The new media environment provides new
opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our
students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the
very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing
questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along
with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave
the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more
importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from
their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to
inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,”
in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but
on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the
types of questions that ask students to
challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own
underlying biases.
The beauty of the current moment is that new media
has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of
question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.
There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the
questions that drive us on.
Glenn Hoyle on 08 Apr 10"What I want to demonstrate is that it works for a purpose-it engages us," said Dr. Vaughan. Using blogs, wikis, social networking systems, mash-ups and voice-over-Internet-protocol, in the class room, student engagement will be measured with a survey. The survey focuses on five points: how actively collaborative the learning is; the quality of interaction with instructors; is there a sense of challenge or rigor; is there a connection between the assigned task and a future purpose; and the larger campus environment of learning. Dr. Vaughan points to the Maclean's magazine engagement survey, which replaced their unpopular rankings of Canadian Universities, as a way of judging student learning. "What they figured out is that engagement really is the time and effort students are putting into their studies. Its got to be relevant, meaningful learning and its got to be challenging, and-this is where the Web2.0 comes in-it has to create relationships."
