The Shifts 01 Aug 2007 07:34 pm
OMG: Universities are Change…Change…Changing???
George Siemens pointed to this article at News.com titled Web 2.0: Big app on campus. Some of the highlights:
“That interaction between student and professor is going to become more prominent where you have already read about or watched the lecture online. The days of the large university with a 300-person lecture hall are over,” said Schooley. “Universities will be built very differently, with the concentration on workshop life.”
And:
“Every term I would get someone coming up and saying ‘Dr. Hartman, here’s the paper from the five of us, but I did most of the work.’ Short of rolling out the Spanish Inquisition, there’s not much you can do about it at that point,” said Hartman. “With wikis, I can see who pulled the load and who didn’t do anything.”
And:
Universities are not just limiting tools to professors and classrooms. Students are given server space to develop Web sites, RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, videos, discussion boards and e-mail groups for clubs, groups and political campaigns.
Dang. Does this mean we have to start preparing our high school kids for that?
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That sounds great! My concern is all about execution. I recently graduated from the Univ of Texas at Austin. I recall having tons of tools available for teachers and students. UT was usually pretty good at it, but many teachers are just stuck in their old ways.
Getting Web 2.0 technology is great and is the first step by making teachers change and incorporate is another.
Anyway, the article is a great sign that progress is being made :).
[...] The spectacular Will Richardson has this post on technology changes happening at colleges. Colleges are moving from 300 person lecture halls to wikis, RSS, all the favorites. He ends with this quote, which I think will come back to haunt the High School teachers of the US sooner, rather than later. Dang. Does this mean we have to start preparing our high school kids for that? [...]
I just took an online course with a very traditional online industrial age professor and I so wish I had the web2.0 challenges mentioned here. I think I would have been able to do such a better job.
This begs the question, exactly which tools need we implement and facilitate at the k12 level in preparation for the work world and/or the college/university world. familiarity with which tools is not essential at the k12 level?
Interesting set of examples slapped with a “Web 2.0″ label - email to new students? Blackboard? iTunesU? Camtasia? Posting videos on a server (and yanking them away at the end of a semester)? Second Life? That’s “read/write” web?
Then again its wrong to focus on the “tools” which will continue to be in flux, tossed, beta, turned over. It’s the processes of learning, of operating in a collaborative space, of communication of evaluating information, of content creation that matter.
It’s not the tools that matter, it’s the craft.
Wow Will, I am begin to understand your belief that we are teaching the wrong skill set in our school. If the colleges are focusing on these collaborative networks, we as secondary educators need to prepare them.
[...] These are just some of the comments and questions I have run into again and again as I promote more use of technology in the curriculum. That’s why I was intrigued by Will’s post last week on web 2.0 making it’s way into colleges. I often wonder how much current high school students will use these new technologies in their classrooms at college. My impression is that certain college professors are embracing these technologies but, like the k-12 arena, it’s hit or miss. [...]
When talking to high school educators I think this could be a powerful article for them to ponder. I keep getting the statement “We are preparing them for college, we should teach them like they going to college.” I can now respond yes we should, because college is not what it used to be and here is the proof of the change that is occurring. Getting E-12 teachers out of their comfortable ways is going to be a very difficult task and this post/article is another tool for us to use.