It is widely known that most teenagers are just savvy enough to be dangerous when it comes to technology. No, they instinctively don’t know where to find double-spacing in a Word document, nor are they born with an innate knowledge of how to hack a firewall. But they figure it out pretty quick. This is what we’re up against as educators: students who learn what is necessary for the task at hand. Just-in-time learning.
Students learn what they need to know when they need to know it. “How does copyright law impact you as a content creator?” Or, to put it more directly, “What do you need to know before publishing your YouTube video?” I see this as an inherently good thing. Instead of working towards fact regurgitation and rote memorization, we can begin to move towards application, evaluation, synthesis, and (my favorite) creation of something new.
Ray Kurzweil says that teenagers today have more information in their pocket than the President of the United States had at his disposal just fifteen years ago. Data and information have never been more important
because they have never been more available, not the other way around. The question, then, is “what do you do with all that data?”
I have read many blogs, heard many presentations, and seen enough literature to know that many of those in the Baby Boomer generation believe this to be the end of learning as we know it. Good. Learning as we know it (read: as established in the 1950s) desperately needs to end. Today’s students are not the same as those students that sat in the same seats in the same classrooms half a century ago. We inherently know this, but how long are we going to make today’s learners conform to models that are, quite frankly, outdated and archaic in a digital age of just-in-time information?
The Old
The teacher stands up front. Students sit at desks and write down what the teacher says. There are practice problems and/or a worksheet that is completed (to assess learning) and the students are given homework to be turned in upon returning to class the next day.
The New
Structured chaos. In a classroom of thirty students, you might only have four or five working on the same thing in the same way. Jesse is watching a video from MIT. Kelsey is watching programming from PBS. Jenny is programming an interactive game to teach about what she has learned. Jake is editing a video montage he has put together. Ivan is reading an article and developing a critique about the author’s bias. Oscar is looking for media on Creative Commons to use in his next presentation.
Here are the questions many might begin to ask, particularly those indoctrinated with “the old.”
Where’s the teacher in this mess? How is it even possible that students are learning anything? How in the world are you going to assess their learning? Why do they have headphones on? Did I just see a cell phone? Why is that kid listening to music?! What will I tell their parents when they ask, “what did they learn in school today?”
There. THAT’S the million-dollar question. Precisely because it’s the wrong question entirely.
Don’t tell me what you learned. Show me what you made. But for this to happen, the teacher must give up control. The teacher must stop being the arbiter of all information and instead leverage just-in-time access to create something that truly represents the potential of your students.
“What did you create in school today?”
