(iverson's) currentbuzz

Our students are already appropriating information from the Web and turning it into new knowledge. They are already learning from each other and participating in the learning of their peers. They already connect, create, collaborate, and circulate information through new media. The goal for us, as educators, is to find new ways to harness and leverage their interests and social competencies to establish a participatory learning environment. Teachers and administrators must learn to leverage this new learning paradigm to engage our students, and we encourage you to use the Learning Library and see if it works for your context.

via Confessions of an Aca/Fan: What Is Learning in a Participatory Culture? (Part Two).

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If you teach, or you are student, or staff at a school of any kind, this is the short and sweet summary that is signaling the big and disruptive changes that face education now. As assessment co-ordinator, I’m going to make this required reading for my colleagues. Kids, parents, if you are paying for education today, you ought to be thinking about these questions and demanding changes. Why pay big money for an education suited to the last century?

On the one hand, faculty members are still most often expected to publish as they always have, to teach in a classroom not designed, without retrofitting, for digital technologies, to teach students who really do want to be told what to think, to do well on faculty evaluation surveys that value traditional ways of teaching, and retain all the trappings of their quasi-religious profession.

Fundamental change is inevitable because cultural knowledge creation and dissemination has changed. None of us works in the same ways as 20 years ago, so why do we teach the same? The changes higher education needs to make require re-engineering on a scope unimaginable to most administrators.

via Horns of the Dilemma for Faculty — Campus Technology.

I actually did not write this piece, but if you have worked with me since the 1990s, you have heard me ask these very questions:

• - Since the interaction between student and teacher is paramount, and not a particular geographic location, why is a classroom necessary?
• - If it is necessary that the instructor make some logistical arrangements and a room is therefore necessary, why must the learning group then always meet in the room?
• - If the class is very large and lecture is the only option, why meet in a large room where many of the students are more than 50 feet from the instructor? Why not use an online conferencing system to bring the instructor closer to each student and to enable more interaction, easier display, more variety, and where questions can be sent via chat?
• - Why is the semester length fifteen weeks? Students in writing classes, for example, begin to really improve in week 20 or so. Why not design courses of learning based on how long it takes students to attain the learning goals? For some goals, 10 weeks may be enough, for others 35 weeks may be necessary. Isn’t it time to put learning needs at the center rather than business efficiency? Management software can handle many more variations than were possible before, so let’s take advantage of that new capability.

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This is a good idea. Not even ahead of its time. This is what the schools should have done several years ago. Better late, than never.

Jeff Jarvis in buzzmachine says, “At CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism we just told the students that they no longer need to commit to a media track – print, broadcast, or interactive. We believe this is the next step in convergence. All media become one.”

via What’s a medium? « BuzzMachine.

From Amy Gahran’s contentious.com blog:

On Monday, Mar. 23, 1 pm EDT, the Poynter Institute will host a live online chat: What Do College Journalism Students Need to Learn? It was spurred by a recent (and excellent) post by my Tidbits colleague Maurreen Skowran, Reimagining J-School Programs in Midst of Changing News Industry, which attracted some intriguing comments.

via What do journalism students really need today? Poynter event Monday — contentious.com.

Following on Amy’s idea of looking back on her blog for a year to see what she had written about Journalism Education, I decided to do the same for currentbuzz.org.

• Journalism Education and Media Literacy
• Jeff Jarvis’s online presentation on The Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism
• Programming as Journalism, and something we need to teach our students
• Twitter Journalism 2008 with notes for students
• The Passing of a Dream: Dreamweaver is so Web 1.0
• Rob Curley asks J Teachers “Why are your student so dang close-minded?“

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• The State of the News Media 2009 (michsineath.com)

So I do not think it is such a terrible thing that your journalism students are entering an uncertain world. It’s the kind of world that is ripe for enterprising journalists. It is the kind of world that needs to be reported on and explained.

Leave it to your students to create new modes for the buying and selling of this information. Their generation will do this. I feel confident about that.

Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important. Then you will have done your job and given them the gift of a lifetime.

via Why teach journalism if newspapers are dying? a Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis | Salon Life.

I will repeat some of this as I get ready to come back to teaching after sabbatical….

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