Mischa Colley's Profile

not
to mention being broadcast to as children by parents, as students by
teachers, as citizens by politicians, and when then entered the workforce
as employees by bosses

one
of these is Richard
Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

"Good Questions," which
is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Steve Hunka, a visionary in computer-mediated
education

according to an article as long ago as 1997 called "Technology in
the Classroom: from Theory to Practice," which appeared in Educom
Review.
"These results hold for a broad range of students stretching elementary
to college students, studying across a broad range of disciplines, from
mathematics to the social sciences to the humanities."

The issue of pedagogy raises a deeper issue — the purpose of the university.
In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb
vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and
being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for
life — just "keeping"
up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you're set for say,
15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in
the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity
to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize,
contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems;
to collaborate and communicate.

Universities should be places to learn, not to teach.

As Seymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technology
can provide new ways to learn put it: "The scandal of education
is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure
and benefit of discovery."

The lecture hall is a prime example of mass education. It came along
with mass production, mass marketing, and the mass media.

Schooling,
says Howard Gardner, is a mass-production idea.

Of course, universities play an important role in the sorting of individuals
in society, through the admissions process and the awarding of degrees.
One of the most important roles of the university is to screen human
capital for future employers, and more broadly stratifying society.

The experience has shown
MIT that real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, but
rather the whole package — the content tied to the human learning experience
on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words, cannot
survive on lectures alone.

"The
time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our
model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest
of the world,"
says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks
a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted
to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending.
True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world
through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn't
a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university?

Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global
centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have
and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the
world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students.

So why hasn't
it happened yet? "It's the legacy of established human and educational
infrastructure," says Proenza. The analogy is not the newspaper
business, which has been weakened by the distribution of knowledge
on the Internet, he notes.
"We're more like health care. We're challenged by obstructive, non-market-based
business models. We're also burdened by a sense that doctor knows best,
or professor knows best."

Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student
to take first-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high
school?

Why not deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform
the university into a place of life-long learning, not just a place to
grow up?