Week Six: Piaget Discussion and Course Reflection

     The word “monolithic” means “in the form of a large stone block” or “large and unchanging” (Encarta). The latter definition would appear to be the meaning intended for this discussion. While unwieldy and bogged down in tradition, our educational system has never been completely static. The physical buildings and classrooms have changed as our society has changed. I’m almost certain that every classroom has electric lights and paper and pencils as opposed to kerosene lanterns and slates. Advances in technology are not enjoyed equally by all schools though. The same holds true for the learning tools in schools. Some schools are embracing Learning 2.0 (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28) while others are still lacking in the most basic computer equipment. The problem, however, is not the physical trappings of education. It is the direction of teaching. We have been teaching knowledge instead of teaching ways to acquire knowledge.
     According to the popular 2007 “Shift Happens” video by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, “The amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years. By 2010, it’s predicted to double every 72 hours.” In the 2008 remake of that video, “It is estimated that 4 exabytes (4.0X10^19) of unique information will be generated this year. That’s more than in the previous 5,000 years.”
     Instead of the knowledge acquisition model, with the student receiving knowledge from the educator, we need to embrace social learning (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18) and the idea of becoming lifelong learners. Fisch and McLeod state that, “We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet” (2007). There is still room for the lecture. However, the lecture can be a video-blog by an expert in the field used as a jumping-off place for lively discussion (social) and hands-on learning (Bowen as quoted in Young, 2009).
     Will Richardson says, “teachers need to find ways to use these tools to move away from the more traditional paradigms of instruction on their own terms in their own ways and recruit others to follow suit” (2009, p. 137). I liked the quote from Albert Einstein that the Fisch & McLeod video used, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”



References


Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.


Fisch, K. & McLeod, S. (2007) “Shift Happens” Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U


Fisch, K. & McLeod, S. (2008) “Shift Happens” Newly Revised Edition. Globalization & the Information Age. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8


Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.


Young, Jeffrey R., (2009, July 20). When Computers Leave the Class, so does Boredom. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/