Final draft of course design (for now)

Things are hoppin' I'm excited about the design of the new course, and about some recent related re-discoveries. Here's the text of an email I sent out to colleagues:

A friend sent me a link (included below) to a video of a TED presentation by Sugata Mitra. I think this video poses --in easy-to-grasp, concrete terms-- a critical question about the scale or type of change that new-media occasions for education. I sometimes wonder (okay I often wonder :) whether or not we are for the most part responding out-of-scale (e.g., making minor adjustments when the changes we are responding to are major). How would we be thinking about curriculum reform, classroom space, the new library, where we'd like to be in ten years, and so forth if we took what Mitra is doing and applied it to our context? http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html I would love to have a conversation on our campus community about this, and possibly even frame a bit of it as research. I'm thinking I may submit something to the ARTStem project-grant program to see if we could get some funding for it. Anyone else interested in exploring this?


Several years ago I co-wrote a piece about an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional pedagogical experiment I engaged in. The piece is called University to Diversity: The Story of 2 Live Class. In it I state the same conclusion that Mitra arrives at in the linked-to piece above; namely, learning is an emergent phenomenon resulting from self-organizing systems. If systems are damped and disturbed (in other words not allowed to self-organize) then teachers (I could be provocative and say dictators :) have to step in. In many ways teachers as actors create a need for themselves/ourselves by impeding the self-organizational capacities humans in interaction have.

The same colleague that pointed me to the Mitra TED talk, put it this way:

I don't think the important variable is "how many computers" but rather
"how can we get kids engaged with other kids over an interesting
learning task." In the clip he had fewer computers than children, but
the key was that he gave them an interesting task, the technology to
accomplish that task, allowed/encouraged them to talk with each other
and he got out of the way. We tell kids to sit down and don't talk, then
we precede to tell them a bunch of stuff we think they should know in a
form that all but makes it unknowable to them while we punish them if
they talk with each other. And we call this "education."

You have a lot if not all his ideas in practice in your classroom. You
don't have 25 students sitting quietly in rows all facing you and
writing down what you say that might be on the quiz. You have them
sitting in small groups and facing at different angles. I guess you must
have turned the podium into kindling or maybe some art project by now,
but it is not in front of the room. You allow and expect the students to
talk during class. Success comes not from the number of computers but,
as always, from the pedagogy employed.

It was interesting for me to see his success and to remember that we
should trust the kids to learn. The only real question is "Can students
learn when they are being taught?" As long as they are not taught, I am
sure they learn well.