Tapscott – The Impending Demise of the University
“Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.”
“The Detroit of higher learning.”
Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) - Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel
In a NY Times editorial, Columbia professor Mark Taylor said that universities are becoming obsolete because they:
- produce a product for which there is no market (teaching positions)
- develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields /publication in journals)
- rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)
This “industrial model” of education goes back to Kant, who said universities need to “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
This is a problem because…
Kids These Days (are Thinking Differently)
“But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet.”
They’re used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What’s more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what’s going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.
The professors who remain relevant will have to:
collaboration
1. Abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one.
2. They should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information.
3. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university.
4. They need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.
How Learning Should Be: Discovery / Context
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.”
John Seely Brown – learning should be like learning language, “based on social context,” in which individuals are “highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system”
“once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you’re learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…”
“Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you.”
Keeping Universities Relevant with Digital Interactive Courses
“If all that the big universities have to offer to students are lectures that you can get online for free — from other professors — why pay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of free university-level education online, they need to change the way professors and students interact on campus.”
Example: MIT offers free courses online (OpenCourseWare)
If universities want to stay relevant, they need to offer more interactive classes.
“Today the tools on the Net make it a great way to teach and free up the teacher to design the learning experience and converse with the students on an individual and more meaningful basis.”
One technique is just-in-time teaching: ‘warm-up questions, written by the students, are due a few hours before class, giving the teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson “just in time,” so that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with.’
According to the 1997 Educom review article “>”From theory to implementation: The Mediated Learning approach to computer-mediated instruction, learning and assessment” by Warren Baker, Thomas Hale, and Bernard R. Gifford:
“students who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction … generally achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn their lessons in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positive attitudes towards the subject matter they’re learning”
Challenging the Credentialing System
One argument for Universities is that they provide a credentialling system – as proof of hard workers’ discipline (and weeding out inferior students). Presumably, “those who graduate — better still with distinction — have a credential, to get the most desirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven they have a degree of discipline and that they’re prepared to play by the rules.”
But, Tapscott writes, if large, lecture-based universities are proven to inferior to smaller schools with new, more interactive programs, then this model will change – because credentials are based on effectiveness.
Improving the Campus Experience
Is there a point to going to a University if lectures are available for free online? The campus can provide an opportunity for interaction, enhancing learning (going back to Brown’s point above… and Sunstein’s points below).
“The experience has shown MIT that the 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.
Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital — on the part of both professors and students — to spend their on-campus time thinking and inquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbing information.”
Global Academy
Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron: “Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending?”
“…Universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence… 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. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest — either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online.”
Why not?
“New paradigms cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, uncertainty. They are nearly always received with coolness or hostility. Vested interests fight change. And leaders of old paradigms are often the last to embrace the new.”
- “The problem is funds,” one president said. “We just don’t have the money to reinvent the model of pedagogy.”
- “Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change.”
- “I think the problem is the faculty — their average age is 57 and they’re teaching in a ‘post-Gutenberg’ mode.” (or even pre-Gutenberg)
As Proenza says, “There are a lot of sacred cows,” he said. Why, for example, are universities judged by the number of students they exclude, or by how much they spend? Why aren’t they judged by how well they teach, and at what price?”
Conclusion
Students need to be agents of change: ‘If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award, their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses where young people get a chance to “grow up.”‘
Tapscott calls for a revolutionary, new educational system based on interactive communication.
Sunstein – “Personalized Education and Personalized News”
“Is the power of personalization a wonderful development? For institutions of higher education? For democracy? Should we celebrate complete freedom of choice with respect to the content of education and the content of news” Personalization is the power to “filter” what you see, but education should be “prescribed’ (chosen in advance) for students.
The big question is the “extent to which students should be allowed to exclude what they dislike and include what they like.”
“…institutions of higher learning, like democracy itself, require something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices” because…
1. “…people should be exposed to materials they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.
2. “Many or most citizens… should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, members of a heterogeneous society will have a difficult time addressing social problems, since people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another.”
People have always had some amount of choice in their education/media content. But the internet dramatically increases “individual control over content.” Correspondingly, the power of general-interest intermediaries – the newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, and educational administrations” has decreased. This is a problem because traditional media allow you to be exposed to content you might not normally choose.
