Education 2.0 & 3.0

Regardless of one’s academic discipline or the courses that we teach, college faculty members share a responsibility to prepare our students for success in our courses and academic programs, their professional careers, and ultimately, for life in general. While this is a seemingly formidable challenge, it is one that we, as members of the teaching profession, are called to embrace and achieve.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

The semantics of school reform are sometimes deceptive. This is apparent when educators talk about “personalized learning”. Personalized Learning is an attractive proposition that is, in an increasingly number of instances, ironically characterized by an absence of the “personal”. Many of the emerging “canned” approaches to Personalized Learning are predicated upon false assumptions about student engagement and motivation. Thomas Armstrong, writing for the American Institute For Learning and Human Development, articulates this concern in succinct terms:“I’m taken aback by some of the highly packaged ‘’personalized’’ learning systems now being developed …. These edtech products often give the appearance of offering personalization, but in reality, they more often rate and process a student’s learning needs, wishes, strengths, and aspirations through impersonal algorithms, then generate a profile of the student that includes content ‘’deliverables’’…. Sounds kind of de-personalizing, doesn’t it?”
Via Mel Riddile, Dean J. Fusto, Mark E. Deschaine, PhD, Elizabeth E Charles

There have been many changes in the development of national and world education. The most observable phenomenon is now the internalization of society and the penetration of digital technologies into learning. 

Education has traditionally been seen as a pedagogic relationship between the teacher and the student. Pedagogy, the art of science and teaching the child, embodies a teacher-focused education where the teacher dominates the classrooms. This approach assumes the teacher being the repository of knowledge and taking full responsibility about what the learner needs to learn when it is to be learned, and indeed how it should be learned. This pedagogical slant develops the role of the student to be a dependent one and the relationship between the student and his/her peers as a competitive one. Pedagogical learning is purely based on the possession of skills and knowledge through transmittal techniques, such as lectures, demonstrations, textbook reading, audiovisual presentations and examinations. Students are motivated to learn due to external pressures such as competition for securing higher grades, fear of failure and at times due to fear of punishment. Learning is confined to a pre-planned curriculum for all students so that it can easily be monitored and evaluated. It addresses the issue of what is to be learned “The Content”, and not how it is to be learned “The Process”.[1]

Via Elizabeth E Charles

When I was 19 and decided I wanted to become a psychology professor, I did so from the comfort of my dorm room, on the window seat across from a decommissioned fireplace. I’d always loved reading, writing, and talking, so what better career for me than academe? I could not have known that my vision of faculty life would become anachronistic by the time I was out of graduate school.

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Miloš Bajčetić

December issue of UKED Magazine - Festive theme

Via Elizabeth E Charles