Don't speak. Point!

Kalman's

Wednesday, April 18. 2007

Posted by Yoram Kalman in Online International Academic Education

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Bruno Giussani quotes Ethan Zuckerman in his blog posting about the future of journalism. I already talked about how we are educating better citizen journalists in online classrooms, but Giussani's blog made me contemplate the parallels between what journalism is going through, and what higher education is undergoing, following the emergence of online tools. Online instructors in collabortive classrooms are at the forefront of this new reality, where the teacher (like the reporter or editor) is no longer necessarily the top authority and the only voice, where the teacher has many new roles, and where the teacher talks much less, and "points" (i.e. moderates) much more. This is most apparent in online classrooms, though the tools that are making this shift in what higher education is all about are influencing traditional lecture halls too. As usual, the weaker teachers see this as a threat to "proper" education, and the more confident ones are seeing technology as a tool that allows them to leverage their knowledge and skills, and to become more engaged with the learning process of individual students.

Thanks, Dennis, for, hummm pointing me to Giussani's posting J

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Wow, of course. I saw how this worked in my on-line M.Sc in IT program, but I didn't make the connection until I visited your link.

In a Social Psychology course that I took in my B.A studies, we watched a series of videos where I was struck by the degree to which, in societies that claim to be raising individuals, the teacher is at the center of the class.

This was contrasted with a Japanese kindergarten where the teacher was on the periphery of the class and the students were being taught to be responsible for what happens, with the older students assisting the younger ones. The contrast was amazing.

The differences in teamwork were also striking. In the American classroom, there were many separate play activities and watching two youngsters bathe a rubber doll was instructive -- they were sort of on a team separately and they would have drowned a baby.

This is all anecdotal, yet the sense of something very different in the atmosphere was very strong.

#1 orcmid (Homepage) on 2007-04-22 14:15 (Reply)

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