Category: Education

Martin Weller wrote a piece for On the Horizon about a challenge higher education is facing:

When learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?

A good question–and one that applies to instructors as well! Ars did a great write-up, and you’ll find a summary written by the author over at Michael Feldstein’s blog (he was the editor of the journal issue). Weller is a good writer, and makes his point much better than I could:

The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students [and instructors] will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.

This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this. If we add to the technological experience, the user participation one they will have had through social tools such as Flickr, YouTube, blogging, wikis, etc and compare this with the top-down, pre-filtered experience they have in courses and selected resources, it becomes obvious that this is about more than just technology, it is a social change.

I can think of two possible reasons behind this phenomenon.

The first is momentum. A university that runs an e-mail service, a web hosting service, a streaming video service, etc. sees all of these tools and wonders where to start and where to find the time and resources. Should they let something go, or try to do everything for everybody?

Second, FERPA has everybody scared. The purpose of the law was to protect student’s personal and grade information from things like the grade list on the door and prying parents. Yet fear over having students work on external commercial systems, which are largely secure from hacking and violate privacy only on the aggregate level of data, causes hesitation from using Web 2.0 systems or attempting to form partnerships with their owners.

I’m curious if anyone has written a recent history of educational technology. What did universities do when e-mail was the new thing? My guess is that they just bought a VAX system. If that “buy an X system” model is breaking down, how can institutions affordably buy or build an open platform that has the flexibility to work with existing apps, develop new programs, and protect user security–all at once?

I was preparing to teach next week’s “Quizzing and Gradebook” workshops on our course managment system, Learn@UW. Being a law geek, I thought a short quiz on civics would be an easy way to show off all of the quiz question types–until I saw this:

“Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government,” [Justice Sandra Day] O’Connor said, “but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol.”

Hopefully my quiz won’t be too difficult for the participants, but the surprise in this story is the Madison connection.  Justice O’Connor is heading a project to develop a game called “Our Courts” to help seventh and eight graders learn about our judicial system, and she tapped Madison’s own James Gee (formerly of UW-Madison) to do it.

The game “lets students engage in real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said. It will allow them to “step into the shoes of a judge, a legislator, an executive — teach them how to think through and analyze problems, take action and voice opinions to their elected representatives.”

An early exercise in the game will likely deal with educating students about their First Amendment rights, using examples like Tinker v. Des Moines and the “Bong Hits For Jesus” case.

I love it! Having students step into existing problems is the best way to learn how the courts work–it’s exactly what we do in Intro to Mass Communication Law courses. Maybe the students who have played this game will do better on our hypothetical questions 🙂