Talking Creatively About Education 2.0

Risk-Based Education and IT July 10, 2008

(Source)

I’m continuing to work in IT while I patiently wait to head off to begin my doctoral studies on the West coast. I’ve worked in IT for a reasonable amount of time - almost seven years now in roles from lab assistant, lab technician, doing network admin, faculty support, etc - and as I read more and more academic literature on surveillance studies, privacy theory, and communication theory, I see a recurrent thread: we live in a risk-filled environment, and we need to secure ourselves from that risk. This is often done through predictive measures that are institutionalized to afford long-term predictive abilities, safeguarding not just ourselves, but others, from proposed dangers. I’m not going to engage with whether we live in this society or whether we should, but instead relate that thread to IT in education.

What IT Tends to Be: Risky Problems
I should start with this: (a) what I write doesn’t necessarily reflect the attitudes of my employer; (b) I really do like my job, and have for a long time. I’ve had the opportunity to write policy that I think really matters, work with a handful of others to keep the likes of Google as far from campus as I could, and generally enjoyed the various facets of my employment. This having been said, those aforementioned projects were all ’special’; most of my job end up being proactive risk management and troubleshooting.

Risk Management in IT
What happens when email goes down? What happens where a projector or teaching software doesn’t work? What is the experience that I, as an IT person, experience from users the most often?

Believe me, when things that are important to people, things they require to do their job/studies aren’t working, they aren’t calling me with a cheerful tone in their voices (in most cases - a few people excluded). That doesn’t mean that they are angry, but it does mean that they are at the very least anxious, more often already frustrated, and I become the punching bag. Part of IT, you see, is disembodied voice that people can complain to. The other part of IT is that it’s both a surprise and joy to have someone thank you for fixing a problem. Given this environment (relative thanklessness in stressful environments) many people in IT are slow to jump onto new technologies for their organization. The IT persons themselves may be incredibly enthused about a new technology (wikis, blog, user-generated videos, shared collaboration tools, etc), but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to support that new thing, given the headaches that will almost certainly follow.

Software/hardware/training is often withheld, not because it won’t work, not because the IT person isn’t mindful of its possible benefits, but because they don’t understand all facets of the technology. While it’s one thing to advocate ‘encourage your students to help you learn it, call on them to assist you!’, that isn’t the experience of many IT departments - users want things to work, and it can be very hard to actually identify the ‘non-IT’ software experts (i.e. students and staff) because they never enter into the IT hierarchy. IT doesn’t know who to turn to for help, is usually distanced from the teaching staff and students, and is thus left alone as the ‘experts’ to get things working promptly if they break down. Remember: if they can’t get things working quickly their jobs are often on the line, and stress levels (especially when something critical breaks in the classroom) rapidly rise. These factors mean that ‘risk management’ strategies and assessments are central in decisions to roll-out (and consequently support) new technologies. What is often associated with such strategies and assessments are the economic requirements to get a new piece of technology up and running - you may have set up a class-based server on the PC in your office, but most IT groups are going to want both sufficient training to support the software AND the reliable enterprise-grade hardware to host the software in question.

Troubleshooting
This is similar to the last section, but important. When was the last time that you took your computer to a repair shop/had someone look at your computer, and were frustrated by how long/how awkward the whole process was? Couldn’t they have done something faster? Couldn’t it have been cheaper? Couldn’t their solution have been more elegant? While you might have been grateful/pleased when the computer device was returned in working order, wasn’t that really just an indication that the tech was ‘doing their job right?’

This is the typical experience of troubleshooting a problem - oftentimes one-on-one stress as the tech tries to determine what is wrong with the particular device. Sure, most good techs will have a process to diagnose and resolve most common problems, but as soon as we run out of our ‘usual tricks’ it can take a long time to resolve the problem, with no guarantees that it is possible to fix. This is obviously an issue when talking about a home computer, but the pressure that one in front of a classroom of students and their educator, where they are all relying on you and failure means jeopardizing the semester’s curriculum, is considerably higher.