“A well-designed campus will ensure such [chance/unwanted] encounters, as students meet people engaged in very different activities and concerned with very different issues.” This allows students to “discover topics that can alter interests/attentions” or change their lives. “One risk with a system of perfect individual control is that it can reduce the importance of the ‘public sphere’ and of common spaces in general.”
Constitutional Principle of Free Speech
“Public Forum Doctrine” adopted by the Supreme Court says streets and parks must be kept open to the public for expressive activity. This implies a belief that governments are obliged to allow speech to occur freely in public.
1. Ensures speakers can have access to a wide array of people
2. Allows speakers to have general access to specific people/institutions with whom they have a complaint
3. Increases the likelihood that citizens will be exposed to a wide variety of people or views
While the internet breaks monopoly of general-interest intermediaries (such as newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, educational administrations) on public forums, the traditional intermediaries do “expose people to a wide range of topics and views at the same time they provide shared experiences for a heterogeneous public.”
Wider Choices = More Exclusion
“Selecting can produce narrowness, not breadth. The wider range of choices is likely, in many cases, to mean that people will try to find material that makes them feel comfortable or that is created by and for people like themselves.”
This leads to group polarization. “After deliberating with one another, people in a group are likely to move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which they were previously inclined, as indicated by the median of their predeliberation judgments.”
Sunstein says “…the likely result of personalization is that groups with distinctive identities will increasingly engage in within-group discussion” or balkanization.
This harms the educational experience itself (which involves exposure to many different viewpoints), AND it endangers democracy by degrading the wide experiences one receives in an education.
1. “ A good system of education should counteract this risk [group polarization] by exposing people to a wide variety of perspectives.” … “Education is not an ordinary commodity, in part because it should shape preferences and values, not merely cater to them.”
2. “A well-functioning democracy and a well-functioning system of higher education require that people be exposed to unanticipated, unchosen encounters and that people share a range of common experiences.”
Sunstein’s Talk at the University of Michigan’s 18th Annual Davis Market Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Free Expression
In this talk, Sunstein mainly elaborated on points made in his article… here are some of the things he brings up to support his point about the necessity of directed education, shared experiences and democracy.
3 Studies
Sunstein tapped the Rockies for his experiment.
1. Sunstein and other researchers performed an experiment with groups in Colorado Springs (mainly Republican) and Boulder (mainly Democrat). Before the experiment started, the participants were asked questions designed to gauge how strongly they felt about certain polarizing political issues. Then they were allowed time to deliberate on those issues with other participants in their group (the members of each group had the same political leaning). After deliberation, the average group viewpoint on the political issues was more extreme than those of the individual viewpoints measured before deliberation. Additionally, individual views measured after deliberation became more extreme.
The research shows that within ideologically uniform groups, internal diversity is squelched and diversion from the median becomes much more dramatic.
2. US Courts of Appeals have 3 members and they can be 3 Republican appointees (RRR), 3 Democratic appointees (DDD), RRD, or DDR. A study of the outcome of labor law cases showed that RRR or DDD decisions were more extreme than the decisions of mixed courts (RRD or DDR). At the same time, in mixed courts the dissenting decision was far less ideologically extreme.
3. In a study of 1000 Texan jury-eligible people, participants were asked to rank corporate misconduct cases from 1-6 on their moral severity and then to assign a dollar amount to how much the company should pay to make up for it.
While moral judgments were strikingly uniform across the board, the dollar amounts were very unpredictable.
In a second step for the experiment, the participants were given the chance to deliberate about their moral judgments and dollar amounts… after deliberation, moral judgments became more extreme (whether extremely severe or extremely lenient). At the same time, the dollar amounts for each case increased (whether the moral judgment moved up or down).
All three studies showed examples of group polarization, where after deliberation with like-minded people, viewpoints grow more extreme.
Social Architecture
Sunstein theorizes two kinds of freedom enabled by social architectures:
1. Control – characterized by self-sorting and convenience
2. Serendipity – characterized by unanticipated, unchosen encounters or shared experiences with others
He favors serendipity – saying shared experiences are the foundation of liberal democracy and academic freedom. He goes on to review what he says in the article about the Public Forum Doctrine and remarks upon Jane Jacobs’s work on American Cities, showing the “criticalness” of public spaces for creating unimaginable, unexpected encounters… which lead to tolerance.
While cities nowadays are lacking those locations, television, newspapers, and universities are picking up the slack – providing opportunities for people to learn things they wouldn’t normally be interested in or changing their minds about critical issues.
