1) Most schools employ outmoded models of learning
We learn and teach in institutions that were designed to train citizens for the Industrial Age. From compulsory public schooling for K-12, to the birth of the research university, virtually all of the apparatus of “school” was designed to retrain farmers and artisans to the Industrial mode of work—division of labor, separation of work into discrete specialized tasks, the divorce of production from consumption, and the careful creation of “the consumer” (through advertising, media, and education). Prestige came through credentials, with some warranting more prestige (and remuneration) than others, and the whole process of education, from pre-school onward, trained toward the 1% who would thrive in the most elite fields in the most elite institutions.
–Cathy N. Davidson, “Digital Literacy: An Agenda for the 21st Century” (2012)
2) Pedagogy hasn’t evolved much in 1000 years
If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they’d be dead. If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do.
–Howard Rheingold in The Atlantic, September 2, 2011
3) Students take writing for peers more seriously than writing for teachers
Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University’s Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
–Cathy N. Davidson, “Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age,” August 26, 2011
4) Term papers aren’t the only way to showcase student scholarship
Andrea Lunsford’s writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed over the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first few weeks. Once that’s done, they use the ideas in it to build blogs, Web sites, and PowerPoint and audio and oral presentations. The students often find their ideas much more crystallized after expressing them with new media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays. Blogs, a platform that seems to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, can also be well crafted and meticulously researched. Some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic.
–Matt Richtel, “Blogs vs. Term Papers,” New York Times, January 20, 2012
5) Teaching is only one way to enable learning
What do you think is the purpose of education? Not to teach but to enable learning. That will sometimes entail teaching, but mostly will entail other modes. These other modes are best effected in small groups (either in person or virtual, but ideally small in number). These other modes should probably not be put into practice in a classroom.
–Al Filreis, “Learning, not teaching” (2012)
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