My college students are trying to juggle traditional school/college with the explosion of media available to them. Can my daughter REALLY perform effectively in her online college class if she’s got IM and Facebook running in the background and she’s bouncing between the three? Oh, and her phone is either ringing with calls or buzzing with texts at the same time. I think not.

As for college — I’m not convinced that developing more online classes is the answer. Our kids, by using so much technology and being continually connected, are doing so in an isolated fashion. They don’t call each other — they IM. They don’t talk to each other — they text. Many of my children’s friends are socially delayed because they find it so difficult to carry on a conversation or discussion in person, particularly with people they don’t know.

In my mind the purpose of college is to teach young adults to think critically, discuss intellectually and find their places in society. Because we’ve raised a generation of huge media consumers, we need to find the right combination of technology and human interaction that will result in successful, contributing members to our society.

Now that’s a huge job.

Thanks for posting this video on “Education in the Digital World.” I’ll definitely be thinking about it the rest of the day and how I can make an entry around it that relates to nonprofit organizations, education, and our changing world.

(I’m also wondering how you came across it.)

Maya Norton

The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy
http://www.TheNewJew.wordpress.com

I say this as someone with an Ivy League education and a JD, that the education was important to make me an informed, critical thinker, and helped me discover things I would not have otherwise. But I do not think it is the only pathway for critical thinking, and I do not think professors need to spoon feed students, but we have to make th education contextual and meaningful.

However, at 17 & 18 yrs old, you have no real perspective on what that will meanlater on in your life, either. That’s why being made to take electives in other course areas is important- you need to know what else is out there, and what else might interest you.

If a single minded approach was the only way to go, I would either be a doctor or a biologist, or have given up on both of those dreams from high school when organic chem did me in.

I actually experimented with one class in college, that had 9 (count ‘em, 9, and it was NOT a lit class) books in the assigned reading list totally over $200. I did not buy a single one, yet managed a B in the class by working from class notes and borrowing a book or two (though not all of them).

None of the complaints from these kids are new, what’s new is the distractions. Classes are always massive, college is always insanely expensive, reading has always gone un-done by a wide percentage of students, and college kids have always been lazy and unmotivated. (Hello there, sweeping generalizations!) It’s just that in these Web 2.0 aughts we find ourselves in, the distractions come with a higher price tag.

I’m really not sure what the answer is…it’s a “mentality of youth” and “crappyness of education system” problem more than anything. I don’t see technology as a savior, I see a never-gonna-happen complete overhaul of the way kids learn from the ground up as one.

The best remarks were from the kenote speaker from Penn State’s Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning, who has a great article here [http://www.isat.jmu.edu/cuttinged/winter0304/article7_teaching_bad_idea.htm] about what colleges should be teaching, and how they should go about it… School needs to be about critical thinking and reward that over memorizing.

Technology can help even dull subjects to become more interesting- it’s all in the presentation and talent of the teacher.

I spoke with Rick LaVoie on a recent LD Podcast, and asked about the very scripted curriculums in teaching these days, and he agreed that most of the joys of teaching come from those “side roads” in the classroom over the scripted moments of Chapter 5. What we also have to do is reward the creative and invested teachers over those who drone on and have more difficulty in making their students care about the subject matter at hand.

Teaching is a talent, and should not be left up to those who go into it because they don’t know what else to do.