The results show that while 72 per cent of respondents used course- management systems such as Blackboard, many did not use any other technology in their academic lives.
What percentage of students will use Blackboard to support their lifelong learning once they’ve graduated?
Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom
Every semester a lot of professors’ lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.
That frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.
“If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, ‘I’ve been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I’m going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,’ you’d be rightly incensed,” he told me recently. “Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, ‘I don’t need to change my teaching,’ as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it—if they’ve ever been prepared to.”
And poor teaching can have serious consequences, he says, when students fall behind or drop out because of sleep-inducing lectures. Colleges have tried several approaches over the years to spur teaching innovation. But among instructors across the nation, holdouts clearly remain.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
JP Rangaswami - Learning by doing, not by listening
I came across this video on J P Rangaswami’s blog Confused of Calcutta on a post about Musing about Learning by doing. Watching the video I was struck by a couple of things that JP raises.
- Learning is more about the questions you ask rather than the ones you can answer.
- Enlightened teachers will be asking students to write wikipedia articles rather than beign sniffy about them referring to it for their homework.
- Learning by doing is not about listening, it’s about sharing and feedback. Feedback is the area that always seem to rate most lowly on the student satisfaction surveys.