He says that this:
1. Provides social glue to a diverse population (by creating a shared information source)
2. Allows people to encounter diverse topics even if they wouldn’t normally see them.
As a technological analogue… Political blogging allows like-minded groups to stick together… and links to unlike-minded people usually point out “the contemptuous or ridiculous nature” of those other sites.
In groups, people try to present themselves as a certain type of person – not a moderate or boring person. Brain scan studies show that when people’s views are corroborated with another, they:
1. like the other person better, and
2. like themselves better too.
The polarization machine / echo chamber effect impairs education literally and impairs the type of education required by democracy.
Importance of a Free and Widely-Read Press
1. No nation every with a democratically elected government and a free press has ever experienced a famine.
2. A famine is a measure of how governments respond to food scarcity.
3. Pressure provided by a free press requires the government to do something under these conditions.
Sunstein says this shows the importance of the ability of information to flow from one person to another – people can’t be “cocooned” and receptive only to info they like – there needs to be a permeable membrane.
Cell Membranes are semipermeable. I know this because of general education requirements. Directed education at work!
Educational institutions need to protect against group polarization and provide space for serendipity and work against self-sorting – not just for the sake of learning but also for interpersonal understanding.
Technology!
1. Allows for new kinds of public spaces with unrealized possibilities and deliberative forums.
2. But we need to recognize the importance of respectful links between blogs – a “civic tip of the hat” to other viewpoints.
Points brought up in question and answer session:
1. Polarization isn’t always bad (sometimes the “center is lousy” – i.e. Nazis).
2. Large scale polarization is possible, it is not just represented small group behavior.
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- i can haz teknoluhgee – pt3 (2) | sava
- Alternate Reality Games As Education Tools (1) | Franklin
- I can haz teknoluhgee – conclusion… (3) | sava
15 Comments
I enjoyed “The Death of the University” and many of the viewpoints that it entertains. Educational methods have definitely not changed very much over the years. Speaking for myself, up until I began MCC classes, there has been virtually no difference in educational methods from about first grade on (pre school and kindergarted included finger painting!). I would even argue that my earlier education, which encouraged much more self directed learning and self-discovery, has been more effective in shaping me. As soon as 2nd grade hit and the creative ventures came to a halt, it all became boring and monotonous. The broadcast model only works in certain situations; being discouraged from speaking is simply not an effective model for learning. Being that I’m a very hands on, physical learning type of person, I’ve always had difficulty with mathematics beyond algebra/geometry because the concepts simply became too abstract for me to internalize in a “watch the teacher do math problems on the board” kind of way.
In Computer Lib/Dream Machines, the great Ted Nelson asserts that computers have the ability to evolve and become the great liberating force in education (in 1975…!). They’ve obviously evolved enough, but they seem to be underutilized for learning purposes. Nelson believes that education as it is practiced is cold and rigid, and that our careers/areas of expertise are the subjects that are ruined for us last (because all subjects are, eventually, ruined for us). While this is obviously extreme, I do agree to a point. A great deal of my education is self-education, picked up online and through personal reading.
While the university obviously needs to make changes for the benefit of society, I doubt that they’re in any real danger. The fact of the matter is that, for the vast, vast majority, intelligence needs to be legitimized by the diploma. That is the method that society has prescribed to us. Very rarely does one get ahead in our society without an acceptable amount of legitimized education. If we really expect universities to evolve, society must evolve first. This is a top-down problem.
I sort of rediscovered the joy of serendipity during my technological backtracking during thanksgiving break, and I agree that individualization has its pros and cons. For example, without the newspaper, how would people conceptualize a mass public? If we’re to keep society from becoming over-fragmented, personalization of education can only occur to a point. This is necessary to promote a critical point of view. Personalization is only possible in certain forums. For instance, the criminal justice system would no doubt be much more effective if cases were analyzed only on a subjective basis rather than within precedent and certain social confines, however if that were the case, there would be no such thing as objectivity and the system would crumble. In order to keep the system afloat, it would require too many resources to be feasible. Again, I see the author’s concern, but I don’t see his “worst case scenario” coming to light – as long as education remains an institution (which it will).
