Full Sail Education Media Design & Technology

This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide.  It’s teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It’s time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning.  We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques.  This is not about technology per se – it’s about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.

Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn’t much good for children who have to work in a digital age?

Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.

Valerie J. Shute, an associate professor of educational psychology and learning systems at Florida State University, believes she has a solution in "stealth assessment"—the administering of tests without students' knowing.

To do that, Ms. Shute and other stealth-assessment researchers have turned to video games, which let educators watch students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual worlds.

"Everybody likes to play," she says. "And so much could be done using games."

College leaders don't yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to

While the concept of a self-educated citizenry circumventing the traditional system of higher education may have sounded far-fetched a decade ago, the fact that the likes of Spilde gave it more than lip service marks something of a shift. Indeed, there was more than a subtle suggestion across hours of sessions Monday that colleges are in for a new world, like it or not, where they may not be the winners.