First- to expand on my first thought about corporate sponsorship in education.:
I need to read up more on group growth vs individual growth. Rick said a whole lot of terms that are relatively new to me- as I live in my performance art world vs. teaching world. But I think technology is great when it, as he says, "helps [teachers] facilitate education to meet how the students are learning" though I don't think it's realistic to say that they will replace teachers. As the discussion went on- I thought more about how technology impacts the content. Specifically sponsorship/involvement from corporations.
So some folks totes quoted M. Mcluhan "the medium is the message" and I'm gonna twist that a bit and say, "What happens when the brand of the medium is the message?" My example was... a thousand years ago when I was in highschool- Rogers TV offered to put flat screen TV's into every classroom and boost our media "program" to allow us to show tv broadcasts of our morning student news and announcements, but in return we had to watch some Rogers stuff everyday.... and of course- see Rogers branding- every-bloody-where. I don't think many schools jumped at this, we certainly didn't- though I will say that I think we turned it down more from the fear of technology than the... social/brainwashing implications of it.
I went to uWaterloo... kind of the home of engineering and mathies... to a lot of people. Our alumni created Blackberry (formerly RIM) blah blah blah, and continually Google, Microsoft, EA, Blackberry, Lucas Films come to school and throw jobs at people. I'm not bragging, I'm not actually proud of this- but I'm happy for our grads who get it.
But what it made me think about is access and outcomes. A few people on our thread talked about measuring outcomes, and a big part of that comes down to what our students expect to do with their education, and the realities of what they will do with the education. For uWaterloo grads, a lot of our hard science & tech students aim to move to Seattle, Silicon, San Francisco, etc. And the tech they use/develop/learn are directly in line with their trajectory.
On the other side of this.... I recently got to travel to some more... remote towns in Saskatchewan- and found these schools where they were BLINGED OUT (even more than some buildings on campus) with smart boards and wifi, etc. Unfortunately- half of the faculty didn't know how to use this tech, and there was one or two lone (often young) teachers who were charged with being the "tech" teachers who knew how to run this stuff.
In an attempt to keep up and be state of the art... I think they missed the mark on staying present with how and what the students learned. I think there is something to be said about staying present with your students vs. staying current with tech... to be hip if nothing else- or to take advantage of what funding you can get from whoever funds you.
And somewhere in between these two, or perhaps on another side iof its own, Dr. Charity Marsh from UofR taught some guest lectures in some of the Creative Technology classes that I was TAing. She discussed going to Nunavut, and how remote schools from remote "fly in only" cities used youtube and social media to connect to each other and share information.
Ugh- I feel like I'm dribbling into some mass stream of consciousness- I guess this is my 'flow' but I'm continually unconvinced by this notion of balancing and using technology or assuming that anyone is an authourity or an expert. I feel like if we're actually going to adapt to the learning styles of the students, we need to actually continually talk to our specific students and negotiate how they learn.
I predominantly teach performing arts and fitness- theatre, movement, music, dance, yoga, etc. And it's definitely been impacted by technology- not only in reassessing the patterns/habits of how students connect to each other, but also in how they consume the content that we teach. I'm totes not bragging, I'm just saying it's tough because I have to be transparent when I talk to them and not pretend to know their pup culture references or latest hashtags or assume I'm still cool. LOL, not saying that's what anyone else is doing, but I think I'm saying that- THEY can tell when we struggle, and somewhere in that struggle we still have to be Experts.
Ahhhh, I'm an extrovert- thanks for reading- I need to type it out to realize what I'ms saying, and I'm saying- we need to trust the experts and set outcomes that match how they learn.- even if it's sad.
I was teaching a lit class in Canadian Theatre and none of these students read the plays or tried to critically look at the content... correction... very few of them did. In an honest (unfrustrated way) I asked, "what do you think you'll be doing when you graduate? don't you think you'll be the future of Canadian Theatre?" to my devastation- the answer was almost a resounding "No." Yay liberal arts classes where you have to foster and recognize why they learn something to create realistic standards while not compromising the quantity of information that they leave retaining.
So leading to my second thought- I'm saying that the students are, in fact, the experts to their own individualistic learning, so how do we prepare and offer content for them to learn and exist somewhere between edutainment and education on demand?
For many years, the performing arts- specifically acting, recognizes that we can NOT separate ourselves as artists and our own histories from the characters we approach and put on. (Check out Heddon on Autobiographical Performance). One thing I am excited about is that like the Brooks Ted Talk, and some of the other folks Rick mentioned- we need to recognize that we bring an emotional, historical self to our experiential learning too.
Shit that was long- I hope that counts for two blog posts. Maybe I'll just split them..... ha....
OK so fun video for this weeks blog- actually inspired by Brooks and this lecture it's.. less funny, but a video that really influenced my journey through tis MFA. The video is by Renny Gleeson and the proliferation of mobile devices and our "obligation to engage"> Check it out!!!