This is, again, stressful. Techs respond to problems, or troubles, more often than they develop proactive risk management solutions that are intended to prevent troubles from arising. When a new device is being introduced, one that educators will prominently use, then the tech needs to know how to resolve common problems, but those problems are often only found after (literally) months of testing.

How This Impacts Education
IT staff is notorious for being slower to respond to problems than would be ideal. This is unfortunate. Obviously educators encounter similarly stressful situations, and resources should be provided to assuage those stresses. This having been said, it seems that educators often lose track of the fact that IT staffs are expected to be constantly learning, constantly acting as quasi-punching bags, constantly finding that their professional lives revolve around risks and troubles. This ‘warzone’ mentality means that IT staff often come off as either obtuse, uncaring, or unsympathetic. I would suggest that they aren’t, but that time has worn on them considerably. Whereas most IT begin their professional lives excited to be helping others, and continue to enjoy that facet of their work, they become more guarded and less optimistic after their first or second major disaster. (To the comment “then just quit and find another job!”, that’s an impractical solution, especially if you have dependents - you need to work, need to be paid, in order to survive. That’s just basic risk management *grin*)

It also impacts IT’s willingness to implement new technologies. Sure, some new product MIGHT be helpful to the educating process (and few techs will openly say that it wouldn’t), but there is a long process involved before they can authorize implementing it - risk management strategies have to be implemented and troubleshooting techniques developed. By the time that those processes are completed, it’s often the case (especially in a world where technology moves as quickly as it does) that the technology is question is seen as ‘obsolete’ or ‘not needed’ anymore. There are few things quite as frustrating as working overtime to get something working as quickly as possible, only to find out when the project is up and running that it’s not needed any longer.

The Meaning of This Post
The title of this blog is ‘Talking Creatively About Education 2.0′ - creativity means sometimes uncovering unpleasant realities and then determining ways of approaching/understanding them in a fashion that generates something new (and hopefully positive). I don’t know how many educators have sat down with their system administrators, and had those admins explain what life is for an admin. I hope that, if you haven’t, that this gives you a bit of insight into why IT is sometimes slow - it’s not because they/we don’t care (they/we usually do), but because risk-based experiences have taught-through-practice the value of conservatism when deploying new technologies.

This post isn’t meant to explain away problems that you may be experiencing, just to elucidate why the challenges that teachers often face actually arise - not from uncaring IT staff, but from IT staff that are often perpetually ‘under fire’.

Technorati Tags: IT, culture, risk management, Troubleshooting

Digitality or Why ‘Literacy’ is Dead July 8, 2008

(Source)

I like teaching. I think that that’s important to state up front for this post. I also enjoy working with students, like reading, and think that a classical education remains an optimal way of developing the analytic skills to approach the environments we are set withing. I also think that I have issues with how ‘literacy’ and ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Education 2.0′ are thrown about because these terms seem to have become unmoored from their historical anchoring points without clear attempts to re-anchor them.

The Role of Education
What is education for? I don’t necessarily mean that in a deeply philosophical sense (though my reply will certainly be encompassed by various educational theorems), but in a fairly direct sense - why do we educate ourselves and others? I want to pass away from an economic reason, and instead move to a slightly deeper level - I want to suggest that we learn in order to survive, to comprehend our environment, and (depending on the paradigmatic time that one’s finds themselves) for fulfillment and enjoyment.

Ordering the World
Educational systems find their origins in ancient Greece, where students were taught to exercise the mind and the body - honing both was essential to becoming an educated person. In the process, students were immersed in philosophical theories that were intended to explain substantial facets of the world, even where that explanation was a “we can understand X through the lens of Y”. The theories that dominated this period of time, and until fairly recently, were comprehensive, insofar as they provided full metaphysical systems that were intended to capture literally everything of any and all value. Even that which was valueless was caught by these systems, because the systems were capable of explaining the lack of value of those objects. As an example, when Christianity genuinely rules the metaphysical roost of the Western world, it was possible for a priest to make sense of, and respond to, the question “why did my husband die” in final terms that held meaning beyond the material world.