Very good summary. It seems you enjoyed writing it and choosing images to decorate it through. I wonder what are your take on the (to some degree opposite) views expressed by the two readings and how you see your own education in that context. (a question to both Melissa and the rest of you)
i haven’t finished reading it all yet, but my blood is already boiling… both authors once again presenting “chicken little” logic, replete with vague and hardly-substantiated hypotheses of a future-to-come, and the dangerous and insulting tendency to boil down an entire generation to a glib description (“digital natives”, anyone?) of cybernauts who can traverse the vast spaces of the internet all the way “from Google to Wikipedia”. ugh.
What Harlo said!
At my undergraduate institution, I was stuck with a professor in the English department who refused to teach with any other style than the fad at the time, “cooperative learning.” This was pre-Internet hoopla, and yet, she treated her classroom like it was a co-op cathedral. I dared to blaspheme and asked her privately if she might give a lecture or two. I even quoted her dissertation to sort of give her a clue as to what I might like to learn about. She gave one lecture the entire quarter and prefaced it, “This one is for Camille.” (Picture Lauren’s fist in the air!)
If I had wanted to learn from my peers, and only my peers, I wouldn’t have paid nearly so much for the credits. Same goes for the Internet. Although I agree with Jason’s “get the piece of paper” reality, I would also like to tell these powers that be, that there is actually a huge demand for great professors, you’re just not listening to it, nor taking enough of the 100k from many of us to pay the faculty well/have enough of them.
Again, as Jason pointed out well, we like to learn certain ways, and many of us probably like a variety of ways, yet we stopped getting what we want in many schools. As Harlo suggested, we are not some giant digitized blob, not a bunch of cyber-addicts mainlining the Internet. All of these authors seem to suggest a “right way” of teaching to the “new” student body. Well, this body would like to tell them that the problem isn’t a lack of technology, or a surplus of tech, or too much diversity, or not enough, it is with this absolutist nonsense! Mix it up! Let your cannons hang out. Party with the feminists! Give me your blogs, your wikis, AND your huddled lectures yearning to breathe free.
Speaking of mixing it up, I have a funny story about why I didn’t apply to Columbia, but if you remind me, I’ll say it in class, and give your eyes a break.
I find it sort of funny to assert that the internet will erase the importance of institutions of higher education–in many if not most cases, it’s academics from these very institutions who are posting the most in-depth and useful pieces on various subjects, because they come from an environment that encourages hyper-focused research. Additionally, a significant number of professors enter the university environment only after becoming experts in their field – this is commonly seen in business schools.
As for the supremacy of hands-on media learning to the old school lecture, I’m with those who think this is kind of a silly comparison. The more ways we find for people to learn, great– but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the old ways are immediately rendered ineffective. Whether a third grader learns her multiplication tables the old school way– by rote memorization– or by some cute video game with bunnies and puppies, it’s still about ultimate effectiveness. Just because the video game is the more enjoyable way for a child to learn those tables now, rote memorization– which is all about quick, unthinking recall– may actually be the method that serves her best long term.
Just a quick anecdote, In 2007 I attended a conference at Harvard on the future of the university. While one of the issues was the political economy of how the open university would sustain itself, one of the bigger topics up for discussion was the issue of prestige and how an institution would sustain this if the open model prevailed. Many of the people who were so excited about being affiliated with Harvard seemed to have issues with the open model. This is where I could see Lanier siding with the people who are all about Harvard remaining an institution that only those who are accepted benefit from. I found it shocking. Were they not aware their neighbor MIT was striking a decent balance between students who applied to be part of the institution and Open Courseware? (BTW check out the open course ware for the core course for MIT’s media studies program and you’ll see that it features a ton of readings from MCC professor lisa gittleman…)
To Sunsteins relentless pursuit of arguing the internet balkanizes interest groups, a good read on the value of reflexive technology design would ease his concerns. Implementing reflexive design technology would prevent balkanization in customized online education.
