JSB – Use Web 2.0 to fix education

C|Net has a nice little writeup talking about John Seely Brown’s comments at a recent MIT event. One of the things that he suggests is that we look to the sharing and apprenticeship model rather than the hording/mastery model that we have now to make education more authentic. He also notes that the rise of the amateur (Pro-Am) is something that is going to shake up traditional education. He also suggests “passion based learning” should be included in schools in addition to traditional means of education.

This isn’t anything new really, to those of us in the the field, but it’s something that when said by the right person can affect change (granted, it’s been said for a long time, and things still aren’t really moving). If schools ignore the fact that there are kids with more media skills than their teachers, how are they going to keep those kids engaged? How are they going to be properly assessed? Teachers should not be multi-media uber-masters, but they should at least know the basics of how to put some of the projects that their students are handing in together, otherwise, how are they going to mark them? I remember in high school, my brother’s teachers finally realized that it took as much work, if not more to put together a video as opposed to an essay. That was about 12 years ago now, but looking at some of the students that are leaving the various Ed departments, there are still teachers that don’t know anything about doing anything more than putting together a lesson plan and some idea of what to do create an exam.

I think part of it is the generation gap that we have with those people who are instructing our new teachers – they are teaching what worked in their classrooms yesterday, not what students need tomorrow. This is fine for basics like classroom management (but even that has to adapt), but for content and assessment? I don’t think this is very good for anyone. Many students also think that education is a fall back option and they don’t take it very seriously. And it seems that there are many more of these than there are committed individuals who actually see that teaching is a profession on par with any other, and so central to society that it is a crime that it has been neglected so. Slacking students, combined with aging preservice instructors doesn’t bode well for education to be able to follow JSB’s lead any time soon.

(Edit 12/3/06) Will Richardson over at Weblogg-ed also has a bit of a writeup.


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