Below is another YouTube video from Kansas State University on learning in higher education — today and tomorrow. It is a condensed version of a full documentary, edited to just under 10 minutes to meet YouTube’s time limit.
January 24th, 2008
The following is an article from our Fall #2 “Communicating for Learners” newsletter. We encourage your comments, thoughts, experiences, and questions as they relate to this concept of a “new world” learning paradigm. Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!
The research-based concept of a “new” paradigm for learning in higher education was originally proposed over a decade ago. In 1995, when the term “paradigm shift” was all the rage, Barr and Tagg described a shift from an instructional paradigm to a learning paradigm. Then in 1997, Smith and Waller set forth over a dozen examples of changing paradigms for learning. More recently, Fink (2003) echoed the need for moving from a content-centered to a learner-centered paradigm, while Bain (2004) uncovered the effectiveness of challenging students’ existing models or paradigms, helping them transform existing understandings into better, more accurate models of truth.
Semantics aside, the change involves a clear shift from one-dimensional, unidirectional teaching to multi-dimensional, multidirectional learning. So why now? Primarily because we live in a changing, connected world, with increasingly complex problems to solve.
What is the Learning Paradigm?
The student-centered learning paradigm is not a new concept, but the implementation of these revised pedagogical strategies has yet to become mainstream in higher education. At the core of the learning paradigm is a foundation of reciprocity between students and faculty. Essentially, it requires active, problem-based, collaborative strategies for both student and faculty learners. The learning paradigm is based on a community of continuous learners—both students and faculty. This change from higher education to continual learning has “learning how to learn” as its valuable product.
Just as early explorers set out to discover new places of potential riches, educators too can set out on their own journey of discovery in learning. Christopher Columbus, who was looking for a new world, certainly found something that resembled a “new” place—unfamiliar people, plants, foods, and treasures. But what he really did was bridge two unconnected land masses already sharing the same water and sky. Similarly, faculty “explorers” of the new learning paradigm can help students connect seemingly distant concepts, creating bridges to deeper, synthesized, and meaningful learning.
Beginning and Continuing the Journey
When working toward changing a paradigm, especially one that may have worked well for us as students, it is important to consider the future—what will our students’ emerging careers be, what skills and knowledge are essential for them to be engaged in their professional worlds, and what paradigms might they face? Our teaching behaviors, our expectations we set for our students, and our students’ learning behaviors must evolve to fit our students’ futures.
Tagg (2003) reminds us that to change our paradigm from teaching to learning is to view education through a new lens—“seeing” our work in a different light and having diverse experiences as we and our students interact to learn. As we peer through the telescope to chart our course toward a new horizon of a learning paradigm, what do we see? Where will BGSU students and faculty travel in their journey toward a learning paradigm? Click on the COMMENTS link below to get started!
November 13th, 2007
Many faculty scoff at the phrase above, often exclaiming, “Isn’t all teaching ’student-centered’ or ‘learner-centered’?” Well, not exactly. Here are some descriptors to help clarify the true intent of the term, learner-centered (or learning-centered) teaching:
Maryellen Weimer describes seven “Do” principles for teachers/faculty to begin their planning for learner-centered teaching:
For more information on learner-centered teaching:
Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice
by Maryellen Weimer (2002). Jossey-Bass. (A summary by Bill Peirce; available for check-out from the Center’s Library)
Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
From The American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987
Mapping the Learning Space: Overview of the Territory
5 Learner-Centered Principles and Practices in Higher Ed: Design Implications, Learning Activities, Deeper Learning, Teaching Practices, and Technology Uses
International Institute on Student-centered Learning and Engagement
May 20-23, 2008 at Portland State University
Student-Centered Learning: What Does it Mean for Students and Lecturers?
O’Neill & McMahon, 2005
October 29th, 2007
Sarah Robbins (aka – Intellagirl), prompted the BGSU Tech Trends Series audience, “The world is changing… are you ready? Are your students ready?“
After presenting a multitude of recent statistics on the technology use habits of 18-22 year olds, Robbins explained how the numbers simply represent symptoms of a larger issue – young people want to express themselves and communicate with others, which all too often ends at the classroom door.
Her remedy for bridging this chasm is to determine what faculty need to know and be able to do in this new, changing world. She suggests that an instructor’s technological expertise should be “somewhere between (knowing) everything and nothing” – enough so faculty can help build a bridge from the place where students are interested and engaged to where they need to go, educationally.
