All these forward-thinking, learner-centric, innovative classroom and education ideas we’re going over, learning about, experiencing – probably because of my current standing as a graduate student – I can see working in a graduate environment. I am still finding it difficult to see how these things can work with the massive amount of undergrads with varying degrees of motivation or desire to learn that permeate higher education. I agree with you when you say boxed-in education isn’t conducive to maximizing learning potential, and that focusing attention on individualizing learning techniques for each student is likely better than large lecturing, but I am having a difficult time wrapping my head around a professor teaching an undergrad lecture class of 900 students and addressing the needs of each on an individual level. Doing away with the mass class may be the answer and focusing on small classes, like we do in grad school where individualization is possible, is a neat idea, but I doubt we’ll be able to get administration, responsible for the hiring of thousands of new, qualified, and salaried/funded/contracted faculty and building enough small classroom space to accommodate, to sign off on it…..

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I definitely agree with your description of being unable to read a lengthy paper on a screen. I, tonight, am attempting to do just that, and am clicking on this and other windows.
I know there is a significant amount of research on attention spans and multitasking, but I am curious (and may attempt to find some in a minute to go along with the other pieces of distracting materials at my fingertips) as to whether a study has been conducted on a population of younger adults that have never NOT multitasked and were raised on “read-bytes.” I would be interested in a comparison between that population and an older population that has adapted to multitask.

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Machines and algorithms that allow for the processing of information on a massive scale to occur almost instantly for each individual person with a connected device is certainly a useful concept. But (and I keep coming back to this in discussions that thematically tend toward a technological answer for all questions education, although that’s likely a symptom of my own love/hate computer-age technobias), if we only teach our students (and ourselves) how to access information through Google, we are teaching them nothing. Everyone with an Internet connection has access to the exact same pieces of information (or misinformation) at the same time. In this regard everyone is on the same plane, and that plane alone is static. The argument I keep having with myself is not unlike the one Clive Thompson points out after Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue – If everything our students can learn is already available to them, what motivates them to learn it for themselves? And if they are not learning for themselves, what critical thinking processes, discovery processes, are not being triggered? Intuition underdeveloped?

I was at a Smashing Pumpkins show over the summer – I had decent enough seats, but was still several rows back. As soon as the show started, the sideways phones went up. It was so bad I was forced to watch the opener through the screens of the phone in the hands of teh people in front of me that were so concerned with capturing a crappy video with horrible-quality audio that they missed out completely on the show itself. After a fairly heated exchange and an overt threat to confiscate phones and start slinging them onstage, they put them away.
Why would you pay an exorbitant amount of money to sit in a dark room in front of a live band if you can’t peel yourself away from your phone long enough to enjoy, well, sitting in a dark room in front of a live band?

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I would like to think inclusion and a recognition (and perhaps celebration) of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts, allows for healthy discussion and empathetic conversation, free of prejudices and misgivings/misconceptions based on race, gender, nationality, etc, especially at our institutions of higher education. But that is an ideal and not reality. I think it is a goal we need to be working toward, foster a climate of community, guide reality toward that ideal as best we can. The classroom is a good place to start.

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I would like to think inclusion and a recognition (and perhaps celebration) of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts, allows for healthy discussion and empathetic conversation, free of prejudices and misgivings/misconceptions based on race, gender, nationality, etc, especially at our institutions of higher education. But that is an ideal and not reality. I think it is a goal we need to be working toward, foster a climate of community, guide reality toward that ideal as best we can. The classroom is a good place to start.

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Does education have to be either/or? Why does education have to be polarized as either liberating or domesticating, promoting either conformity or freedom? Seems absolutist and counterintuitive. Freire….

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Does education have to be either/or? Why does education have to be polarized as either liberating or domesticating, promoting either conformity or freedom? Seems absolutist and counterintuitive. Freire….

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Education without critical thinking isn’t much of an education. An understanding of the self and the subject material is a positive thing, certainly, and critical pedagogy is one way to achieve that. However, an instructor must ensure the students have a foundation of understanding before allowing them free rein to critique. Otherwise the classroom will resemble a political chat forum on Facebook: “Well, in my horribly uninformed opinion which is all that matters in this world the item under discussion is offensive and wrong. RRRrrrrrr.”

Personality counts for a lot in the classroom. When I first stood in front of the classroom I thought it best to keep mine out of it, focus on the material instead. Tried that strategy mostly out of trepidation and the desire to appear like I knew what I was talking about, above all else. Swing, miss. I didn’t have any fun with that, the students didn’t have any fun with that. Strategy altered. personality came out, connections were made, learning took place.

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