New Learning?
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 6/14/2010 11:03 AM 
Categories: Students, Colleges, Professors, Around the Quad, Distance Learning
Tags: Around the Quad Colleges Distance Learning Students Professors
Categories: Students, Colleges, Professors, Around the Quad, Distance Learning
Tags: Around the Quad Colleges Distance Learning Students Professors
From Inside Higher Education:
This is mirrored in a split between professors and students, who approach knowledge in very different ways. Traditional faculty might be described as hunters who search for and generate knowledge to answer questions. Digital natives by contrast are gatherers, who wade through a sea of data available to them online to find the answers to their questions. Faculty are rooted in the disciplines and depth of knowledge, while students think in increasingly interdisciplinary or a-disciplinary ways, with a focus on breadth.
source: <A href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/14/levine">http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/14/levine</A>
This is malarkey: the skills needed to find knowledge in a library of books are the same skills needed to find knowledge in a collection of website. In both cases the reader needs to know who the author is, how they know what they know, what influenced them to write, what their sources are, and whether the information holds up under fact-checking.
There are already older distance-education technologies (documentaries , version of museum exhibits , college classes broadcast on TV , audio and videos of classes, and photographs (and drawings or diagrams )) and the problem with all of these is they are easy to tune out. In a classroom professors can see how they are going over: a certain amount of boredom is normal, but it is possible to see if a student is focused on their phone, typing long after one has paused to put something up on the board, looking out the window, whether most of the class seem lost, and how they act while taking a quiz (this can be as important as their actual answers.) (It has long been true that students' homework and what say about themselves seldom tells the whole story: a student who looks like she has mononucleosis is a very different matter than one who will not apply herself in a boring required class during her first semester in school. These may seem identical, online.)
Some subject cannot be easily illustrated visually (and not all students learn best by seeing something demonstrated), or taught in a hands-on manner (not all students learn well by doing, either.) I would love it if all subject could be taught in the same way and absorbed equally well by all students but every educational fad makes these claims and every fad has its own failings (some worse than others.) There have been genuine advances in understanding how people learn, but educational fads often have too little to do with experimental psychology.
To go back to another point in the article: skimming will not help you evaluate the quality of your sources. If many of them turn out to be ill-informed (or outright bunk) then breadth of knowledge does little good. (And it is certainly possible to lightly read a wide variety of books and come away just as poorly informed.) Only time, depth of study, and applying the five journalistic questions to your sources can give you a true education (on any subject). This is not a passive process (I am wondering how much academic research the article's author has done...) and it is even more challenging online where little is vetted or fact-checked and anyone can say anything for the price of a small website (like this one)* or a free weblog account. (This has always been the case, of course: anyone who could pull together a little cash could put out a set of leaflets, pamplets, newsletters, or self-published books ... but no one took them seriously as a source of information.)
Nor should you take this website as a source of information: verify what you read here, do your own reading and thinking, and come to your own conlcusions.
* My helper keeps telling me this site would go over far better if I hired a professional designer, let them organize the website, and stopped stuffing every blinking thing that caught my eye down one side of the page. Naming myself after a cartoon character has not helped, either. In my old age I have learned to listen to advice, nod thoughtfully, and do what I wanted to do, anyway. I will leave the better sites under real names to my younger colleagues who have careers to foster.
-Kushana
This is mirrored in a split between professors and students, who approach knowledge in very different ways. Traditional faculty might be described as hunters who search for and generate knowledge to answer questions. Digital natives by contrast are gatherers, who wade through a sea of data available to them online to find the answers to their questions. Faculty are rooted in the disciplines and depth of knowledge, while students think in increasingly interdisciplinary or a-disciplinary ways, with a focus on breadth.
source: <A href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/14/levine">http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/14/levine</A>
This is malarkey: the skills needed to find knowledge in a library of books are the same skills needed to find knowledge in a collection of website. In both cases the reader needs to know who the author is, how they know what they know, what influenced them to write, what their sources are, and whether the information holds up under fact-checking.
There are already older distance-education technologies (documentaries , version of museum exhibits , college classes broadcast on TV , audio and videos of classes, and photographs (and drawings or diagrams )) and the problem with all of these is they are easy to tune out. In a classroom professors can see how they are going over: a certain amount of boredom is normal, but it is possible to see if a student is focused on their phone, typing long after one has paused to put something up on the board, looking out the window, whether most of the class seem lost, and how they act while taking a quiz (this can be as important as their actual answers.) (It has long been true that students' homework and what say about themselves seldom tells the whole story: a student who looks like she has mononucleosis is a very different matter than one who will not apply herself in a boring required class during her first semester in school. These may seem identical, online.)
Some subject cannot be easily illustrated visually (and not all students learn best by seeing something demonstrated), or taught in a hands-on manner (not all students learn well by doing, either.) I would love it if all subject could be taught in the same way and absorbed equally well by all students but every educational fad makes these claims and every fad has its own failings (some worse than others.) There have been genuine advances in understanding how people learn, but educational fads often have too little to do with experimental psychology.
To go back to another point in the article: skimming will not help you evaluate the quality of your sources. If many of them turn out to be ill-informed (or outright bunk) then breadth of knowledge does little good. (And it is certainly possible to lightly read a wide variety of books and come away just as poorly informed.) Only time, depth of study, and applying the five journalistic questions to your sources can give you a true education (on any subject). This is not a passive process (I am wondering how much academic research the article's author has done...) and it is even more challenging online where little is vetted or fact-checked and anyone can say anything for the price of a small website (like this one)* or a free weblog account. (This has always been the case, of course: anyone who could pull together a little cash could put out a set of leaflets, pamplets, newsletters, or self-published books ... but no one took them seriously as a source of information.)
Nor should you take this website as a source of information: verify what you read here, do your own reading and thinking, and come to your own conlcusions.
* My helper keeps telling me this site would go over far better if I hired a professional designer, let them organize the website, and stopped stuffing every blinking thing that caught my eye down one side of the page. Naming myself after a cartoon character has not helped, either. In my old age I have learned to listen to advice, nod thoughtfully, and do what I wanted to do, anyway. I will leave the better sites under real names to my younger colleagues who have careers to foster.
-Kushana
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