by” game) and asked, “What kind of vicious game is being played here, and who are the sinners and who the sinned against?” (1969:51).
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Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it.
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Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.
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And that’s what has been wrong all along. Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”
Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.
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Mathieu PlourdeWe love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
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The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information.
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It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game.
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Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
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Some simply suggested that new technologies are too distracting and superficial and that they should be banned from the classroom. Others suggested that students are now “wired” differently. Created in the image of these technologies, luddites imagine students to be distracted and superficial while techno-optimists see a new generation of hyper-thinkers bored with old school ways.
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Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it.
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While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods.
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In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.
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check out the World Simulation, a project in which students explore the dynamics of how the world works in order to create a simulation recreating the past 500 years of history and exploring 100 years into the future. I discuss the project and my use of technology in detail in A Portal to Media Literacy, available on YouTube, and in the essay, “Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance.”
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Michelle A. HoyleIn spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result
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