As more and more information was collected and converted into knowledge, it came to pass that certain things were labeled as not important, dangerous, wrong, or a host of other deviant names. The education system that was developed after the printing press’ inception, the system that the contemporary school system is predicated upon, placed high value on reading and ordering literary information. The role of literacy was to provide students with instruction on how to approach art and science and comprehend these increasingly complex systems. The catch, however, is that humans have been persistently adding to their knowledge-repitoire, to the point where it is now impossible for any one person to know everything about the world. This difficulty, as it relates to the present persistent accumulation of knowledge, (at least in part) stems from the transition to digital technologies.

Becoming Digital
With the rise of the electronic counting machines that made processing the America census more efficient, the West has becoming more and more infatuated with possibilities of the computer. Without IBM mainframes the Nazis would have been far less efficient in monitoring their death camps, banking would be a tiresome process that was more cumbersome for banks, and the Internet would lack much of the technology governing its routers. This said, without the digital database it would have been more challenging to collect and find as much information as one can now - whereas we once enjoyed privacy by obscurity, that obscurity is falling away from us like the scales of a great serpent, and as a result we need to analyze and process data, both about us and that affect us, much more rapidly than ever before. The collection of that data into ethereal data clouds that are separate from us, physically, but surround us, practically, have lent to the need for our students (and ourselves!) to develop sophisticated understandings of the technological superstructure that surrounds us all. Literacy, in this digital era, has taken on the connotation of ‘digital’ literacy - students need to know how to navigate search, how to find and process information, how to write on electronic media, when to avoid topics, etc.

The problem that has arisen, and the problem that I continue to find with much of the education literature of blog conversations that I watch, is that the narrative of digitality involves ‘efficiencies of comprehension’ - students need to learn how to process information. What most discourse on ‘efficiencies’ lies upon, however, is the capitalist metric that perverts what it touches when unrestrained by a constituted ethic. What ethic, in this age of seeming moral relativity, should guide the process of education? Surely we cannot impose any particular religious creed - doing so would threaten to disenfranchise the members of alternate creeds - just as turning to all-encompassing metaphysical claims similarly are insensitive to social difference.

Skills vs Philosophy
When a student is taught how to upload videos to YouTube, or how to create a ‘mash-up’, are they really being ‘educated’, or are they learning a set of useful skills? Clearly an educating environment sees the teaching of particular skills, but those skills ought to be in the service of something more substantial - skill-based learning alone isn’t enough, should we want to retain the notion of education as a transformative process. I think that the focus of education ought to align more closely around a conception of self-valuation, valuation that is guided by the teacher and can be approached through the lens of (in contemporary cases) digital technology. At the same time, I worry about the techniques that are often referred to - writing on a blog, creating videos, using social networking.

It’s not that drawing on any of these techniques is necessarily bad - far from it - but rather that instead of just allowing a technology into a classroom one needs to reflect on its implications and try to divine good reasons for deploying it. Is the aim to enhance communication for communication’s sake? Is it to do something ‘cool’, whereas another technique might have a stronger, though somewhat more ‘boring’, effect? Are core skills being given up to the alter of the new?

Literacy Has Transformed
I get somewhat unsettled whenever I hear an educator use the term ‘literacy’ in pretty well any sense. This isn’t because people don’t use it with a particular intent, but rather that the term itself is relatively archaic, and is commonly conjoined with the terms ‘digital’, ‘cultural’, or ‘media’. These aforementioned words are conjoined with ‘literacy’ whenever educators feel a need to differentiate what they are speaking about from ‘historical’ literacy - literacy now entails more that a simple scientific or literary comprehension and awareness. The concern that I have is that literacy was born from an ordering philosophical position - literacy campaigns were designed around the need to order media in particular ways - whereas it seems to me that contemporary ‘literacies’ aim to provide exposure to, rather than an understanding of, new environments that students find themselves in.

Let me take ‘digital’ media as an example, if I may. Briefly, my understanding is that digital literacy entails teaching students how to use a computer and, more substantially, how to search and find information and then create their information cells and nodes. This said, to teach students what are and aren’t appropriate sources of information, and what are and aren’t appropriate search methods, and what are and aren’t appropriate things to create things about, necessarily rests on an epistemological stance that is intended to order the knowledge available to students. This epistemological stance needs to be highlighted, not because it demonstrates a bias (which it almost necessarily will), but because it shows that a universalizing meta-principle of value remains behind the literacy campaigns of the present. ‘Digital literacy’, should mean nothing more than extrapolating that epistemology to a new environment, but what more often happens is that students are taught the skills used after realizing that epistemological position, rather than the position itself.

Thinking Smaller
The most obvious response (which I don’t buy, but that’s another post entirely) is that students aren’t able to grasp broad epistemologies, and our teachers aren’t capable of explaining it. I think that this is blatantly false (students aren’t dumb, and teachers aren’t inept fools), but lets suppose that the position is as fair as I’m told it is.

Were we to think ’smaller’ than epistemological foundations, then perhaps instead of teaching skills (i.e. how to use blogging software) teachers should focus on why we use particular environments for particular things. This has the advantage of teaching the epistemological stance through action, rather than through verbal communication. Moreover, it means that students aren’t learning ‘locked’ skills, or skills that are rooted to particular applications, but instead begin to think of how media can be use for best effect. This effect, however, shouldn’t be read as ‘the most efficient means of communication’, but as in ‘most personally transformative’. Under this metric, students would learn that a live performance holds differeny resonating effects in comparison to blogging, writing on the board, and creating digital music.

Smaller, in this case, means action - the explicit intellectual understanding of the epistemology is put at arms length from ‘action-based learning’. Action-based learning ensures that students remain engaged with what they are doing while developing and sharing present-day skill sets that satisfy the requirements for ’skill-based learning’. Skills are fine, so long as they are clearly in the service of a higher purpose which, in this case, means education’s transformative character.

What are your thoughts on teaching? What is the epistemological stance that informs learning, and do you think that it continues to have the ordering capacity of the past? Should it, and if not, how does one even conceptualize of education in a contemporary environment?

Technorati Tags: pedagogy, philosophy, epistemology

Let’s Talk PDA April 30, 2008

(Source)

In my personal blog, I’ve talked about the issues surrounding placing information in a PDA - I think that the concerns I raise there apply to educational environments, but I won’t discuss those issues here. What I do want to talk about is Abilene Christian University, which is distributing iPhones or iPod Touches to its incoming classes. While the application suggestions from the pilot group sound interesting, and include homework alerts, in-class surveys, directions to classrooms and offices, and meal balance information, I’m not certain that this has really panned out.

Instead of all those cool features, ACU is really using the Apple wireless devices to provide some neat online services - students have access to a map of the campus, which is tied to their class schedules, times and dates, instructors, and so on (Source). Location sensing for books in the library has been suggested, but this technology hasn’t matured sufficiently that the technologies in the iDevices allow for accurate sensing. Moreover, the notion that students can use the devices for taking quick notes seems bit silly - shouldn’t students have pen and paper with them? Do they need an expensive PDA to do this?

Don’t get me wrong - I’ve been using PDAs for years, and I love them. That said, I’m not entirely certain that they are particularly needed - wouldn’t a tuition reduction, where students would have the option of spending their savings on PDAs be a better way of approaching this? Moreover, until developers make new applications using the recently released iPhone SDK, what benefit will these Apple devices really provide?

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, learning, students, Technology

From Software to the Classroom April 29, 2008

(Source)

I happened upon a great blog post that suggests how software developers can ‘do thing right’. Lauren Wood notes that a good product management involves four steps:

1. It’s easy to find out what the software does;
2. The software does what it claims to;
3. It looks like people still work on the product;
4. There’s some hope of getting help with problems. (Source)

I think that these can nicely be reframed for when creating projects/assignments/seminars for class environments.

Have a Clear Objective
When Dr. David Kahane spoke last year, he noted that clear objective statements for each class were surprisingly hard to develop. The challenge wasn’t that classes tend to lack objectives - quite the opposite - but that actually identifying what those objectives are and codifying them can be devilishly hard. In spite of the difficulty, when you have a clear statement your students know what to look for/how you intend to engage with the material, and you develop a nice theme to build on.

Substantiate the Objective
Simply put, when you say you’re going to do something, DO IT. If you find yourself deviating from the stated objectives, but in a positive way, make a note of the deviation at the end of the class and (preferably) how it links with the objective statement. Be accountable for what you claim that you’re going to do, but don’t let yourself get so caught up in the objective statements that you stifle productive discussions. With this said, make sure you understand your objectives, and can suitably discuss them - don’t just dogmatically force statements down your students’ throats.

Avoid Cobwebs
Make changes to the curriculum - if you’re left teaching an introductory class term, after term, after term, don’t just reuse the same lesson plan each and every time. Find new textbooks, examples, ways of presenting the material, etc. This doesn’t mean that you have to throw everything out each time, but make sure that you don’t have fourth year students selling their notes to first year students, with the fourth years’ notes precisely matching your current lectures.

Alternate Avenues for Clarification and Exploration
Whereas in software you need to be able to contact a developer, in academics I think that it’s perhaps more valuable to have a list of places that you can go to read and get extra help. This may mean putting a few books aside in the library for students to take out, or putting some suggested readings on the book list. Ultimately, what matters is that students have some inclination of the resources that are available to them. Even if they never use those resources, simply having them can assuage concerns and reduce stress levels, which will (hopefully) lead to better papers and exam results.

YouTeach: Openness and Intrusion April 28, 2008

(Source)

I’m sure that various readers have been following some of the experiments with Web 2.0 technologies, such as YouTube, and how to situate them in the classroom. Recently Professor Alex Juhasz at Pitzer College decided to see just how far you could push YouTube - could it be an effective arena to hold a class?

Her answer: no.

The Binaries of Teaching and Entertainment
Juhasz perceives two separate elements of the classroom: the educator must provide the core set of data/information/critical approaches to the students, and a necessary component of transmitting that message involves being entertaining. While recognizing this binary of teaching and entertainment, she notes that:

video shifts the balance heavily towards the entertainment end of the spectrum, a shift that has a number of causes and corollaries. One of these is the loss of the balance between amateur and expert. In an entertainment-focused medium, being entertaining is more important than being right, which means the voices of amateurs with excellent video skills can drown out the voices of those who know what they’re talking about, including the professor. (Source)

I think that, to an extent, she’s right in her perception of video media as being more likely to fall within the realm of the entertaining - students have been indoctrinated to see video media as content to (typically) be amused by. This is occurs because of everything from the rise of sitcoms, the fantasization of reality through the lens of reality TV, and shift from news to infotainment. Students are taught by major media conglomerates that what is on video is, typically, there for fun/their transitory enjoyment.

In response to this, I would suggest that it’s possible (though not necessarily true) that Web 2.0 technologies offer a way of disrupting Juhasz’s binary - if educators and others use web video in a way that strongly deviates from ‘traditional’ media presentation and consumption students may begin to more critically engage with/analytically distinguish between information and entertaining visual media. Then again, they might not - this is, of course, the excitement of being a pioneer in technology.

300 err… 500
No, I’m not referring to a movie, but to a word count limit. A student complaint surrounding the YouTube classroom stemmed from the post word-count limitations. With YouTube, you’re limited to 500 word comments, something that can disrupt how much a student can convey in a single post. I think that there are (at least) two ways of considering this:

1. Word count bad!
2. 500 word posts encourage brevity, clarity, and precision. This is a skill that is both important, and often lacking, in many university level papers (mine often included!)

The Gang’s Here!
When you post in a public space, the public has a tendency to show up. This should not be surprising.

Having come off as somewhat snarky in that sentence, I genuinely do see the matter of the public showing up and trying to engage with paying students as a real issue. The public’s involvement limits the university’s attempts to foster a private space, where students can experiment with their ideas without the fear that they will be judged or mocked for their ideas and thought experiments. Students are paying, in part, to have a space that is intended to foster their thoughts and shouldn’t have to bother with, or worry about, random YouTube trolls.

Sources:
Juhasz’s YouTube Page
ArsTechnica Article

Technorati Tags: YouTube, teaching, Technology

Students, Plagiarism, and the Normalization of Thought with 2.0 We-think, I-think … and Groupthink | The Register April 6, 2008

(Source)

A recent article from the Registrar raised an excellent, if somewhat depressing, point: university students are told over and over again about the dangers of plagiarism and the (supposed) consequences that will follow from appropriating ideas that are not their own. This isn’t a new mantra - I’ve heard stuff like this for as long as I’ve been around universities, which predates the Internet’s transformation into a useful and accessible information resource. What is of concern is that students, who are regularly accessing a diverse set of information points on the Internet, are becoming less willing to express their own thoughts because they fear that their ideas may have been drawn from online discourse - if the ideas presented as their own in actual fact aren’t, then they would be punished for plagarism.

In the ‘Web 2.0 era’ some educators talk about the need to have students learn a new form of media literacy. This, most significantly (to my mind, at least) extends beyond showing students particular resources, such a different blogging system and environments, the power of wikis, different photo upload sites, and so on, instead focusing on a critical media awareness. Why does that picture look like that - has it been photoshopped? If so, why would that have been done? If a particular blog site is referencing some sources in particular, what is the significance of those references, and what might not be being said?

In essence, it’s important to foster the desire to critically engage with the media that students are presented with.

A problem arises, however, when students are expected to account for all of the info-fragments composing their papers. In an era where students are reading an incredible amount of information from diverse knowledge-repositories, an expectation that they can catalogue all the sources that might influence their thinking is absurd. Now, as the Registrar’s article lays things out, it would seem as though this was a new issue for the Web 2.0 generation. I’m not so certain that that’s a fair presumption; prolific readers and social individuals have likely always been likely to be influenced by the range of knowledge-repositories that they have come into contact with. The difference between the analogue interactions that predominated the past, and the electronic communications that are increasingly impacting students’ lives, is that the former systems were challenging to comb through, whereas digital systems lend themselves to automated search algorithms that are time- and cost-efficient.

How do we react to this hybrid environment, where students live digitized lives, lives that lend themselves towards perfect analysis and control of their actions? Should we teach students to develop annotated bibliographies for every site they travel to, every forum post they are exposed to? That strikes me as patently absurd. The problem is that, until some kind of explicit, systemic, and transparent negotiation between imperfectly enforceable analogue rules and the possibility of their near-perfect enforcement in digital environments takes place students will (and probably should!) continue to be fearful that they have accidentally plagiarized something in the course of their writing. This fear and shift to conservative writing threatens to leave academic writing (relatively) barren of the insightful and inspiring thoughts that are exciting both for students to develop and for instructors to read, forcing students’ insight into ‘unofficial’ (or illegitimate, depending on the faculty member) knowledge-repositories such as blogs, wiki, and forums.

