49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A reflection on the effect of new technologies on higher learning, January 11, 2010
This review is from: The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) (Kindle Edition)
The "Digital Age" that we live in has been the subject of many (too many?) books, articles, essays and blogs in recent times. Everyone who has not lived in a cave in the last few years realizes that the pace of technological advancement is increasing, and many of the traditional forms of communicating, working and shopping are continuously being redefined. Despite all of this, the role and the form of higher education have hardly changed, aside from PowerPoint presentations replacing most writing-on-a-blackboard styled ones. On the other hand, it is unclear whether any of these new technologies do in fact aid the learning process. As someone who has implemented many of these trends in college classes that I had taught, I have to admit that the jury is still out on the actual impact that the new digital technologies can have on students.
This short book raises many interesting points and it provides references to several novel learning and publishing tools that I will be happy to try out. The book itself was written using some of those tools in a very collaborative process. It provides a prescription for implementing many of these tools and techniques in academia. However, it is not clear to me what exactly would the implementation of those tools and teaching techniques accomplish. In fact, there is very little hard analysis in this book that one can find in most social-science publications. Overall, this book provides more starting points for further consideration than actionable ideas for further development of higher education. It is a worthwhile read if one doesn't expect too much.
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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not Supported By Scrutiny, August 12, 2010
This review is from: The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) (Kindle Edition)
Davidson and Goldberg state that changes in communications technology in recent decades demand concommitant changes in how schools, especially colleges and universities, educate our young. I agree. But our authors take that premise and run with it in some directions which I don't believe are supported by the evidence.
Our authors insist that conventional education, with its hierarchical social groupings and insistence on individual work, will prove completely unsustainable in coming years. I wonder if they have read their history seriously enough. Their warnings repeat, nearly verbatim, statements made when moveable type, film, and television challenged former paradigms of learning. A time traveler from 1975 might be astounded to see that videotape hasn't rendered teachers obsolete.
They go on to extol "virtual" educational models which take place without "the contiguity of time and place." Which sounds good, but my own experiments with structural flexibility teach me that, if I don't require my students to be in a room at a certain time, more than half of them will never do the reading or write their assignments more than a day in advance. I doubt even Goldberg and Davidson believe that classes without classrooms will ever be more than icing on the cake for advanced students. They concede early on that "most virtual institutions are, in fact, supported by a host of real institutions and real individuals."
Though some students love learning enough to be self-motivated, they are not the majority. Many, if not most, regard classes, even within their majors, as a nuisance. I would love it if my students had enough ambition to undertake the kind of team tasks Davidson and Goldberg describe, but anybody who has taught more than one or two semesters knows that if you get three students per class who don't need to be prodded, you are one lucky cuss.
I found one comment our authors quoted to be all too telling. A respondent to an early draft of this paper insisted that "open-ended assignments provide the opportunity for creative, research-based learning." This is true, for those willing to embrace such opportunity. But this respondent sought out and answered back to a scholarly paper; I might get two students per semester with that level of ambition.
I would absolutely love to assign more open-ended research projects. I would love to let my students take ownership of the learning process. But I have learned the hard way that they usually will not. I had two students drop my class this past semester because, even with five days' warning, they considered a ten-question reading quiz on a twenty-page chapter too onerous.
Likewise, these authors repeat the claim, which I keep seeing lately, that Pokemon teaches youth important matematical and reasoning skills. I don't doubt this. But my colleagues in the Math Department tell me that only a handful make the leap that allows them to apply Pokemon-based math skills to diverse real world applications. Most still rely on the institutional classroom to make that connection for them. Regular students still need the skills and structure only a conventional four-wall classroom can provide.
Consider Wikipedia, which the authors extol, claiming that professors disparage the site without merit. Yes, its many user/editors keep it up-to-date and Open-Source. Yes, the collaborative model ferrets out innacuracies. But even laying aside the limits of a tertiary source, its programming model leaves it vulnerable to pranks and hacks by idiots. Even that wouldn't be so bad if students utilized their discretion to screen out obvious bunk, but they don't. Too many students receive content uncritically, and I get papers riddled with inaccuracies.
Institutional schooling has survived past changes in the media and cultural landscape because it works. Sure, it will have to adapt to the influence of the new technology, just as it has before. But as long as most youth need mature guidance to take on the skills and responsibilities of adulthood, there will be a place for a classroom with a clear leader judging progress. Davidson and Goldberg claim the old models have become obsolete, but that just doesn't bear up to scrutiny.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Will formal education adapt and evolve to a new reality? Should it?, June 28, 2010
This review is from: The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) (Kindle Edition)
This kindle "book" is sort of a preview of a much larger work the authors are currently writing. In reality, this should be read like a very long magazine article exploring how the digital age may affect and is affecting higher education in particular and to a lesser extent elementary and secondary education.
The "book" begins and ends, to its disadvantage, with a lot of jargon-filled commentary such as: "We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistmogological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution." (loc 50) Yes, yes, yes. This is college writing at its classic wordiness.
Fortunately, once we get into the heart of the paper it gets quite interesting and more reader friendly. There are some big, important questions being asked here, such as, "Why go to college to get information when it can be found in 3 seconds on the internet?" and "Is the purpose of college really to learn skills under the tutelage of acknowledged experts?" (If that is so, why was my smallest class at Indiana University 8 people and the average was around 40?)
The authors seem to be leaning away from the traditional expert model of the university and embracing the collaborative model of the Internet. They use the model of Wikipedia, which is the poster child for what is right and wrong about the internet. Anyone can edit it, which means anyone with knowledge can add to it, but vandals can also damage the site or ignorant people can include their "facts" as well. One of my high school students added his own name to the site for the band Korn as a "spoon player". It stayed up there for months.
But, this model has strengths as well. As a group, we certainly know more than we do individually. The trick is using the experts to weed out the inaccurate information. The authors are especially interested in global participation - they are imagining projects with participants from all over the world, which is easily possible right now with sites plenty of online sites, not just public ones like Wikipedia. What they don't have is an answer as to how to connect the experts with the students all over the world and make sure that the "facts" that are being learned are actually facts.
The meat of this paper is quite interesting and would make for a great classroom discussion. What will education in the future look like? What will college mean in the future - will it mean that an area of knowledge has been mastered or will it mean that the holder of the degree has demonstrated the ability to work towards an abstract goal for an extended period of time? I think the latter has been reality for a while now and the diffusion of information technology will only make it more so.
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