Some people reading this blog will be thinking of younger students with their educational work. Others of us may focus on making digital things for the adults that will result from the current younger generation. For these people, and for me, here’s a great look at the generation who are “Growing Up Online.”
PBS’s Frontline is a fantastic show, and best of all, is freely available for viewing online. Thus, this episode is officially on my to-watch list: Growing Up Online :: PBS Frontline.
Many community colleges, especially in rural America, are dropping Friday classes to save their students gas money.
Meridian Community College President Scott Elliott says his students, who on average drive 30 miles round-trip to campus, could save $200 or more a semester based on recent pump prices. “When you’re … working a minimum-wage job and (taking) care of a child or two, that could be a lot of money,” he says.
This seems to be a big opening for distance technology. Perhaps one class a week over a forum or an audio or video chat technology.
Thanks to Chris Penn for the link.
Related, also from CSP: Cisco’s really pushing telepresence. It’s hard to tell the quality from this video, it’s lighting, etc. but it’s clear they have something going.
ACU, Abilene Christian University, has announced that they intend to give iPhones to their incoming freshman students. The university began thinking about the mobile/education convergence on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform in early 2007 and appears to have begun testing the device on campus midway through the year.
Today, along with the announcement of the forthcoming initiative, the university released two video which dramatize several mobile computing issues they can foresee using the device for. They have higher resolution versions available, but here are the YouTube versions: (Fair warning: some cool ideas, great production, somewhat hokie screenplay)
Connected, part 1:
Connected, part 2:
How does a small religious school in central Texas get to this program before bigger, more prestigious schools? Could be several reasons, but I’m sure a relatively small campus population certainly aided in their agility.
See the very smart mobile web portal they already have up: http://acu.mobi/ (Best viewed on a mobile device, especially Safari. Will render on desktop Safari, too). These guys are good.
One of their web developers offers this on his blog:
There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.
Apple rumor site MacRumors believes this is only the first of several universities about to deploy such a program, with Apple’s active involvement. They offer up “Harvard, MIT and Stanford” as the other schools, but as typical of Apple rumor sites, I think they just made this one up. No offense to ACU, are clearly very tech savvy, but considering how much earlier Stanford (whose picturesque Palo Alto campus resides near Apple’s corporate campus in Cupertino, CA) was on iTunes U, I just don’t see them leap frogging these academic powerhouses if Apple was spearheading the program. I think the credit here all goes to ACU.
If nothing else, the program is a PR coup. Of course, they run the risk of becoming “the iPhone school,” but I imagine that’s a risk they’re willing to take to be out in front of this. Duke ran a One iPod Per Child (er, ahem, student) program for several years, before curtailing it. But I feel that this may just have more staying power. The looming question for me is “what about the AT&T contracts?” I haven’t seen this referenced anywhere yet.
Prediction: this program is the sound of the train horn in the distance. The freight train of mobile connectivity in education is coming this way… and it’s nearly here.
(updated with the web developer’s comments minutes after original post)
My first introduction to Michael Wesch was through a video posted on YouTube entitled “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” I wasn’t the only person introduced to him that day. What started as a video discussing digital communications with his colleagues, was within a few short days the most talked about video on the Internet, and has now been viewed literally millions of times.
I didn’t realize until later that Michael was a college professor. One who was really rethinking his role as a teacher. Many of Professor Wesch’s ideas meld neatly with the andragogy that we investigate in our Adult as Learner course.
This October, I was reintroduced to Wesch through another video which was making the rounds on the Internet. “A Vision of Students Today” was video made by Wesch with his introductory anthropology seminar, engaging the participation of his students. All couple hundred or so of them. Clearly, this was no traditional lecture class.
After viewing this latest video through the lens of a graduate program in instructional design, I determined I needed to discover a little more about Professor Wesch. With a little digging, I discovered a guest blog post of his at a blog called Savage Minds. “A Brief Philosophy of ‘Anti-Teaching’” is Wesch’s description of the techniques he is auditioning on his students at Kansas State University.
He found himself teaching two and four hundred students at a time. The only tools he was given was the tradition of college lecturing. And much of his audience was only there because the course fulfilled requirements for graduation. Many didn’t not know what “Anthropology” even was before stepping into the classroom. Student motivation was clearly low, and participation seemingly oppressed by the logistics of an en-masse classroom environment. Anyone brave enough to ask a question, would also have to be brave enough to ask it in front of 399 of their neighbors.
Wesch wanted to convey information about anthropology, yes, but more so, he wanted to create “active, lifelong learners, with critical thinking skills.” Critical thinking requires asking great questions, and answering great questions with more great questions.
Unfortunately such great questions are rarely asked by students, especially in large mandatory introductory courses. Much more common are administrative questions such as, “What do we need to know for this test?” This may be the worst question of all. It reflects the fact that for many (students and teachers alike), education is a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create. I don’t think it is the student’s fault for asking this question. As teachers we have created and continue to maintain an education system that inevitably produces this question. If we accept Dewey’s notion that people learn what they do, the lecture format which is the mainstay of teaching (especially in large introductory courses) teaches students to sit in neat rows and to respect, believe, and defer to authority (the teacher). Tests often measure little more than how well they can recite what they have been told.
Clearly, this format is losing college-aged students’ interests, just as we see that non-participatory formats don’t motivate adult learners. To motivate the students, we find Wesch establishing inclusion and enhancing meaning with his techniques, a la Wlodkowski’s Motivational Framework. [Source, Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults ( or Amazon link)]
But while the sheer numbers of students are a burden in one sense, there is also tremendous potential. Think of the knowledge and life experience that is in that single room, if only I could find a way to harness it! I wanted the students to be fully engaged, talking to one another, grappling with interesting questions, and exploring any and all resources to find answers (and more questions).
Wesch takes his position as “teacher” and converts it to a learning manager, aggregating information his class created and directing a product of their experience, the video “A Vision of Students Today”. He clearly takes what could be a bad situation, an enormous class with the potential loss of human connectivity, and made the best use of the situation. This inclusion makes all the difference.
Wesch cites Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (or Amazon link) as a major influence of his, and I now have that high on my own reading list. The authors make the argument that teachers should concentrate on the learning environment they create at least as much as the content, or message, they have set out to express.
The classroom is the means, not the ends, of the information that circulates within it. So teaching to the test is a good idea… when you realize the test isn’t multiple choice, it’s life.