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Buzzwords Are Stifling Innovation In College Teaching
jyosim writes: Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of 'adaptive learning' and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. On the other side of it, professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says the buzzwords have thus become a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together.
It's not something that just "capitalists" do; spinning and BS are part of every known organization. We saw it in the Soviet Union also. Humans, especially those who strive to move up in an organization or power structure, are overall aggressive and selfish, and playing games with language is part of this process.
Even if students don't want to play language games themselves, they should be exposed to spin and understand its usage and techniques in order to navigate the real world.
Table-ized A.I.
The problems occur when you use those specific terms with NON-insiders.
A doctor should simply say arm bone, or at least "ulna - a bone in your arm", when talking to a patient.
Similarly, a competent businessman will strip out the specialized terms when talking to specific people. If you are selling software to a business, do NOT say 'enterprise', say business.
The only reason insiders use insider terms with outsiders are:
To hide something - a lie, incompetence, overcharges, etc.
Because they themselves don't understand the term and are reading from a script.
They are REALLY BAD AT COMMUNICATING.
For example, When I talk to my father, I don't talk about object oriented programming, I talk about re-useable software parts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There's always a lot of buzz about tailoring learning to each individual and a lot of the literature suggests that it isn't terribly effective in that while students might enjoy the lesson more, but they won't actually learn more. What I'm more worried about is that if you don't expose students to other ways of processing information and learning that they'll become unwilling to try acquiring any knowledge that can't be presented to them exactly as they would like it.
Instead, we should be teaching students how they can more effectively process information provided to them even when it's not in their preferred style. Otherwise they'll eventually end up in the real world and be unequipped to handle things as they find themselves in an environment that doesn't really give a damn about what they prefer and isn't going to waste time coddling them.
I'm more worried about stifling the students and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at various learning environments or other projects that don't actually improve education when they money could be spent on hiring more instructors or tutors so that they can have more one-on-one time with students or provide additional instruction as necessary.
I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.