Lynne Wolters :: Blog

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Escape from IDEO on Vimeo.

Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!

Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.

Stay tuned!

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First, I want to thank the editors at the New York Times Magazine for featuring an article that focuses on teacher education (Elizabeth Green’s “Can good teaching be learned?” 7 March 2010). Since most of us attended school at one time or another, teaching and teacher education are always hot-button topics in which most people have an opinion. This opinion is often based on what one researcher dubbed an apprenticeship of observation, that is, we think we understand teaching because we have watched it happen to us and others for many years.

The truth is, effective teaching is a complex art that requires the practitioner to be part subject matter expert, part psychologist, part instructional designer, part expert communicator, and part performance artist. While teaching and wisdom do seem to come more naturally to some than others, what is important to consider is that good teaching ultimately happens by design. The trouble is this design sense is often implicit in teachers. Many good teachers know how to effectively work with their students without being able to describe what it is that they are actually doing. This is turn sheds light on the trouble with many teacher education and staff development programs: teachers are not educated explicitly to be designers.

Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.

Ultimately, Lemov’s taxonomy may be quite useful. From a design perspective, the taxonomy should not be considered a set of recipes for success, but instead they may be thought of as a way to help teachers select and apply the most substantive and useful procedural knowledge for specific tasks in their own learning ecologies. From a neuroscience perspective, it is important to consider that the taxonomy in and of itself can only be of limited use. Research has shown that the brain is good at interpreting information, not simply memorizing it. What might work best with such a taxonomy is an iterative cycle of learning, application experiences, and reflection repeated over an extended period of time to enhance long-term memory processes as well as the potential deepening of the practitioner’s understanding of how effective teaching and learning can be designed.

Teacher education will always present us with numerous challenges. Yet, it is important to remember how important this education process is. Teachers are the marrow of our society. They are responsible for inspiring and guiding learners and families that in turn act, guide, and inspire generation after generation. The more research and attention we can bring to this topic, the more we as a civilization will gain.

Reference:
Green, E. (2010, March 7). Can good teaching be learned? New York Times Magazine, pp 30-37, 44-46. Retieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

Image:

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http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/signs-of-the-season/

The sidewalks are crowded and the coffeeshop patios are filled. The motorcyclists lean on their bikes and watch the walkers parading past.
The spot of red (against the cream-coloured house, in the leafless branches) is the first cardinal I’ve seen this season.

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca






[...]

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/winter-diminishes/

It feels like spring!



Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/social-media-makes-a-small-w

Two weird social media things have happened to me this morning. In Twitter, I have a new follower who, when I checked her or him out, was following only people with the name Joan, including several Spanish-speaking ones with distinctly masculine avatars. A strange way of selecting people to follow!

The other, and much more [...]

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/snow/

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/hamilton-harbour-from-the-hi

Looking at the industrial area.


Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

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This is article is written in response to Trent Batson’s essay As We May Learn: Revisiting Bush in Campus Technology.

Batson argues:

“We lack a coherent and comprehensive way to study media and learning that would help us make wise enterprise decisions instead of the constant lurching we’ve sponsored during those 20 years. Where to turn for this new knowledge and wisdom?”

My contention is that this is both near-sighted and patently untrue. Batson himself, a former professor at a large university, clearly suffers from what many at large and small higher education institutions suffer from: individualism. Given the comforts of tenure and the lack of sociality and intra-college mingling that can be documented in one institution after another, it’s hard to see what is going on in college classrooms much less know who is using what digital media to enhance teaching and learning or to what end.

Batson asks:

“But where is the field of media and learning that encompasses all this scattered inquiry?”

In my college and many others like it, it is in the educational technology department. One that is often parked in a remote region of an education college or psychology department. One that you would easily overlook given the culture of  individualism that dominates the institutions. (Perhaps this isolationism and individualism is a leadership and policy issue which should be re-examined by those at a much higher pay grade. Yet, I digress.)

While I agree educators and college professors need to spend more time reflecting on how we, as practitioners, conduct the collegiate enterprise, the chances of this happening are slim on a large, continuous scale. And while this may sound at first like a bad thing, I have come to realize that this is actually a wonderful thing. Let me tell you why.

This thing that we call a call a college education is about to implode. And it will happen in our lifetime. I have heard this over the past decade within the halls of academia, in journal articles, editorials, and blog posts. But now I am hearing it from the students themselves. They see that to succeed in life and develop the requisite knowledge and skills to support a nimble civilization , they do not require university professors. And I could not agree with them more.

As an educational technology professor in a higher education institution, I see it as my job to train and educate the next generations of teachers to make inquiry and participatory intelligence the norm thereby rendering the ivory towers useless (or at least rendering them into wonderful Smithsonian-like museums showcasing relics and antiquities of “what used to be”).

Sure colleges can still offer researchers a place to conduct studies of the hard and soft sciences, but it will no longer be a knowledge accreditation agency or a ticket to future success. We will have all that we need at our fingertips and at the touch of a screen. Teachers in secondary institutions will be equipped and available to model the skills necessary for practical and creative living. At least, that’s my goal and the goal of many educators I know and practice with.

Several months ago, James Gee came to my college and shared an insight with us. He remarked that in the future, colleges of education would become obsolete. That instead, those of us that specialize in pedagogy, androgogy, and technological pedagogical content knowledge, would serve the other colleges and departments on campus by teaching these professors how to create robust, engaging, and media savvy learning environments. This would serve both the hard and soft scientists, educators, and students well by deepening each subject matter experts’ ability to serve up the skills and knowledge necessary for students to become the best, brightest, and most creative stewards on the planet. Not a bad vision.

So while “media and learning” could serve as a new department or enterprise, as Batson suggests, it could instead become a part of every subject area’s enterprise. How’s that for a solution: Let’s work ourselves out of our jobs.

Remember, it was not that long ago that universities employed a Dean of Electricity.

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http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/googles-design-sense/

I love Google's sense of design and current events! And am enjoying using Chrome, even though I use Firefox for certain things. Joan Vinall-Cox, Social Media & Learning

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/at-toms/

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca