Month: December 2017

Technology is giving teachers and professors new way of teaching, that is changing curriculums and shaping modern forms of online research and collaboration.

Communications technologies such as online collaboration tools would make the greatest contribution in terms of improving educational quality. Also, different software that is used to deliver learning content is supported individually paced learning. Nevertheless, learning management systems and enhanced video and presentation tools are among other innovations that will likely to have a profound effect on the academic experience.

Social networking is also another benefit of technology that aims to help in building connections with alumni and support career service activities. Using Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, instant messaging and social networking as an example have been influential in improving connectivity in many settings and are in use now at a large number of institutions.

This era of pervasive technology has significant implications for higher education. Technological innovation has a major impact on teaching methodologies, students are more engaged in constructing their own knowledge.Nevertheless, this innovation of technology lead to more online degree programs and distance learning that is offered by different universities
around the world.

Higher education is responding to globalization. Many universities have or will have an overseas presence, institutions either already have foreign locations or plan to open them in the next years. Also, distance education is also becoming increasingly global, with universities in the US and overseas leveraging advanced technologies to put education within reach of many more individuals around the world.

Dan Edelstein’s article brought me back to a book, that I had last read about a year back and Aristotle. Considered as one of the world’s most influential philosophers, Aristotle’s interest lay across multiple fields. He is also considered as one of the world’s first biologist who used a network of scouts to collect botanical and zoological samples from all over Greece and Asia. Aristotle established a school, the Lyceum (in Athens) where the majority of study focused on mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences. Seems weird?

Fig. 1. Aristotle (Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle)

Here’s an excerpt from Durant (1961)

“The new School was no mere replica of that which Plato had left behind him. The Academy was devoted above all to mathematics and to speculative and political philosophy; the Lyceum had rather a tendency to biology and the natural sciences. If we may believe Pliny, Alexander instructed his hunters, gamekeepers, gardeners and  fishermen to furnish Aristotle with all the zoological and botanical material he might desire; other ancient writers tell us that at one time he had at his disposal a thousand men scattered throughout Greece and Asia, collecting for him specimens of the fauna and flora of every land. With this wealth of material he was enabled to establish the first great zoological garden that the world had seen. We can hardly exaggerate the influence of this collection upon his science and his philosophy.”  Durant (1961, pg 53)

This is not a one off situation. The majority of early scientists and mathematicians were philosophers (Pythagoras, Rene Descartes among others). However, with the modern times and the advent of the “Division of Labor” as propounded by the famous economist Adam Smith, there has been a tendency for people to specialize in one particular field (in the majority of cases a specific aspect of a field).

I have an undergraduate degree in Economics, a subject considered by some as a science as well as art (Read this blog) and others as neither. To my untrained mind, economics looked like science with concrete demand and supply equations. It blew my mind when I had to take my first class in Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and other classical economists. Here were people considered the forerunners of the field of economics and their writing turned out to rely heavily on what we now classify as philosophy, sociology and political science etc. (so called humanities). There went my inherent disdain for the humanities. I decided to meet all (or atleast some of the sciences) at the crossroad thereon. From that day on, Economics could not exist independently of philosophy, sociology and psychology.

Reference:

1. Edelstein, Dan (2010), “How Is Innovation Taught? On the Humanities and the Knowledge Economy,” Liberal Education, 96(1), 14-19.
2. Durant, Will (1961), “Story of philosophy,” Simon and Schuster. Link to the full text here

It was during my high school. One of my English teachers asked in the class, what’s the job of education? Many of us responded but finally, we agreed on one thing – to make us more humane. This was the first time someone taught about a different facet of education and I was sixteen that time. During the final semester of my undergrad, I was taught a class on Engineering Practice and a small part of that was on ethical values in engineering. Other than that, there was no class on ethics in my entire life. I did not get any chance to take these classes in the earlier stage of my education, which could have been more impactful. Despite the availability of a class called Engineering Ethics at Virginia Tech, I did not take it as I thought there will be a lot of workload on me besides doing research. Some of my friends took the class, however, they think the materials which are taught in that class are what everybody knows. So I thought, since I know the stuff (every human must know how to act ethically!), I may skip the class. But sometimes, we need to be reminded of what we know and what we should practice. To me, this type of classes must be made compulsory for all students to be reminded of their responsibility as humans.

Educating the educators is what required most to make sure that students become more humane in the process of education. I taught for two years when I was in Bangladesh. I got the chance to teach just after completing my B.S. without any training on teaching. Because of the lack of candidates with higher degrees, students with good GPA in B.S. can teach in my country. This makes a huge void in the education system. I only taught my students what was required to complete the syllabus, but I could not offer much. There were few reasons behind it, which I figured out later. I was not educated enough and I was not trained enough. I could teach better if I were given chance now. Because I got an extended exposure, which made me confident and I got training in teaching. It is true that sometimes we teach unconsciously by just influencing students by who we are. But to become that person who can teach students unconsciously, the person needs to be trained. If the teacher himself has no idea of the goal of education, it’s treacherous for all. Now if we consider the educators who are already in practice and practicing the old school teaching style where the humane part of education is absent, how we can solve this issue. Replacing the existing negative (!) teachers with positive would take time in a natural way, and the time required to do that would create a huge number of graduates without a humanistic view of education.

If there is one thing that my graduate education has made me realize, it is that I have to un-learn everything I learned in school and in undergrad. I was taught to make decisions with reason and not emotion, and follow instructions without questioning. If you plot my grades over the past 19 years in education, you can see an inverse relationship between my obedience and my grades. Come to graduate school, and I had to think for myself. Think for myself?! It was intimidating at first, but slowly I realized this is what I was destined to do.

This class has made me question my goal to be an educator. I want to continue in academia after my PhD, and I don’t know if I will be a successful professor (or a professor at all), but I will try. I will try to keep pace with the new culture of learning and I will try to listen to students and improve based on feedback. There will be critics, and there will be failures, but I will keep trying to get better.

I am reminded of a quote for moments like these:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

I did not expect this week’s reading to be as informative as previous weeks. I thought it was going to be a simple happy ending summary of what we have learned. They tended out much more profound. I have read them all. Although the readings delayed my blog posting, I do not regret it. I was not that good at liberal […]

When I heard about the problem-based learning (PBL) case at Queens College or listened to the TEDx lecture by Seth Godin, I recalled my confusion and embarrassment when I first encountered a PBL-style class. It was the first class I attended when I returned to academia after some years of professional life. The class was for learning a computer scripting language, but the professor did not give any lecture in the lab and just shared his tutorial videos that he posted on YouTube. There was a little project assignment each class that students had to figure out how to complete by themselves watching the tutorial videos. The professor stayed in the classroom just to answer the questions.

My first thought was as follows: why am I here paying the tuition? Did I make the hard decision to come back to academia giving up my career and salary spending all my savings just for watching YouTube videos in the classroom? I can watch them at home or in my office without paying for the tuition! Moreover, I had never seen that type of class when I had been a college student, thus, the professor not giving a lecture seemed like a dereliction of his duty. Due to these thoughts, I was lost during the first class and finally dropped that course.

Ironically, this issue of YouTube learning came up again in another lecture class. In that class, a guest lecturer was invited one day, who was a young CEO of a consulting company for Building Information Modeling (BIM). He said that nobody was teaching BIM when he was studying at architecture school because it was a new system of which not many experts were available. Therefore, he could self-learn BIM only on YouTube, and he could be one of the few BIM specialists when he graduated. He said the self-learning through online platforms would be the future of the education, and we should be more active and comfortable with learning new area utilizing those supports. The guest lecturer’s session helped me open my mind toward the new learning method.

Afterwards, more and more classes in my schedule turned into PBL. I could learn a lot, even though the learning process required significant efforts. During the three years in academia, I could see the guest lecturer was right, also, the scripting language class would have been helpful if I did not drop the course. As Godin explained, the definition of learning seems to move from “collecting the dots” to “connecting the dots” now. I was educated in the system of “collecting the dots” in my college. Although I knew the system was burdensome and uncreative, it was harder to break through the familiar methods. Finally, I could start moving toward “connecting the dots” accepting the new system of learning, which seems like a valuable gift from my graduate studies.

 

 

Reference

TEDxYouth. (n.d.). STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc

This semester finally almost comes to the end. The GEDI course has brought me different perspectives on teaching. In this post, I just want to do a few reflection on the article by Dr. Palmer…..

First of all, I like the analogy that teaching is just like cooking. For example, adding a little spices may change the taste of the dishes. If you add too many sugars or salts, people may enjoy it at the moment, but it would not be good for their health in the long term. Different people have different tastes. How to cook a dish that can satisfy everyone’s taste buds?…. There are so so many things we need to learn to become a good cook or say a good teacher?! I would say the best cooker is the one who doesn’t need recipes; instead, who can use his/her intuition or experience to make delicious food! However, I believe that in order to get to that level, more than 10 years experience is necessary!!!

Next, it’s very interesting to recognize the differences between the Western and Asian “FOOD”. In my opinion, the teaching styles in the West is definitely more creative and more interaction between teachers and students. Besides performance, the Western teachers seem to more care about students’ emotion. The courses’ contents are encouraged to include more projects and case studies, instead of exams. In the East, I remember tons of exams were torturing me every semester, and I was the top student in class, but I had no idea which subject really interested me. However, I like the fact that the traditional learning environment can provide students with more systematic and logical way to learn new knowledge. I think this plays an important role when we were establishing the basic foundation and developing our studying strategies.

Finally, WHEN AM I ABLE TO COOK FOR SOMEBODY!!!!???

At this moment, the only thing I really want to do is to find an opportunity to teach and apply those methods I have learned from this class!!!