Old School Education, Wake Up Academia
“In all cultures members tend to share certain common activities, the ’signature activities of the culture’ …For those of us living in the information age, signature activities include reading, writing, computer literacy, and using electronic media… Signature activities require training and cultural experience and lead to the development of a new, specially wired brain.”
- Norman Doidge, M.D. from ‘The Brain That Changes Itself‘
Among other things, I’m passionate about education that’s very accessible, effective, and widespread as a cure for lots of societal problems (my mother is a teacher so I think that’s where it comes from). Now that the information age is upon us, we have new resources that let kids around the globe work together, compete, and learn about different cultures. On top of that, we’ve got ever-improving teaching techniques backed by the latest research in cognitive science, just look at the research done by Sesame Street.
Hey Teacher, Don’t Leave Those Kids Alone…
For K-12 there are a lot of creative teachers out there already using web 2.0 to bring a new style to the classroom. Some are setting up Skype accounts for their classes so they can conference with other classrooms around the world. There’s Teachertube.com with lots of short, easy-to-digest clips about all kinds of subjects including jingles! Putting something to music like the State Capitals is huge when it comes to recall. Then there’s @Brightstorm_, one of our clients, an online learning network for teens that matches them up with cool teachers to prepare them for placement tests. We all knew people that were just good test takers back in grade school, it’s a skill set like any other that you have to develop.
All Your Kids Are Belong To Us…
Educating our young ones is a long and difficult process that takes lots of time and resources. The question is how to keep information relevant and useful, make it as easy to digest as quickly possible, then reinforce it so that kids become fully functioning members of a society that continues to move faster and faster. Digital Natives like myself consume much more information than our predecessors and much quicker, but from entirely different mediums (like blogs and RSS feeds for instance). Our attention spans are short and getting shorter, but higher education hasn’t been as malleable and as quick to accommodate as we’d like.
While blackboards and overhead projectors were fine for concrete memorization as a kid, even with the addition of PowerPoints in college, these mediums left something to be desired when it came to absorbing complex, abstract concepts later on (See ‘A Vision of Students Today’ by Michael Wesch). Web 2.0 adoption within the groves of Academia might be slow at first, but the recent flock to online courses is evidence of a pretty big change under way. That’s pure conjecture, this recession skews my point like crazy since online courses are a much less expensive alternative to brick-and-mortar schools…I just realized I used ‘brick-and-mortar’ to describe education, that’s a good tangent for later.
Business schools in the US used to rake in students easily, but the recession has changed all that. Students from foreign countries are electing to get their MBAs in their homelands instead of coming to America. Maybe now Business Schools will have to compete and, if we hold to the principle that competition is better for everyone, in a few years our B-Schools may look entirely different and be more relevant and beneficial for students.
Some good signs: web 2.0 education content is appearing across all types of platforms, even Twitter. @educationweek tweets about the latest education news, @pbsteachers offers content resources for K-12 educators, @patrickstrother is a professor who tweets about PR and Advertising, and tons of other educators are out there using new mediums to connect with their students and find relevant content. Can’t wait to see how classrooms change in the coming years, maybe some will even move into the virtual realm, but that’s for another post. How’d you like to take a class in Second Life or something similar?
*This post is dedicated to @DonorsChoose, an online charity where teachers post what they need for special projects in classrooms and anyone can go online and decide which projects to make donations to. Find their site here.