Teaching Our Way to a New Way of Thinking

1. Teaching Our Way to a New Way of Thinking Thom McCain

3. Overview • Intro and background • The Vision Thing • Lessons Learned in the trenches • Living in the Information Age • Designing Usable Information Resources on the Web • Internships • Policy making/lobbying • Research Center Partnerships • Politics of University change

4. What’s the end in mind? • Transform the context for student learning • Provide “authentic experiences” for learning with technology • Encourage and model collaborative work • Combine skill training with problem solving • Relax and fuel the chaos • Require public student performance of learning • Develop credible assessment and evaluation

5. Constructivist Principles • Student exploration vs. Faculty direction • Interactive vs. Didactic lessons • Extended blocks of learning vs. Short blocks of time • Multidisciplinary subjects vs. Single subjects • Authentic Tasks vs. Universal issues • Heterogeneous groupings vs. Ability groupings • Performance based assessment vs. Mastery of facts

6. The most important issues are human, not technical • Encourage students’ work to be public -- invite the neighbors in • Be sure the learning drives the technology • Work on your human network • Social needs of the participants • Collaborative work processes

7. Definitions and Perspectives • Education should facilitate student learning. • The critical components of learning include students, teachers, resources and context. • Contexts both constrain and facilitate learning. • Connected learning is the preferred term to describe the dynamics of technology-mediated learning.

8. Contextual Issues of Digital Media and Learning • The interdependence of technology, markets and policies of communication media define their own unique spatial and temporal biases. • Digital media have characteristics that distinguish them from other media resources and connecting devices for students and faculty including: interactivity, immediacy, multi-media and hypertext, organizational culture and values, and digitalization. • The trajectory of change in digital media is on an exponential development curve. • There is tension in transforming higher education between the needs for both efficiency and creativity. • Successful learning in information rich contexts requires successful collaboration. • Ownership of intellectual property is a major challenge for connected learning.

9. Learners, Content, Teaching and Pedagogy • The information society can be characterized as a context of information abundance. Most educational institutions are based on assumptions of information scarcity. • Problem-based learning, constructivism, and educational reform all suggest that the connections between and among faculty, students and resources, require a different approach than the one that has been traditionally practiced by educational institutions.

10. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”W.B. Yeats

11. The motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and. . . .in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.Thomas Alva Edison, 1922