Her overall message centered on three approaches to reach current (and especially future) students:
Benefits of these three approaches include:
Robbins is known to some for her often-publicized, academic exercise where students were asked to portray Kool-Aid people and mill around various Second Life spaces to experience diversity, crowd mentality, exclusion, and discrimination. She explained that because most of her Ball State University (Indiana) students never felt excluded or discriminated against, the “Kool-Aid man experience” was the best way to get them to quickly and easily understand a previously foreign concept.
So how did the students react to this new (and strangely unique) exercise? Robbins said many of them expressed they felt safe because they were in a group who were like themselves; had they been alone, “it would have been worse.” In other words, within five minutes, students learned complex, experiential concepts that were only marginally successful during a 50-minute, face-to-face class.
Robbins shared several other educational uses and applications of Second Life:
Robbins closed by emphasizing the need to find and use technologies that meet the needs and goals of the course and your comfort level – not all tools are for everyone or every purpose, just because they are popular or novel. And with that, we’ll close with a few questions about your thoughts… What do YOU think?
For more information:
Sarah Robbins’ Ubernoggin Blog
(Search for Article) Professor Avatar: In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality (from The Chronicle of Higher Ed – September 21, 2007)
2 comments October 25th, 2007
1 comment October 15th, 2007
Corrie Bergeron, M.Ed., an Instructional Designer at Lakeland Community College in Ohio recently wrote an essay entitled Age of Wonders and shared it on one of the OLN (Ohio Learning Network) listserves. Below are some highlights, but the entire essay is a good, but short read for anyone concerned with being inundated by constant technological change in their life or classroom.
In the film “Master and Commander,” 19th-century British sea captain Jack Aubry is handed a wooden model of a new warship. He examines it carefully, noting its many innovative features. Finally he sets it down, saying, “What an age of wonders we live in.”If he had only known what was just over the horizon.
…For those of us who teach (and who directly support the teachers), this is a huge challenge. Many of our students know far more than we do about the new tools and toys. Others struggle with basic skills most of us mastered years ago. Every semester faculty come to me and say, “Please get me set up with Blackboard. My students say I need to use it.”
But in truth, the technology doesn’t matter all that much. Regardless of the tools they use, people are still people. We all have the same basic human needs: for food and shelter, for security, for love and belonging, for esteem, for self-actualization. Under the iPod and Razr, behind the email or discussion board post, is a human being with the same fundamental needs as his or her great-great grandparents.
They just meet those needs in different ways, that’s all. iTunes is not so very different than the traveling minstrel of Chaucer’s time. It just has a larger repertoire.
A tool is merely a set of affordances and constraints – stuff it lets you do easily, and stuff it makes it hard to do. That applies to tools used for teaching, too. You can teach in the 3D simulated world of Second Life, where people can fly and a student may appear as an alien with an orange mohawk (ok, bad example – that can show up on campus, too). But you also can teach while sitting on a log and using your finger to draw in the dirt (hey – digital interactive multimedia!)
…Is that good? Is it bad? Neither. It’s just different.
…We often feel like hamsters on a wheel that’s spinning faster than we can run. But we keep up as best we can with what’s going on “out there.” We try new things. Sometimes they work better than we’d planned. Sometimes they crash and burn. We pick up the pieces, learn from the experience, and try, try again.
We have to, if we want to prepare our students for the next Age of Wonders. It’s just over the horizon.
This is distrubuted with the author’s permission and a Creative Commons license (non-commercial with attribution).
August 8th, 2007
The beginning of the semester is an exciting and busy time for both faculty and students. The semester start is also the best time for you to take the opportunity to make students aware of your expectations for the entire semester.
Expectations help define a boundary for students in which they can focus on the required tasks, leading them to the desired learning outcomes, rather than being distracted by unclear or obscure objectives. Some areas you can define or clarify include:
In concert with expections, here are some assignment ideas or discussion topics that allow students to claim ownership of their role in the learning process, :
July 31st, 2007
1. Generation “Y” will migrate heavily overseas
2. Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy
3. Workers will increasingly choose time over money
4. Outlook for Asia: China for the short term; India for the long term
5. Children’s “nature deficit disorder” will grow as a health threat
6. We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing
7. The costs of global warming disasters will reach $150 billion per year
8. Companies will see the age range of their workers span FOUR generations
9. A rise of disabled Americans will strain public transportation systems
10. The robotic workforce will change how bosses value employees
(See the YouTube video )
July 24th, 2007
Classes should be designed so it is impossible for the students to take a passive role in the course. This Chinese Proverb is a good reminder: “Tell me, and I forget. Show me, and I remember. Involve me, and I understand.” Unfortunately, it is often difficult to gain the involvement of students in large lectures. In an ideal world, students would ask questions when needed, however, most students are apprehensive to speak up in large lectures.
