TechWag

I’ll be trying to grab a slide presentation from last night where a business group was talking about how we need to develop a better approach to dealing with students, blogs, and the expectations of people coming in to the education process. This is going to be a hard change for eduction, it breaks the silo, web 2.0 breaks down the ivory tower and asks people to talk to each other.

There are many great educators out there, but they do not understand the social landscape that students are bringing with them when they come into the school. We have baby boomers teaching genX/Y and Millennial, if there was ever an age gap, we have it in our institutions of higher learning.

Students are running circles around their instructors, they blog, text, facebook and friend each other in the class, which the instructor with their death by powerpoint every Monday morning from 8 to 12 does not get nor understand. More troublesome is that not only are they blissfully unaware, they are also not interested.

Changing eduction, and the paradigms that go along with it needs to happen, but will be a long, politically challenging process for people, students, instructors, and management across all college lines. There are shining examples of what could be done, and what is being done, but much like corporate blogging five years ago, those examples are few and far between.

Education can benefit from Web 2.0, if you back and look at the Socratic Method, or how we taught before the standardized and formalized education processes that we currently use, the collaborative viewpoint of education suited humans for over a 1000 years. We learned from people who wanted to teach, and fought to keep students. Even in Ancient Greece, students talked to each other. The more popular the instructor, the more students tried to get into the their classes. This worked great for many thousands of years.

What made the instructor popular was the approachability, the expertise that the instructor was known to have, and the word of mouth advertising from other students. Today the whole idea of instruction is not student centric, it is research centric. The best part is that by using Web 2.0 tools, blogs, wiki’s, and the rest of it, we can have both. We can have the collaborative learning model used a thousand years ago, and still come up with research opportunities, and provide input into the credibility of the instructor.

The problem is that this is contrary to how education is run now, we live in our silo, our ivory tower, and communication is difficult. We exist behind pay walls for information, instructors are not effective in communication when the power structure is different. We don’t collaborate with students, we lecture, and hope that some of it sinks in long enough to pass a test or other measurement of learning.

This is where it gets interesting, with good community management, good blogs, good wiki’s, and a collaborative learning environment we not only meet the expectations of students coming in to the education system, but we create more valuable employees for business. If a student blogged before they got to college, blogged through college, and then the company wanted them to write on their corporate blog, they are already there and ready to go. They already know how to manage comments, they know how to work with their readers.

Same for Wiki’s, same for twitter, same for video, podcasting, and everything else. We also need to teach the difference between personal, corporate and professional blogging. Schools have to teach these tools, use those tools themselves, to engage the students where they are already.

It is an exciting time to be in education, because we can literally reinvent this industry, the question is how to overcome the fear of change.

That is next, dealing with the fear of change within the educational system.

tags: education, web 2.0, students, management, blog, blogging, blogger, twitter

Tags: education //