[youtube]dGCJ46vyR9o[/youtube] An intro anthro class did an online project and this is the result. http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
I don't know what I'm supposed to take from that. If a kid attends a lecture, only to spend the whole time on Facebook, how is that materially different from me doodling in my notebook or reading a magazine during class?
I think it means to suggest that students be given less information to digest and more cooperative tasks pertaining to real-life applications of basic knowledge. And, I think the "blackboard" statement means to urge teachers to be more involved and dynamic with their lessons [i.e. - move]. I know that I have come to hate powerpoint presentations. But, I don't know.
I haven't quite figured out how I feel about it myself. I mean part of me wants to say "get the ******** over yourselves, and stop sitting on your asses waiting to be entertained". It's not like learning hasn't always required a little elbow grease. I will say that I think being on Facebook is more distracting that doodling (which I find helps me pay attention) and even reading a magazine, as it carries some of the urgency of a real social interaction. Kind of like how talking on a cell phone is more distracting than listening to the radio, which is why cell phones cause car wrecks and radios don't. I also think our nervous systems are trainable and the digital age has established a new, hardwired set of expectations. But that's all pure speculation on my part.
People said similar things about the television age, but we children of the cable generation managed to sit through boring lectures and learn a few things all the same. It is interesting that the video began with a quotation from Marshall McLuhan. I've always felt pretty iffy about McLuhan's work, but I do wonder what he would have to say about today's digital communications technologies. But I have to say that, in my case, doodling never helped me concentrate. It always causes my mind to drift, and I have great trouble processing information from two different sources at once. So if I start to draw, I become so focused on that activity, that I don't even hear or comprehend what a speaker is saying. Yet if I have a pen or pencil and sheet of paper in front of me, it's almost inevitable that I will start drawing. So although I realize this is somewhat unusual, for me, having school supplies in front of me can be as distracting as having access to Facebook.
From one of the blogs I read http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2007/10/visions_of_students_today.html
How can you say that something you learn is "relevant to your life" ? How can you measure that ? [Siggh, social sciences specialists... ] Reading poetry isn't relevant to my life. Learning history of the middle-age isn't relevant to my life. Walking in the countryside alongside with Marcel Proust, somewhere near Combray, isn't relevant to my life. Listen to the Modern Jazz Quartet (give me John Lewis or give me death) isn't relevant to my life. Lascaux paintings aren't relevant to my life. Those incredibly beautiful landscapes by Paul Cezanne aren't relevant to my life. Buster Keaton isn't either. The Madeleine à la veilleuse, by Georges de la Tour (*) isn't relevant to my life. None of these things are relevant to my life... and yet, without them, my life would be irrelevant. How would you put this in your statistics, dear colleagues in social sciences ? (*) the real Madeleine, at the Louvres, not the ones that are in American museums.
I can dig it. I especially liked... But she then follows that sign with another saying “only 26% {of the assigned readings} are relevant to my life.” To which I would want to respond, so what? Is a university there to teach only classes relevant to the lives of late teens, or there to broaden the knowledge and understanding of those teens by trying to educate them?
I think the video is interesting as a look at the perspective of the student--irrespective of the truth of comments like the 26% statement, it is interesting to see that the students think that only 26% is relevant, or that they "need to multitask," a statment that relies on the assumption that they need to spend two hours on their phone.
Oi! -------------------------------------- Just by coincidence, I was just listening to the Dean of the local Med School talking about pedagogy and how it's changing. There students may still attend the lectures, but these are optional. The alternative is viewing the lecture on iPod, which many do at 1.5x or 2x normal speed, taking time slow down and/or review stuff they have trouble with. Says he, the era of "the Sage on the Stage" is fading, giving way to one in which transmission of information is one thing and teaching is another, and it's embodied increasingly more direct and personalized mentoring.
The truth in this statement overrides anything in the video. You don't need to sit in a classroom to get information, but it seems that classrooms feed content and test for retention. I don't think that is the most efficient way to teach/learn. I would _hope_ that is what the video wants to address. Lectures versus learning opportunities. I'm still taking undergraduate, 400-level, English classes where the teacher lectures on one strain of thought. And, if any of the discussion strays from that planned tract, he is completely unprepared to address it. He, immediately ends discussion and reverts back to his "planned thesis". There's a time and place for sticking to content, but when the department complains incessantly about students who can't form their own arguments..... hmmmm.
Great. just imagine you're on the table, in the middle of an open-heart surgery operation. Suddenly, something unexpected happens. Here, the surgeon will say something like : "oh, dang, that thing was in the part I fast-forwarded through". Killed by I-pod. Game over. No savegame in the real world.
There's a difference between graduate medicine and undergraduate anthropology classes. Plus, you have to do an medical internship before you get to "lead" all those fancy operations. Again, highlighting the difference between memorizing information and practical application. Without practical application, the memorized facts mean nothing.
