Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom

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Rethinking the Social Media-Centric Classroom

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 12, 2012 @08:28AM from the cognitive-dissonance dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching after hearing that other professors can't get his experiments with Twitter and YouTube to work in their classes. Is the lecture best after all?"

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There is no by NEDHead · 2012-02-12 08:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

One best thing. Every subject taught, every student taught, every portion of each learning experience is different. To try and force one approach is to deny the variability of the participants and the subject matter. Passion is the only universal secret sauce.
Is the lecture best after all? by owlnation · 2012-02-12 08:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.

Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.

How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.

Leave face time for labs and tutorials, forget lectures -- they are a relic of the middle-ages, along with the need to have term and vacation times that match the harvests.

I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)
1. Re: Is the lecture best after all? by icebike · 2012-02-12 09:02 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.
  Probably at least the male students are in fact more concerned with twat questions, and have very little time in which they are fully ready to concentrate.
  
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  Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
2. Re: Is the lecture best after all? by Sir_Sri · 2012-02-12 09:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The short answer is that while it's true students may be half asleep, left to do the work entirely on their own, most of them don't. Or at least not until it's too late. Even if the students only half pay attention, they are adding their own notes to the lectures, augmenting their copy of the powerpoint with what you say (fill in the blank power points work remarkably well, where the student fills in the answers during the lecture), but when it comes time to study the notes they're relearning the material, not learning from scratch.
  It shouldn't surprise anyone that in a profession that is ~40% about your ability to lecture, you'd have a bunch of people who are good at giving lectures that students understand and find engaging. And those same people trying to completely change what they do doesn't always work. This guy, who is essentially researching experiments in teaching may be good at it because first, he's tried a few beginning steps and knows how to use that to control the classroom, even if he didn't realize it was important. Students might also like it because of the novelty of 'lets try this' or because what he did maps particularly well to the problem he's trying to solve. But trying to use twitter in a classroom needs to map to a particular problem you're trying to solve, trying to do ODE's where everyone starts tweeting about which DE they are isn't going to actually teach you anything about solving DE's. Tutorial exist to reinforce what is in lectures, not to replace them. Sometimes (especially in first year) there isn't much difference, because a lot of the lectures are just an effort to make sure everyone has the same background, since every province, state, country etc. are different.
  The era of 'chalk' is mostly gone, but where it served a purpose it still does. If you're doing math, explaining what you're writing, why you're writing it, in a slow deliberate fashion is conveying that information.
  Keep in mind that a large part of what universities are is accreditation bodies and places of research. The people who teach need to actually do this stuff on a day to day basis, and take time out from that to teach it. You need to make sure that everyone with a degree in CS, or who has taken 3rd year programming languages has gotten a particular experience. Sure, you can spend 36 hours watching lectures from some other universities, but how do you know what from that is important (no assignments after all), how do you demonstrate that you learned it? On your own trying to solve real problems you need to know what you're trying to use to solve a problem. It's been a while since I took programming languages, but I know what a logic language is enough to know if I have a problem to solve that might use it. A physicist may have vaguely heard something about what logic languages are, but has no actual sense of how to use a logic language to solve a problem (this sort of thing happens a lot to physicists because they're expected to be programmers, but then they get almost no formal training in CS, and so they don't know languages or algorithms or automated software testing well, all of which would be super handy). Yes, you *can* learn all of these things on your own, from wikipedia or from some videos, but you need to know what you're looking for. The great strength of wikipedia is that it immediately connects you to connected information, which also lets you get easily distracted. I'm not sure about the US, but at least in canada, our graduation rates and times are carefully monitored. If you aren't getting kids out the door in whatever average, I think it's about 4.5 years for 4 year programme, they start doing extra reviews of what you're up to and so on, and, eventually, if you can't reasonably get people completed on time, you can't take on students and your programme disappears. That's rare, because there are a lot of things you can do to fix it, and there's some fairly complicated analysis that goes into determining how a programme is doing.
  Being able to pause a
3. Re: Is the lecture best after all? by pz · 2012-02-12 09:50 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.
  So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.
  Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session ... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.
  
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  Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
They need to flip their paradigm 180... by hsthompson69 · 2012-02-12 08:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

...have kids watch taped lectures at home, and come to the classroom to do problems and ask questions of the professor in person. Make "homework" "classwork", and make lectures "homework".
More like... by blahplusplus · 2012-02-12 09:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

... rethinking student selection. My god, there are too many people going to school who are not scholastically inclined nor have the work ethic. We instead of created a culture of stupidity and status seeking based on false promises of what can be expected out of an 'education'.
Re:Wired magazine? by biohazard35 · 2012-02-12 10:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

For the people who don't want to find what he's talking about, here's the comment from Raspberry Pi about wired:

Ha – no, that was something else entirely. Wired asked us to give them a copy of our BOM. We told them we couldn’t do that because it’d land us in hot water with our suppliers (particularly Hynix and Broadcom); if their other customers were to use our BOM to demand similar pricing, we’d be in trouble. So instead, they *made up* a BOM (which was gratuitously wrong). They told us they were doing this, and we asked them not to; saying we’d be happier for no article to appear at all. They published it anyway. Our suppliers started getting calls from their other customers, as predicted; we had a lot of apologising to do. Slightly less serious, but still damned annoying: Wired also demanded pictures of a cased version of the final board. This was well before Christmas, at which point we didn’t *have* any beta or final boards, still less any cased ones (the cases are being finished after the board themselves are finished at the end of this month). They didn’t take no for an answer, and kept asking, and asking, and askingand then photoshopped a case onto an alpha board (wrong size, wrong proportions) for their magazine. Which is misleading, but it’s nothing like as damaging as their efforts with the BOM were. Needless to say, they’re off the list for press samples, and they’re not getting any more interviews either (they ran Rob ragged in preparation for this, then never used any of the material they’d got from him). Wired seem to believe they’re still as relevant as they were in 1998. Luckily for us, they’re not; we’ve interacted with hundreds of journalists over the last six months or so, and not a single one of them has been as hard to work with as Wired were.