Source article: We-think, I-think … and Groupthink | The Register

Technorati Tags: academic misconduct, students, teaching, Transparency

FFE (Facebook for Expulsion) March 7, 2008

A Ryerson engineering student is facing expulsion because he created a digital study group on Facebook. He’s been accused of over a hundred academic charges for being the administrator of the group, which mimicked an analogue environment (the Dungeon) where students would go to assist one another. While the University is giving him a hearing and, based on the public outcry, will likely overturn the charge of expulsion, this whole things just seems silly. Chris Avenir’s only mistake was going digital - he used new technologies that are easily indexable and searchable, which meant that the actions he undertook were easier to detect. I’ve never met a professor in the sciences or in engineering that didn’t know and expect this kind of stuff to happen, but it was ‘out of sight, out of mind’. I have family members in engineering, and these sorts of groups are required to survive - not necessarily excel, just survive - these sleep-deprivation programs. In a time when students are living in hybrid environments, it seems patently unreasonable to expect them to abandon key technologies just to maintain professorial illusions.

I think what this demonstrates, really, is that professors are not only hesitant about new technologies, but are so hesitant about them that they often lash out without thinking of how what is ‘new’ is really just a development on the ‘old’. Case-in-point: when my father was in Engineering he and his colleagues would get together for hours at a time and try to work through the problem sets that they were assigned. They were actually encouraged to do this. As educators, we often encourage students to work with their peers (not copy from them, but to work and learn with them). Given this kind of ruling, it seems to be saying ‘work/learn with others, but only in the environments that I did when I was growing up. Anything else will be punished.’

Is there any wonder why undergraduates are more cynical towards their education when issues like this arise? When how they live their lives itself is (somewhat) under siege?

Note: Elements of this post also appeared at http://www.livejournal.com/users/chris_parsons
Source: TheStar.com | GTA | Student faces Facebook consequences

Technorati Tags: academic misconduct, facebook, learning, Ryerson, students

What If Learning Looked Like Teaching? March 5, 2008

When I was in secondary school I was always a bit intimidated by presentations. That’s not to say I didn’t do well in them, and that I didn’t work to present myself as comfortable in from of the class, but it was a bit scary trying to present something that you weren’t an ‘expert’ on. After I had passed on to university one of my teachers in high school let me in on the motivation driving those presentations: they were intended to make me comfortable presenting in front of groups, synthesizing material, and demonstrate that I could respond to questions on the spot.

Great. I get the value in that (though it would have been nice to have such a clear rubric prior to giving those presentations). That said, I think that a great way of reducing the ’scary’ from these presentations, while simultaneously teaching a similar set of skills, would involve learning those skills by teaching on topics near and dear to students’ hearts.

Now, by teaching I’m not thinking of putting students in front of the class for a week and have them hammer out some issue in Macbeth or something (at least, not for the purpose of this mode of learning as teaching - presentations would certainly still remain). Rather, I’m thinking of a case where once a week or two students got up for 15-20 minutes and taught the rest of the class about something they love. It could be anything from a really good newspaper article that touched them, to a memorable lesson imparted from their grandparent(s), to a way of fixing some part of a car, to how to style their hair, to how to perform some task on a computer.

This idea is inspired by what 37signals is doing, and what Nortel in the mid-90s did: both let their employees teach one another skills that they would otherwise not be exposed to. These kinds of learning processes teach students what it is like to facilitate a learning environment and invests them in their education - they become incredibly active participants in the classroom but, because they are already comfortable with the material, the ‘core skills’ that presentations are meant to elicit can be developed without incurring the same degree of overwhelming fear.

This is obvious, I know, but it only just struck me

Technorati Tags: learning, students, teaching

Attitudes and Teaching/Learning February 26, 2008

I firmly believe, nay, I firmly know that I don’t know a lot. I don’t understand an awful lot of things. I can, at best, provide particular insights that are based in my own experiences, my own training, and my (attempts) at openess towards other ideas. This isn’t to make the claim that I hold a relativistic attitude towards what I know, but that prior to something being recognised as ‘valid’ that it has to meet minimum critical standards.