To the previous comments (specifically Gordita), are you knocking seymour paperts constructivist method of education? While you may not have liked how your professor pulled it off, I hope that you are not throwing the whole idea out. While I like listening to what profs have to say, I can say that I am a big advocate of this method as it pushes for a world of proactive people rather than consumers. Teaching through problem solving is far more effective and better for the future of civilization rather than just pumping people with information.
this week’s readings made me laugh and cry.
to be honest, I’m a little past the whole reacting to these things strongly. mainly because I think that what writers like this are doing is presenting a point of view – just one point of view – and I think both these points are valid, if only because they make us think and react!
first, Tapscott’s article was interesting. reminded me of the ‘banking’ method that Freire talked about, and Dewey talked about before him.
from everything I’ve been reading in my programs, I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read (many lovely ones by Seymour Papert) which talk of new pedagogical styles that will change the face education. and some of these were written in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s! if only even half of these were applied! fortunately, some of these ARE being applied; unfortunately, they are often in charter and private schools (not necessarily talking about universities). when I started reading about the wonderful things that ‘technology’ would do for education, it made my heart happy. and then realizing that reality was something quite different, made me sad. enough about that…
I do want to say that the one thing that was not really stressed was EVALUATION and the way that students are ASSESSED. yes, the pedagogical styles definitely need to change (and there are changing! slowly, but I still have hope =)) but I also think that the way we as a society assess success or productivity also has to change. it is not just the educational institutions who propagate this – we all do. maybe an ‘exploit’ instigated by students will break through the current network structures? but I also know that there are progressive teachers who follow more ‘experimental’ methods of teaching and I also believe that this will increase, slowly but surely.
to Sunstein’s piece… wow. I see his point, I do. but I see it more in a social context. to apply it to education is taking it a little… too far. to me, ’studying’ something means looking at it from all sides. yes, we might go to a more ‘liberal’ school, but that doesn’t mean we don’t look at all sides of a story. while researching or reading up on anything, we all look up the author, other authors, references, pros, cons, arguments for, arguments against… that’s what academia is about, that’s what scholarship means!
I agree to some extent with some of the comments above – I too took a class with a very respected person in my field, only to have ’student presenters’ every week who also designed an activity around the topic and the professor never spoke. he was someone who had been there from the beginning, had been an instrumental force in a lot of the movements in the field, but I never once got to hear him talk about his experiences, never got his viewpoints on some of the stuff we read. what a sad sad waste. and of course, he was too busy a person to randomly hang out and chat with.
having said that, there have been other classes I have taken where the professor set up the class for discussion – encouraged student participation, guided the discussion so skillfully, provided valuable insight, took us on a path of discovery… and at the end we realized we had LEARNED. that we understood. and it was cool because this professor would tell us anecdotes about the people we read, talked about what it was like being around these people, presented her views as questions, not as sermons. she was a partner in our construction of knowledge.
yay constructionism!
class discussions are going to be interesting =)
I actually remember being pretty furious about this NYT Op-Ed when it was printed. Agreed with Harlo about the Chicken Little logic – we’ve been hearing stories like this forever. But it’s interesting to read this now that I’m back in school.
While I don’t necessarily agree with Taylor’s extreme opinion that “universities are losing their monopoly on higher learning,” or are becoming obsolete, I do think he makes a fair point — that the ways people learn are changing. But this doesn’t necessarily make standard university practice, specifically traditional lecture, irrelevant. I am definitely open to the idea of collaborative and interactive approaches to learning, but much of it depends on how the individual student learns, and the subject being taught. Sometimes lectures work, sometimes a tool like this class blog is more appropriate. I think being open to constructivist education is important, and there should be a healthy balance of traditional and more innovative approaches to teaching/learning. Questioning education methods is not a bad thing.
Another reason why I think universities are not going anywhere: Let’s not forget that college (at least, undergraduate) is not just about learning in the classroom — students also enroll for the “life experience.” This seems to be much more important for our generation than our parents’. Colleges are focusing much more on branding their campus lifestyle than ever before. I think it’s something that should be addressed when higher education is discussed.
@Gabriel: I’m certainly not throwing the whole idea out–I advocate for variety and balance. Thus, I think it is equally dangerous to favor a problem solving method over an information pumping method. Both extremes do a disservice to students, and reflect issues found in society at large (e.g. collectivism or heroism run amok). I thought Anu’s example was a great one. Also, in my opinion, Mushon achieves a nice balance of peer discussion/production and information pumping. “No, Mushon, we don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell us!”
I look forward to talking about it more with you and others!
I understand the visceral reaction to claims that the University system, and the hyperbole claiming “The Impending Demise of the University”- rather over the top. The lecture model of university seems to be a big point of contention and then some, and based upon my own experience at a midsize university has varying degrees of effectiveness. Some tracts and fields are conducive, some not. I guess my question is what is the most you have gotten out of lecture without following it up with directed research after?
