Technically speaking
Teaching and learning is going to the cloud. No doubt this has its pros and cons. As an educator I see it as a new challenge. Several of my colleagues teach online courses and i think they'd agree it is more work than it soumds like. For some reason the feeling associated with "online course" has a toned-down, less important, almost second-rate connotation. i chock this up to the lack of best practices in an emerging field because the preparation involved is intense and obvious. I think teachers feel like the 'organic' evolution of a class culture is so different online and has so many forms that are different from their rows and boxes and basically the same stiff i mean stuff they have been doing for years that the cop outs are winning out right now. fortunately the new generation is coming and the trends are a changing, see
32 Trends Affecting Distance Education: An Informed Foundation for Strategic Planning
for a great overview that i think is already obsolete in many ways. but that is the nature of technology, growing and changing exponentially faster than anything else. Hopefully the desk manufacturers union lobbyists will at least adjust, because I think the future of classrooms is not only more digital, its going to require less sitting. I think the classrooms of the future will be more like video games and VR simulators, requiring people to acknowledge that our brains require more than the use of just our ears and eyes to learn. i think as schooling goes to the cloud all the buildings left behind will become playgrounds for technology like Wiis and Playstations...well probably more like their great great great grandchildren operating systems. I look at the air force and NASA and cant help but think we've known this for a long time and just ignored it. Perhaps we the "normal curve" dicated that teaching with the same methods for the "most technical" of professions wasn't economical. Hopefully with exponential growth in technology, education will follow suit with exponential growth in its use to relate learning to real life applications...and for motivation's sake, to fantasy applications as well. Jim Block is ringing in my ear now with the four basic principles for motivating students (i hope he will critique and correct this):1. curiosity: we must stimulate students current interests and push them to use them to explore the stuff they want to know more about. hell, just the idea of identifying things they want to know more about is a good start (and making a habit of doing so is a goal)
2. sense of control: force students to dictate their progress, write test questions and assignments, etc. see the greatest book of all time: FLOW for more info on this, a sense of control is vital for losing oneself in a psychologically optimal experience. which leads to the next:
3. moderate challenge: somewhere in between stuff thats too hard and stuff thats too easy is the right amount of challenge and skill use that leads human brains onto a different wavelength of enjoyment...referred to as flow...where "something unexpected occurs" and we are "stretched beyond ourselves". Just think about that thing you do for 2 hours that feels like 20 minutes and you'll know what im talking about. this chart is from the book;
4. fantasy: providing students opportunities to experience an increase in possibilities with a decrease in consequences and another part of the reward pathway will open up...and perhaps they will like us as much as they like video games (for a minute or so). try out a "if you were the president/chancellor/superhero/god/parent/teacher/etc. type assignment" with the conditions that "there are no wrong answers" and see what happens.
Ethically speaking
I was on a committee that produced the following document a few years back
http://www.policy.ucsb.edu/policies/advisory-docs/social-networking-guide.pdf
and its already almost obsolete. Makes me think that all of the use of social networking for business is really just an excuse for employees to be on facebook at work.
Headachey
Ive grown to be able to predict how long it takes for a headache to develop from working on a backlit screen. As it creeps up now, i look forward to my first-ever dictated blog next week with Dragon dictation technology. Every injury has its lessons, i look forward to the new challenge.
Political side note: tax subsidies for voting is long overdue, the fact that less than 1/3 of our citizenry will actually exercise their right to vote tomorrow (and that its predictable) is almost as sad as the 2/3 of americans with no right to complain about anything
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