DK: re: faculty resistance 2 new tech. faculty need 2 remember, we are in the business of learning. the best way 2 facilitate it is 2 model it.
November 9 at 11:41am via Twitter
SB:
I understand their concern. It changes so much and we have to keep up with it. Especially in my field where things change what seems to be by the hour. In the long run it’s better to deal with it, especially if you can pass the knowledge/lessons learned on to students/peers.
November 9 at 12:18pm
DK:
I understand their concern also. However, that doesn’t excuse the problem. One of the webinars I was in on this morning shared a very powerful model of education: switch the role of “teacher” to facilitator/mentor, and the role of “student” to researcher. we are all in this learning together. if you aren’t immersed in learning yourself, how can you relate to others who are also learning? real learning? not just memorizing something for a test, but changing the way you think to integrate and apply new ideas and concepts in new and unrelated situations. maybe that’s just my bias coming through, but i think that’s where we, as professional educators, need to be so that we can be most effective in helping our students achieve that as well.
November 9 at 12:23pm
BM:
I don’t think most faculty see themselves as being in the business of learning as much as in content delivery.
November 9 at 12:27pm
DK:
agreed. definitely in need of a paradigm shift. so… how do we help facilitate that? you and I do a lot with individual faculty and through the avenues where we have influence. do we try to effect change on a larger level? maybe I’m having a “paul sparks – we should change the world” moment 
November 9 at 12:29pm
SB:
This isn’t High School… They are in a job where they have to learn as much if not more than the students are learning. If they don’t want to do that then maybe they should go back to teaching general ed.
November 9 at 12:29pm
TM:
Many people take the easy way out, the path of least resistance, precisely because they don’t want to have to think. Our education system is a bureaucracy, the root cause of its failure to competently educate. Its members become bureaucrats of the type that makes bureaucrat a four-letter word.
November 9 at 12:35pm
GT:
Content is dead. Or more accurately if we let it rule as it has in the past we will be dead under its untenable weight! Education should revolve around process – research, analysis, synthesis, communication . . . and any content will do. Read Rachel Carson in HS science – obvious, but what about as a tool to teach math? Old man and the sea (Hemingway) in literature class – again, obvious, but why not in science? Content should be fluid and at the creative discretion of the teacher . . .
Tom Brown in Change by Design, “If Gary Hamel is correct in arguing that the twenty-first century will favor adaptability and continuous innovation, it just makes sense that organizations whose “product” is creativity should foster environments that reflect and reinforce it. Relaxing the rules is not about letting people be silly so much as letting them be whole people [ ]” Do schools create or allow for this type of environment or is it regimented . . . and if regimented, isn’t it the obsession with standards and standardization that causes the inertia?
If “well prepared students” is school’s “product” is the century old system we are stuck in ever going to result in quality? If education put the focus back on the student, instead of using them to justify jobs and salary increases, we might be able to reinvent school.
November 9 at 12:43pm
BM:
just don’t have a Paul Sparks “would a yo-yo work in space?” moment, and we’ll be fine.
November 9 at 12:49pm
SB:
Seriously, would a yo-yo work in space? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction… So, in theory it could work?
November 9 at 1:45pm
DK:
oh no… yet another student nerd sniped by Sparkian yo-yo astrophysics!
November 9 at 1:57pm