I agree with Tapscott in that we are beginning to gather information in new ways through the wealth of knowledge gathered on the internet. I know personally I’ve become more adept at finding relevant info on the net and following it up outside of a classroom now. This shift doesn’t spell the end of the university and PhD’s, but marks a new way to draw on the experience of other…but where will that come from..dun dun dun.
I think this class is an excellent example of this shift in gathering information and drawing on the resources available to us- a class that uses all of the knowledge of our classmates, led each week by our classmates, with discussion drawn on the independent work we’ve carried outside of the classroom. The readings we’ve done are rather brief in comparison to the depth and breadth of research carried out independently. We all contribute to our own understanding of the themes of the course. I think the Wiki will be a great example of this type of production.
Although I might agree that there is still room in education for us to use an assortment of teaching methods, new and old, in order to pass on knowledge, I would like to play devil’s advocate for a second. I would definitely put myself in an interactive only learning position, which is part of why I chose to do more interdisciplinary work for my undergrad (in Cultural Studies) and now here in MCC. And though our generation (and I can’t even use that properly in our context because our class actually comprises of a multitude of generations) seems to be in the middle of a conversion of some sort in the educational process, those kids still in the public (and private) school systems are getting much more access to digital media than we probably ever thought was possible when we were in their position; iPods, Pocket PCs, laptops, teaching software are all being used at a much larger rate than we ever had access to. (I remember when being called up to write on the transparency projector was cool because it was probably the most advanced piece of technology in the classroom) I agree that there can’t be a deterministic view of education in that because of all this new digital access that obviously education will go in that direction, but it will definitely have an impact in the manner in which students are going to be able to process information and turn it into knowledge. And hostility is bound to happen, it always does when change is proposed.
I agree with basically everyone else: both readings have valid points, but both are too extreme. I’ve seen pedagogical trends come and go throughout my education, from new methods of memorization, to image-based learning, to CD-ROMs, to student-led learning. Every time, it’s going to be the new method! that will change! everything! forever!, and it never does. A few new valuable tools get incorporated into the arsenal, but mostly things go back to how things have always been taught. I think getting too caught up in these trends can be dangerous–I remember one year in elementary school it was all about doing these chants to memorize information (the Shirley Method, I think it was called). They never explained the information behind anything we were learning, but by God, we could recite every preposition. None of us had any idea what a preposition was, though. Which is not to say it wasn’t helpful–I can still name most of them, in alphabetical order–but had we added that to the old method of just explaining stuff, we would have learned a lot more.
I’ve also had the experience where I’ve been in a class with an awesome professor who never said anything. I always get frustrated at that, if only because if there’s only one person in the room getting paid to teach, I would like them to actually teach me something, not the idiot from my dorm. But I’ve also had the experience of walking into a room, getting talked at for two hours, and then walking out. I don’t learn anything there either. But if we combine the two methods (much like happens in this class), it’s actually good!
So I think any sort of “everything about education is wrong!”/”we should never try new things ever” reaction is fundamentally flawed. Both authors do have their points–the university system is flawed as Tapscott says, and it is important to have structure, as Sunstein says–but going too far in either way will only make things worse.
Damn, I actually liked the readings (somewhat, the Sunstein was a little kooky). I personally did pretty well navigating the “system” and playing the “game” throughout (especially) high school and undergrad. My younger sister, who just graduated high school (the same one as I did), pretty much failed everything except for art classes, and essentially shouldn’t have graduated high school (my father called the school and was basically like “can you please just graduate my daughter?” and they were like “o ok, better graduation rats for us!!!”), and is on the verge of dropping out of community college. She is BRILLIANT. She would probably contribute more to my grad. classes than I do, has a book collection that would put any English Lit. grad student to shame, and is an amazing painter. So naturally, I’ve come to question our public educational system. Why did I do well and my sister floundered?
I don’t like the generalization that kids are little digi gurus, but I do like Tapscott’s idea that instructors should strive for a more “back and forth” approach within the classroom, rather than just lecturing, and that education should be tailored to individual learning styles. Having students choose what they want to learn about, however, is slightly ridiculous.
The more advanced our society becomes the higher level of education the average person achieves. The structure of the education system provides deadlines and goals from an authority source that. Learning styles are different and many off us need a classroom experience to learn effectively.