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A blueprint for the future
When Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, sat down with students in a Philadelphia private school to talk about their personal learning preferences, no one delivered the same answer. One student liked research papers, preferring a clear template and an assignment with a defined start and finish. Another loved multimedia projects, relishing the opportunity to think about something in many different ways. Another said their mind worked like the video games they liked to play.
Now imagine, Dede said in an interview at EDUCAUSE 2007 in Seattle, if those three students walked into your classroom. And they came with a group of peers whose learning preferences weren’t even on that same menu.
“If I were designing a learning environment for those students], it would really have to be like an ecology,” Dede said. “It would have to have a lot of different niches in it because from one day to the next, any one particular student may want a different kind of niche. And different types of students might want different kinds of niches… It’s a very different framework from what people typically use in instructional design.
“People in instructional design assume that there’s one best way for people to learn.. I’m beginning in a place that says that assumption is wrong. If it’s one size fits all, some of my students are going to be empowered, some of my students are going to be disenfranchised.”
It’s not just the “one-size-fits-all” framework that might be wrong with classrooms across the country. In October, EDUCAUSE sat down with leaders across the teaching and learning spectrum who shared their classroom complaints and their views of what the ideal learning environment might look like.
“I think tests are just meaningless,” said Susan Metros, deputy CIO and associate vice chancellor at the University of Southern California. “ I was someone that could really memorize well so I did really well in school. But then I would leave and wouldn’t remember a thing. I think the classes I remember are the ones where I learned in context… To this day, my favorite period of art is Impressionism because I learned in context and was able to remember it.”
Linda Baer, senior vice chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, said it’s not just about learning in context, but learning through doing.
“If I was teaching algebra, and I had everybody sitting in a row and I lecture about algebra and I give them problems and they go home and I grade problems and they’re right or their wrong -- that’s one way of teaching algebra. If I took them out to the playground and said, ‘Let’s plan this playground using algebraic formulas,’ then, we find that they will get involved. They will be doing angles and formulas to determine things and they retain it because they applied it.”
Others talked about the types of activities that students should be doing. “One of the things that we do need is to have students in the online environment,” said Ruben Puentedura, a founder and president of educational consulting firm Hippasus. “Aside from the specific possibilities for a given course, it’s a very real factor of the world they’re going to be moving into. They may find themselves working with someone who’s not sitting next to them in the same office or the next cubicle. It might be someone across country or across the world. One of the things that people assume is that the experiences students are getting from places like MySpace, Facebook, etc. are suffice enough. MySpace and Facebook are all very valuable tools in terms of students developing a whole set of social interaction tools. But they are focused in arenas that aren’t necessarily oriented toward the academic or work world.”
As the conversations continued, several key themes floated to the surface. Students shouldn’t be passive participants in their learning, several noted, but active constructors of knowledge, collaborating with their peers and engaging with discipline-specific tools and real data sets. Learning should be “messy,” forcing students to seek help from their peers and outside resources. And the physical space should reflect the course culture, offering moveable furniture to create collaborative spaces and using lighting and spaces to create different zones for reflection and engagement.
The Next Step: A community collaboration
With their ideas as a guide, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is embarking on a collaborative project to create a blueprint for the “classroom” of the future -- realizing, of course, that it may not be a classroom at all.
With wikis as our workplace, we’re asking the EDUCAUSE community to share their ideas and expertise to help us, as a community, a vision of what the ideal learning environment might look like. Comments will be used to construct simulated course environments, starting with easy-to-implement solutions for rethinking the traditional lecture format and scaling to “blue sky” initiatives that include global collaboration and opportunities to “learn by doing.” We hope you’ll also take this opportunity to share the unique and innovative ways that your campus is already transforming learning in the classroom, on campus, and in virtual worlds.
We’ve created three wikis to start the conversation. The first, “Lecture 2.0,” is a space to rethink the traditional lecture course. The second, “Learning for Life 2.0” challenges us to think of the ways that IT and innovative pedagogy might support collaborative, experiential learning that extends outside the walls of campus and empowers learning styles across the spectrum. In the final wiki, our “Innovation Playground,” we hope you’ll contribute any ideas that might fall outside these descriptions. It’s a place to toss out ideas that might extend beyond our current technological capabilities. Or just a place to wonder “what might be.” On each page, we hope you’ll include information about projects on your campus and links to readings or Web sites that might help further the debate.
Join the conversationTo enter each space, simply click on the links below:
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