Hacking Teaching - Hacking the academy - 0 views
www.digitalculture.org/...hacking-teaching
education highered learning academia digitalgeneration internet technology culture future research
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physical schools and structured curricula and degree-seeking programs form a system that makes enormous demands upon you but which is fundamentally out of sync with the fact that your identity, development, education, and success will be intimately intertwined with the digital domain.
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This alternative to college credentials is as huge as the Stay Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters and he’s towering over the skyline right where town meets gown: online identity.
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Who you are and what you’ve done will in the very near future be so well documented by your online activities that a resume will be redundant.
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Cyberspace is already more real to you than the physical space of your college campus—it is becoming so for your future employers.
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Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.
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But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions.
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Why shouldn’t every university—every school—copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability?
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As we increAsingly move towArd An environment of instAnt And infinite informAtion, it becomes less importAnt for students to know, memorize, or recAll informAtion, And more importAnt for them to be Able to find, sort, AnAlyze, shAre, discuss, critique, And creAte informAtion.
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Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0″ buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.
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Radical experiments in teaching carry no guarantees and even fewer rewards in most tenure and promotion systems, even if they are successful.
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Nothing is easier to assess than information recall on multiple-choice exams, and the concise and “objective” numbers satisfy committee members busy with their own teaching and research.
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Wikipedia has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information environment allows people to work together in new ways to create information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts by almost any measure.
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When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension.
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How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
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willingness to experiment with a variety of online tools, and then to think critically and strategically about a project and to identify those tools that would be most useful to that project.
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There certainly needs to be some basic exposure and technical support, but part of the goal is to get students to figure out how to figure out how a new tool (system, software, historical process) works on their own.
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it’s good for college classes to shake students (and faculty) out of their comfort zone. Real learning happens when you’re trying to figure out the controls, not when you’re on autopilot.
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be completely transparent with students regarding my use of technology. I provide links to my blog, my Twitter account, my Flickr account, my YouTube and Vimeo usernames, my Facebook page, and my instant messenger screennames.
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I think that I use technology and social media responsibly (though I could work on the efficiency part). Setting an example that students can follow is important if we want those students to be more critical about their use of technology.