What are the building blocks of a healthy body? What ingredients are required to ensure the building blocks are present and integrated correctly to maximize performance? Top athletes know how to fine tune their bodies for maximum output. They recognize the building blocks needed to assure the necessary ingredients are provided for optimum balance.
The three building blocks on which athletes train are: » More: Three Building Blocks for a Firm Foundation in Education…
I want to extrapolate on last year’s post about Democracy in the Classroom and apply the same principles to the Administration – Teacher/Faculty relationship in today’s educational institution.
The post then and now is based on an intriguing YouTube video from 1945 which I’ve embedded below for convenience. » More: Democracy in the Educational Institution in 1945 … and today!
The Internet was originally designed to be a military communication tool (Arpanet) and transitioned to becoming as well, a storage device or repository for University researchers. As the world wide web evolved for the rest of us, email became the communication choice du jour and the ’90s witnessed a slew of tools and applications for improving our two way communication and archival needs related to the electronic mail phenomenon. Even text messaging on a mobile phone is a development created to more ubiquitously enable and empower this two way conversation need of us social creatures.
Web 2.0 (Social Web) created new platforms for multi-user (beyond two-way) communication that could be both synchronous and asynchronous. Subscribing-to, befriending, and following status updates on platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, Ning Networks, and the like, have allowed for new spaces of communication to emerge. These new spaces resided in a specific place or page where aggregated communiques could be archived.
Twitter is a unique development that allows for the pure mind-surfing thought feeds provided by the status update feature of former platforms. Rather than providing a new space for interactive communication, Twitter provided a portal for calls to action. Whereas the crowd has been gathering in so many “spaces” (Ning, LinkedIn, etc), Twitter is not space-centered but » More: 6 Ways to Use Twitter as a Listening Device…
Just because students may appear “engaged” does not mean genuine learning is taking place. Gaining attention and building capacity for understanding and capability for application, are not the same process.
Certainly it helps in the classroom when students are engaged. However, engagement alone may merely inform. Genuine learning occurs when skill sets and/or real capability is enhanced.
This is why so many educational games are just that; games. They engage and entertain but do they “teach?” Remembering facts is helpful but understanding how to apply facts via extrapolation, is the higher order thinking goal.
Knowing history and understanding history are as different as knowing what certain foods taste like versus understanding how to prepare them and in fact, possessing the skill to do so.
Media fights for attention. Engagement is the goal from every direction. But there is a difference between informing and educating. Informing is a tool that facilitates the reduction of uncertainty. Education increases capability. The value-added increase of capability is achieved by blending practice with feedback that is tied to targeted outcomes.
Too much education is merely informational albeit engaging. Many in education contend rightly that technology as a tool is more engaging than traditional pedagogical practices. However, technology must be used to teach by integrating curriculum, incorporating feedback loops, and result in evaluative outcomes already agreed upon.
The bottom line is, it’s easy to engage. The challenge is to teach. Skilled educators know not only how to engage, but how to “educe” real learning from their students.
Faculty that are equipped with the pedagogical skills will then understand how to apply emerging technologies in a way that supports and streamlines old practices. Educational technologists are needed as liaisons on campuses in order to facilitate this integration.
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