Educational Origami

Ian sent me an interesting article from the Edge – http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/tapscott09/tapscott09_index.html

The article is “The impending demise of University“. The article is written by Don Tapscott

Here is a quote from the article

“The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril. ”

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to visit the University of Queensland and meet Professor Philip Long (of horizon project, MIT and UQ fame). The visit was a pleasure, as Prof Long and his staff showed us many of the innovative learning spaces that the University of Queensland boasts.

Some universities have taken heed of the warning that Don Tapscott eludes to in this article. UQ is one of them. Many of the spaces we visited were exciting and innovative. The spaces facilitated communication and collaboration. However, I suspect many of the Universities are not adopting this mode of education.

In a world of High speed, ubiquitous internet access; in a world where there are now exabytes of information produced annually; where your phone can be your laptop, your television and a games machine, there are still lecturers (and sadly teachers in schools) who stand at front of the room and spout forth. Many of these students are adapted to digital media. We know that Nueroplasticity has shown that constant exposure to multimedia and technology causes our brains to adapt. Our students at schools and many of the students at the Universities are adapted to technology, to coin Marc Prensky’s phrase “digital natives”.

As Don Tapscott notes the pedagogy used in education must change to suit the students and their learning needs.

Here is another quotation from the article

“There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.”

For many of the lecturers (and also for many of the teachers) the students we were taught to teach no longer exist. Well done to the Universities (and schools) that are changing, to those resisting the change…

Your audience is changing, if you want to keep your audience you must change to suit them.