Students gone wild: cutting out the middle man.

Students gone wild: cutting out the middle man. Reform advocates have speculated for decades about how schoolingwill change in the future, and the emergence of "Web 2.0," theread/ write web, has thrown fuel on this fire. Amidst all of the talk oflifelong learning Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organisations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. , disintermediation The elimination of the distributor and/or retailer (the middleman) when making a purchase. The term is used to refer to purchasing directly from a manufacturer's Web site, the benefits of which are convenience, fast turnaround time and sometimes lower prices. , social networking See social networking site. social networking - social network and 21st centurynew media skills, few examples of different educational practice arevisible. Recent examples from my own teaching offer glimpses at thefuture of learning. And the students shall lead I currently teach two sections of a course, Technology andLearning, in Pepperdine University's Online Master of Arts Master of ArtsNouna degree, usually postgraduate in a nonscientific subject, or a person holding this degreeNoun 1. Master of Arts - a master's degree in arts and sciencesArtium Magister, MA, AM inEducational Technology Program (www.myomet.com). My students aremid-career professionals representing all levels of education, plusseveral people from corporate America. It is not uncommon for a cadre oftwenty students to post more than 5,000 discussion entries over thecourse of a semester. In prior years our classes were open to students and faculty whowished to "lurk To view the interaction in a chat room or online forum without participating by typing in any comments. See de-lurk. lurk - lurking " behind the scenes or join in on discussions.Regrettably, the asynchronous communication For other uses, see Asynchrony.In telecommunications, Asynchronous communication is transmission of data without the use of an external clock signal. Any timing required to recover data from the communication symbols is encoded within the symbols. tool we are now forced touse does not allow students to collaborate across classes or even readanother class's discussion. This makes teaching harder sinceinformation needs to be shared to one class at a time and students in"period 2" gain no benefit from an inspired exchange in"period 1." Midway through the semester, I invented a way of penetrating theblackboard between classrooms by asking each class to identify the tenbiggest ideas discussed in their class. Context, references andjustification for selecting an idea were to be included in their finaldocument. Transcripts of synchronous discussions, threaded discussionsand primary sources shared online were the raw materials for thiscollaborative journey. That was the task, no further guidance wasprovided. Class discussions about assigned texts, current events andtechnical matters continued as usual. I anticipated that the work wouldtake three to five days. After more than a week I sent a message to allof my students asking if they were near completion of the classdocument. They apologized for not having kept me in the loop. The students had not only created wikis See wiki. on which to brainstorm,debate and edit the big ideas, but they had already shared the resultswith the other class and spent several days discussing what theylearned. This was all achieved without any intervention on the part of theirteacher. I wasn't even privy. All I did was suggest the activity,and the students were able to learn, collaborate, represent theirknowledge and share their conclusions without me. What am I, chopped liver Chopped liver is a spread from the Jewish cuisine.It is often made by saut��eing liver and onions in schmaltz (i.e., rendered animal fat); adding hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper to the saut��ed liver and onions, and grinding that mixture. ? During this week's Tapped-In discussion (www.tappedin.org) afew students mentioned talking with my mentor "My Mentor" is the second episode of the American situation comedy Scrubs. It originally aired as Episode 2 of Season 1 on October 4, 2001. PlotElliot gets on Carla's bad side after telling Dr. Kelso about one of Carla's mistakes. Elliot gets defensive with J.D. Seymour Papert Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language. . Did theybump into him at a conference? No. One student e-mailed Dr. Papert andasked if they could interview him for an assignment in their learningtheory course. Despite two of their current professors having relationships withPapert dating back between 20 and 40 years, the Years, Thethe seven decades of Eleanor Pargiter’s life. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 1109]See : Time students took theinitiative to contact this expert. The result is primary source materialthat may be used to satisfy requirements in two different classes. Thepodcasts make a contribution to knowledge by making a rare interviewwith Papert available to anyone on the Internet. Not too shabby. Getting to here Neither example of student initiative is the result of a"magic teacher" armed with an impressive Rolodex orstalker-like tenacity. No elaborate lesson plans had been honed overmany years. My students were empowered to learn and assume centralresponsibility for their own progress. Although the products of my students' efforts wereunanticipated, the quality of their work was not. The organization ofstudents into cadres, the 24/7 access to each other and faculty, thefocus on reflective practice over product, the careful selection ofprovocative texts and the expectation that all of their work be publiccontributes to the expectation of high standards without teacherdependency. Gary S. Stager, gary@stager.org, is senior editor of D/STRICTADMINISTRATION and editor of The Pulse: Education's Place forDebate (www.districtadministration. com/pulse).