Below are some tips to keep students actively engaged in large lectures:
1) Use a deck of index cards of student names to randomly call on students to share in their own words their understanding of key concepts of the reading and/or lecture. This strategy will keep students actively listening in lecture since all students have the possibility of being selected to participate.
2) Develop a routine time, either before or after lecture, for students to drop off written questions they have about the material/concepts discussed.
3) Give students the option to turn in a piece of paper with their name and the discussion topic they shared in class for participation points. This can also help you with learning your students’ names.
4) Invite the class to bring in materials, such as current news articles, which are pertinent to the class topic.
Read More Ideas:
• The Chronicle’s Big, But Not Bad article with additional resources at the end, such as tips and books
• Survival Handbook for Teaching Large Classes (from UNC Charlotte)
• Interactive Lectures: Summaries of 36 Formats
• Engaging a Large Lecture Course
3 comments March 21st, 2007
Dr. Paul Cesarini, an assistant professor in the Visual Communication & Technology Education department here at BGSU, began a discussion that we wanted to continue here on Interact at the Center. The original article, Caught in the Network, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, began a discussion on academic freedom, IT controls and limits, and the fine balance between the two. Paul was kind enough to respond to some of the comments and questions he has received as well as reflect his experiences over the past few weeks:
I appreciate how many of you read my article, commented on it in various online venues, and linked to it so that others might read it. Please keep in mind my goal in writing this piece was not to denigrate our Information Technology Services office in any way. As I mentioned in the article, I worked there for years, and I still know and respect the folks that work there. Heck, our Director of ITS even had me over for Thanksgiving dinner a while back. Our ITS office, if I may attempt to personify it as a single entity for a moment, works tirelessly to make sure our network infrastructure remains stable, dependable, and active. Without the often thankless efforts of this office, we wouldn’t be able to send a single piece of email. We wouldn’t be able to rely on a vast, yet standard set of software tools that are officially supported on campus. We we wouldn’t even be able to get our paychecks.My point in writing this piece was not really about Tor, either. It could have just as easily been about Bit Torrent, YouTube, or any other application or service that could potentially be problematic for our university on a variety of levels. Rather, my point in writing this had more to do with my own need to explore, discuss, and attempt to balance the often competing needs of faculty and administrative IT, within the context of this ever-increasing pace of technological change swirling around us at all times.
The incident that served as the catalyst for the article — plainclothes detectives and IT security staff visiting a faculty member, unannounced — is certainly not unique to me, nor was the request to avoid teaching specific content areas in class. What is perhaps unique about it is that is occurred within the times we are living in now: pervasive broadband times, consumer / creator times, Web 2.0 times. This tenuous balance between faculty and IT needs is only going to be amplified in the coming years, as more faculty try to explore more technologies that may or may not be officially sanctioned by their respective IT departments. This isn’t a black or white, right or wrong issue, yet it is still an issue that needs to be debated in a heathy, open manner.
That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out some of the more interesting comments, questions, and in some cases misconceptions I have either personally received or read in various forums online:
- One of the first and most repeated statements I have read about me is that I’m a Computer Science professor. I’m not. I’m faculty in our Visual Communication & Technology Education department, which is not only entirely separate from our Computer Science department, it is also in a completely different college here (Technology, as opposed to Arts & Sciences) and in most universities.
- I’m not a scientist, and make no claims to be one. I am a technologist.
- I do not have tenure, and thus did not attempt to use tenure as a “free pass” to get my own way. I am, however, tenure-track.
- Neither I nor my wife typically consider me to be a “brave freedom fighter” who was “sticking it to The Man”. I’m not even sure who The Man is, really, unless it’s the Director of our ITS office I mentioned before, who had me over for dinner. He’s a real decent guy, and was a great boss while I worked there.
- I did not lose my job, at least as far as I know.
- I realize the following sentence could be read two different ways: “Someone looking up potentially sensitive information might prefer to use [Tor] — like a person who is worried about potential exposure to a sexually transmitted disease and shares a computer with roommates.” My editor and I went back and forth on this sentence for quite some time. Thank you, Slashdotters, for pointing that out.
If anyone else has some specific questions or comments about my article, I would love to hear them. ~Paul
[Post them below in the comments section and Paul will respond -- Just click on COMMENTS to get started.]
2 comments March 5th, 2007
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