As a United States citizen, it is well known that college tuition is downright unaffordable for the majority of the population. I was flipping through a college information booklet the other day and on average tuition to a standard (not a top) university was approximately 35-40 thousand dollars A YEAR. Even with financial aid and scholarships, I would imagine many graduates are facing between 50-100 thousand dollars in student loans to begin paying back. Not only that, but a college undergraduate degree definitely does not guarantee you anything anymore. There isn’t necessarily a job awaiting you simply because you have that certificate. I know that post-secondary education altogether is another issue, but if students after high school AND even after college aren’t prepared for the changes in the world today, what are we doing wrong as educators?
So what are these changes in the world today? This is of course a complex question, and one that cannot be answered simply. As an educator, one of the predominant shifts I have noticed over the course of my lifetime is the influx of information, especially the ability to access information by way of new technology. I would not hesitate to say that learning itself has changed due to the rise in technology today. The problem is that our educational constructs have not changed accordingly to incorporate this notion. Instead of speculating why this hasn’t happened, which I believe in some regards isn’t entirely beneficial, I believe that we should rather look forward and determine what we can do to change this.
It is apparent that knowledge and access to information is growing exponentially. According to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD), “the amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years, and is now doubling every 18 months.” This is huge! The ASTD continues to explain that “to combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.” This is exactly what schools should be doing. It is no longer practical to focus on teaching merely content to students. Anyone with access to the internet can find answers to content questions. Instead, educators should be concentrating on how best to teach students to search for and find information, and then decipher what information is quality information. I believe that George Siemens said it best in his article on Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age with when explaining significant trends in learning. He stated that “know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where.” I would take this a step further and add “know-why this” or better stated, “why know this?” The world is continually changing, and in turbulent times students who understand the significance of information and can effectively place this information into a global context, will be better prepared.
Throughout my journey in the COETAIL class, I have been exposed to a variety of new ideas, classroom tech tools, as well as strategies. I guess what I have started to synthesize is that maybe as educators, we should simulate the challenges of the “real world” to that of the classroom. Students should become more and more responsible for their own learning and become more adept at independently finding and applying information. I also like the notion that it should be challenging. That means that students shouldn’t always succeed at a task given. Possibly the learning process could be of more importance that the actual end product. This in itself is a more modern approach to education today. Another modern approach to education is the idea of connectivism. This learning theory is best described by George Siemens as:
“Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements- not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.”
I believe that this last bit is incredibly relevant to today. If information is changing at such a rapid rate, and access to information is a non-issue, then the ability to find specialized information is what is significant. If individuals are able to find pertinent, specialized information best through their connections (which by the way may not necessarily be a teacher), then the ability to best connect in a digital age is what should be taught. Social networking is everywhere. 250 million people use Facebook. 27 million people in the US alone use Twitter. Networking for employment has also increased. 34 million people visit LinkedIn. Again, the world is increasingly becoming more and more connected, and at an exponential rate. The way we prepare students for these continual changes should reflect the world outside of the classroom. It is no wonder that teachers all over the world are becoming more and more connected themselves (through blogging, Tweets, professional learning networks online), but also within the classroom.
My husband, who is studying international development has been reading the book, The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. He is thoroughly enjoying it, but knowing that I am part of this COETAIl course, he shared with me an entry that describes in detail what some teachers are doing through the Flat Classroom Project. Basically it describes two teachers, one at an international school in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the other at a school in Georgia, USA who decided to show what happens when the world is flat and collaboration can take place thousands of miles apart. Students from these schools were given the task to create a Wiki page together, focusing on one of the flatteners from the World is Flat book. After 6 weeks and usage from a plethera of tech tools (RSS feeds, VoIP, Skype, IM chat, MySpace, Evoca, YouTube, Google Video, Dropload, and others) it was completed, and apparently it went pretty well. After reflection from the teachers involved (Julie Lindsay and Vickie Davis), here are some of the thoughts they wanted to share:
“This project also created friendships across the world and promoted a cultural understanding that is needed in our world today. We may be from opposite sides of the world, but our students became one class tethered by invisible strings and bytes.”
” Students are hungering for meaningful connections with one another…This ability to connect has largely been ignored and blocked by many in the educational community who would rather maintain an entrenched style of a classroom that has been around for over a hundred of years.”
According to these teachers on the forefront of constructing a new age of teaching, a more meaningful age, students are asking for these connections. So, let’s give it to them. Let’s provide them with the tech skills, the social skills, the collaborative skills along with the same ole’ content. The world is flat, and so should the classroom. This is in part what Connectivism is all about. As Lindsay and Davis said it best about what is taking place in the world, but always in the classrooms, “We’ve connected the technology; now it’s time to connect the people.”