I’ve previously noted that I maintain students can provide teachers with insights. In other areas, I’ve tried to battle with the notion of a binary hierarchy that is typically established in the classroom. While true that the professor/teacher is expected to have a certain degree of knowledge, their knowledge should be recognised as limited, perpetually open to critique, and available for revision. It’s possible that this person might say something, only to return at a later date and amend their previous teachings.

At one point I would have seen any such an amendment as a failing on the authority-figure’s part; their job is to know and when they don’t they would have demonstrated a level of untrustworthiness that limited my ability to confidently adopt their teachings. Upon reflection there seem to be two problems with this approach:

1. It assumes that I am operating an a consumer-based educational system;
2. As a consequence of (1) I prevent myself from fruitfully entering an educational dialogue.

while I’m sure that these points are fairly self-evident to most, it’s taken me some time to really understand that (2) can logically follow from (1). I don’t think that my attitude was terribly unique, but I think that it was harmful to a great deal of my early educational experiences. Perhaps being open to students, and explicitly expecting them to be open as well, would be a more successful mode of educating than the (presently) dominant authority to subject relationship that is evident in post-secondary classrooms.

Tags: teaching, students, professors, dialogue

Draft Teaching Philosophy December 1, 2007

I’ve spent the past couple of days reading about/writing my teaching philosophy. It’s been a handy way of drawing together the facets of what I think education is, and what I think it means (or ought to me) to teach in an academic environment. Feel free to offer comments on this version!

Teaching Philosophy Statement

My overall aim as an educator is to provide students with the environment, resources, and opportunity to realize education’s transformative character. My focus on education’s potential to transform students’ lives causes my approaches to teaching to diverge from those used in training and instructional environments. When educating students in philosophy courses, I work with them to realize arguments’ far-reaching effects and consequences which, in the process, implicitly teach students the skills of evaluating, reflecting on, and critiquing arguments’ normative underpinnings. To elucidate, when I work with students who are engaging Mill’s utilitarianism I focus on the theory’s core tenets and how the students might perceive the theory’s influence(s) across their daily attitudes and actions. As the students discover their pre-existing philosophical biases and the logical consequences of these biases, they develop an appreciation for Mill’s theory and the skills of reflection and critique. This causes them to open a space where they can critically appropriate, transform, or reject previously unexplored normative facets of their lives, causing them to realize education’s transformative effects.

My conception of education is contrasted from training and instructing. When training a student, the student is directed to perform particular actions, or recite particular content, without receiving a substantiative explanation for why the content is important. This makes it challenging for students to pass beyond recitation – they learn semantics, not meaning. Instruction allows students to engage with material by providing them with context for the content they study, but their engagements do not necessarily critically resonate with their normative beliefs or outlooks. When just receiving instruction, students learn to instrumentally respond to challenges but do not develop an appreciation for the norms that underlie their prescribed responses. While instruction begins to approach education, it fails to appreciate the value of reflecting on and critiquing normative tenets guiding the studied content.

As a firm believer in active learning I encourage student participation in class environments. Education requires students to actively participate because passive reception of content is unlikely to cultivate norms of reflection and critique. While a core element of teaching is lecturing and presenting course content, I find that providing students with core elements of class material and having them engage texts with classmates result in enhanced content comprehension and retention. Of particular significance, this approach transforms students from being consumers of educations to being active and involved participants of it – students realize education’s value through the discursive labor that they share with their fellows. In focusing on education, rather than training or instructing, I aim to establish environments where students learn through practice that their education rests on their need to evaluate, reflect upon, and critique content. My teaching philosophy drives me to provide students with skills that are useful within and beyond the classroom; they are as useful to class essays and discussion as they are to the life-projects that students assume after leaving university.