TechnologyTeaching & Learning

Industrial Age to Knowledge Age

• A student, when asked how his day at the university went, remarked: I’ve been in PowerPoint Hell!

The evolution of an ‘old’ teaching technology and its attendant teacher- focused ‘method’: Slate and white chalk, to green-board and yellow chalk, to white-board and markers, to overhead projectors and transparencies, to PPT slides and In-focus projectors.

• Initially, teachers teach the ways in which they were taught. Since late 19th century to the present in university environments, lecture . . . information delivery.

The myth of knowledge transfer: Delivering information IS NOT teaching/learning facilitating.

Lecturing requires a great deal of encoding of the message by the teacher and decoding by the student. E.g. Encoded message: “She looked at him with an enigmatic smile.”

The Great Technology Lie!: Technology will make learning easy and automatic.

• Learning IS work: requires some sort(s) of DOING by the learner.

• ‘Doing’ can be accomplished either f2f or at a distance, in classrooms, seminar rooms, online.

Technology can and does engage learners . . . Look around you. Look at learners in your classroom, (before class, during class, after class.)

Some teachers set rules against use of technologies in classrooms: students used to know how to pay attention, even when the lecture was boring.Adding cell phones, ipods and laptops for today’s students is like throwing water on a grease fire. Students seem to no longer have the skill to be able to focus.Blaming the lecturer is the lazy person’s copout.(Perhaps . . . so is blaming the student.)

Others are more permissive; some simply ignore them; still others find ways to use them to facilitate learning. For example:

• Task 1: Search WikiPedia for a topic about which you are knowledgeable. How does the content stack up against traditional sources?

• Task 2: Search WikiPedia for a current topic, issue, or person in the news. Repeat question above?

• Task 3: Search WikiPedia for any topic. Click the HISTORY tab at the top. What do you notice, and what implications does this have?

Three types of ‘users’ of learning technologies: Technophobes, Technophiles, Techno-pragmatics.

Almost all undergraduate students and many graduate students are Digital Natives (Have never known a world without Information, Communications Technologies (ICT’s.)

Faculty born prior to the mid-1980s are Digital Immigrants. Many struggle to ‘understand’ the new information/knowledge is everywhere paradigm . . . find it confusing . . .many in denial, avoidance.

• 21st Century skills are inherently linked to Information, Communications Technologies skills (ICT’s).

• Digital Immigrants struggle to understand these . . . Some feel caught in a time warp.

Some fight or flee . . . as if the ‘Borg’ are after them . . . .Resistance is futile (Star Trek – Next Gen.)

Effective use of learning technologies requires effective Instructional Design System (IDS). ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation.)

• The most potentially powerful learning technology ‘tool’ = The INTERNET.

• A ubiquitous Interactive –Network • Knowledge is in the network• It’s changing the ‘shape’ of higher education.• Challenging the traditional, higher education

industrial-age teaching-learning paradigm and infrastructure.

Traditional view of the learning ‘Hub’ of a university. The Library.

21st Century view of the learning ‘Hub’ of universities is the Internet. (It may look like a galaxy, but is actually a map of the Internet. showing the hardware that serves as its 'skeleton' or infrastructure of the Internet.)

If it cannot be found on the Internet, then for all practical purposes it does not exist. Example of a PLN Personal Learning Network.

• Pedagogies : Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism.

• Constructivism best for online learning pedagogy.

• 1) we have to focus on the learner in thinking about learning (not on the subject/lesson to be taught)

• 2) There is no knowledge independent of the meaning attributed to experience (constructed) by the learner, or community of learners.

• Add to these pedagogies: CONNECTIVISM (Siemen’s, 2008) Learning is facilitated by cyberspace networks, online learning communities, online communities of practice.

• 24/7 access, anywhere, anytime.

• Important learner questions: How am I like everyone else? How am I unique? Where do I go for confirmation of who I am?

• Important teacher questions: Foremost in a teacher’s thoughts…are people in my classes students or learners?

• What are my assumptions about my role as it relates to how it helps learners deal with their important questions?

• Important question for HE organization: How does a higher education institution’s academic infrastructure, designed to meet the needs of the industrial age, help learners in the information/knowledge age answer these questions and become independent learners?