To follow up on Twenty26Six's response, I want to make clear that the med school in question is a) not depriving those students who prefer to attend lectures from doing so. They still have that option. b) the methods they use are designed increase the amount of small group and even one-on-one teaching time. c) they are moving to an assessment system that focuses on mastery of material and practice and d) the school maintains a 100 percent passing rate/first time tested on the national licensing examinations. So even though I tend to fall closer to the luddite end of the spectrum on these issues (I genuinely believe the face to face human interaction tends to be the best way to teach almost anything, simply because of the mulitplex ways we convey information), I was pretty impressed. The intent was to use technology to humanize education as much as possible, as paradoxical as that might sound.
Call me "Doctor Blimp", but I think books are synonymous of civilisation. Long studies, countless hours alone in front of your desk, lists of important facts learned by heart and in the right order, long lectures during which you silently and religiously listen to the teacher... all that kind of things are necessary. Whatever you do, you need linear thinking, you need method, you need an ability to focus on a single issue more than the 30 seconds the TV and internet provide you with. You can't reduce education to a funny talk with good old friends. You can't reduce it to some sort of hypnotic flick, flashing on the screen like the rap clips on MTV. You need time. You need solitude. You need to be a monk and not a disc jockey. Hobbes, Pascal or Descartes. Not Jay Leno. Darwin spent most of his life sorting earthworms and barnacles. If, instead, he had spent these years connected on I-pod, having nice talks with friends, fast-forwarding "uninteresting" stuff, "irrelevant to his life", his theory would not be here. I know, I know, I know. When I was a teenager, everybody used to think the professor Keating was cool. I was the only one in the classroom -- no, the only one in the whole school, and probably the whole city -- to think he was a self-centered, irresponsible moron. To fire him was the happy end of the movie.
That's intrinsically motivated study. On your own time. No one is suggesting you "take that away". People [like Darwin] will do that regardless, if they really want to. This isn't to coddle the uninitiated. It's to streamline the education for the initiated.
The last paragraph is quite the apparent non-sequitur. Do you have an argument to link it with the body of your post?
If you catch the reference he's making to the movie Dead Poets Society, it's pretty clear. Pierre-Henri's not using transitions, and he's not building an argument the way one would in Freshman comp, but the last paragraph continues the theme of all the other paragraphs, namely, education isn't entertainment. Also, Demosthenes, I thought the movie was pretty lame, too. I think it would've been better if Keating didn't quote the worst Walt Whitman poem in the Collected Poems for one thing.
The problem, Wankler, is that there is no indication from that last paragraph [nor the movie he references] as to how it relates to the notion of "education as entertainment". If you wish for the last paragraph to continue the theme, it has to actually, ya know, actually, like, ya know, continue the theme. Some evidence within, or analysis of, the film is needed to back up the most unobvious claim that it deserved a place in a post which lists out examples of the theme. Just because a post is not constructed as an argument [and, by the way, what sort of intellectual pathology is it that would deride posts which do make an argument as "freshman english"?], but is content with stringing out little evidentiary beads...."red" , "red", "red", "red",... does not mean that no justification is needed when all of a sudden "blue" pops up.
There's nothing "blue" about it. He did analyze the film. He called Keating "a self-centered, irresponsible moron." He added, "To fire him was the happy end of the movie." The concept that Keating, as portrayed in the movie, represents "education as entertainment" is self-evident. The relationship to the "theme" of Pierre's post is thus not unobvious at all.
I can't believe I'm the one stuck making this argument, but what the hell. I am the last person--the very last person--to suck up to the technological imperative. However, the blanket assertion that the merest application of a technology like recorded lectures is automatically inferior to previous teaching styles is not supported by the evidence and it's equation with "education as entertainment" is at best thoughtlessly doctrinaire. What I don't see is the connection Pierre makes between the statement regarding education at the med school and "education as entertainment". There is no indication in the statement I cited that education as he values it is being given short shrift in any way, shape, or form. There isn't even any indication in the statement I cited that books have been eliminated from the pedagogical approach used by that school. And, for that matter, let's examine just briefly the assertion books are the best way to teach the sorts of subjects and skills that are the responsibility of medical schools. What sort of books? Text books? We aren't being told that text books are the purest refinement of the scholarly endeavor, are we? All the statement suggests is that one suboptimal (speaking as someone who has lectured in front of 550 students) mode of teaching is being supplemented by an alternative. The mass lecture is more a product of market forces than it is a thoughtful creation of expert teachers. Students now have a different way of viewing the lecture. Many, but not all, students find it useful and those that don't can still attend the lecture. They are all still required to study written texts. They are all still required to attain mastery of the subject matter. And they are, praise Poku the Turtle, required to put the knowledge into practice at an earlier stage than ever. Because why? Because it's demonstrably more effective, that's why. Entertainment, at least in the sense Henri is suggesting, has ********-all to do with it.