[Note: Bert Kimura posted the following as a comment on 19 June 2009, in response to "‘The College of 2020: Students’ – A Chronicle Report." We've decided to publish Kimura's comment as an article to facilitate further discussion. The original comment has been expanded to include a note from his email message to me on 6.20.09. -JS]
Jim, thanks for posting the summary. From my own experiences teaching online classes at UH-Manoa in Educational Technology and also having tried such classes with Japanese students, the items summarized certainly make a lot of sense.
There are three items that I believe will become important by then, if not, perhaps passé by then:
1. The 2020 students may not have had any familiarity at all with desktop computers and traditional operating systems. Instead, all of the communications, creation, and retrieval of info will be done with mobile devices. I also believe that, as may of us have two or mobile notebook computers today, 2020 students will have multiple devices to accomplish their online tasks. The proverbial “toaster” could still be one of them. :-)
The idea of the end of the desktops should also be attributed to Alan Levine, CTO of the New Media Consortium. He also does a very informative (with a unique perspective) blog: http://cogdogblog.com/. Alan was formerly the instructional technologist for the Maricopa CC system and was tremendously influential in getting faculty in the system to adopt technology in teaching and learning.
2. Texting such as this comment will be replaced by or, at least, on par with verbal, visual or multimedia communication modes. Consequently, faculty need to be able to reach visual learners in an effective pedagogical manner as well.
3. Internationalization will enable many more distance learners to participate in online courses, and thus the online student community will be more multicultural than the current group. I believe that this will result in a much richer student experience.
I’m a chronic reader of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Part scholarly journal, part newspaper and gossip column and help wanted advertising, each week its reporting brings to me the doings and thinking of faculty, students, academic administrators and education officials and accrediting agencies and all the shapers of academia in the colleges and universities in the US and around the world.
Lately I’ve been bemused by that 375-billion dollar question asked in the October 3, 2008 issue:
“The 375-Billion Dollar Question: Why Does College Cost So Much?”
The article itself never really gets around to answering the question. But each issue of the Chronicle provides pieces of the answer—and often analyses that are quite convincing.
Here is the answer of Honor Jones, a student. Her piece in the May 8, 2008 Chronicle is titled “Invest in People, Not Buildings.”
“Everywhere I hear the sound of dump trucks. It’s my fourth year at the University of Virginia, and they haven’t stopped building since I got here. A new commerce school, a new theater. If UVA is any example of the state of public education in general, we need to evaluate our priorities before another brick gets bought.”
In his “Meditation on Building” in the October 20 Chronicle faculty member David Orr paints this grim picture:
“It is estimated that the construction, maintenance, and operation of buildings in the United States consumes close to 40 percent of the country’s raw materials and energy and is responsible for about 33 percent of our CO2 emissions, 25 percent of our wood use, and 16 percent of our water use. In 1990, 70 percent of the 2.5 million metric tons of non-fuel materials that moved through the economy were used in construction.
“Further, by one estimate we will attempt to build more buildings in the next 50 years than humans did in the past 5,000. Most of this development will be driven by individuals operating in a market system that does not account for losses of farmland, forests, wetlands, or biological diversity — or for the human need for community.”
So: to students—some thoughtful students—and to faculty—some ecologically sensitive faculty—the university invests in buildings, not people, not the environment. The counter, of course, might well be: how else does the university house its students and the apparatus it needs for learning? How would the critics provide spaces for instruction, for housing, for study, for recreation? Are there alternatives to the buildings, or are the critics beneficiaries of the structures they deplore?
Which brings us to the question of the new information and communication technologies and how to bring their benefits to the university.
Xavier University’s answer is typical: build a building around the new technologies, and have the students come to the building to use them.
From the Chronicle, January 1,2008:
“A $28-million building called the Learning Commons will be erected to house the organization and serve as a center for various educational programs. Users will be able to get technical help, use multimedia software at any one of a bank of computers, view the library’s online holdings, and have their reference questions answered.
“The library, which will be attached to the new building, is being refashioned as simply a warehouse for books.”
The Xavier officials, of course, could not have seen the October 17, 2008 issue of the Chronicle and the story headlines “Colleges Struggle to Keep ‘Smart Classrooms’ Up to Date,” which describes such a “learning commons” shared by the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver.
“Professors who hold classes there say that years of financial neglect have left the smart classrooms nearly unusable.”
Xavier, then, might find that its $28-million is only the beginning of its commitment to keep its Commons smart and usable.
We need—need desperately—a new Learning Commons: a new Agora.
There are those who point out that we already have such a commons in the Internet itself. It is a worldwide commons that need not be enclosed in buildings: indeed, its possibilities for serving students and teachers and researchers are limited when it is enclosed.
The new Agora of the Internet is classroom, lecture hall, library, and students can take the Agora with them and listen to lectures and read books and engage in dialog with teachers and students who are scattered in time and space.
MIT, Yale, Stanford, Rice have put syllabi and lectures online.
David Wiley, then at Utah State, let unenrolled students take one of his online courses, and gave them his own unofficial certificates to show employers: this as a public service. And Stephen Downes and George Siemens allowed more than 2,000 unofficial students to take their online course “Connectivism and Connected Knowledge.”
There is a new Agora in the process of creation, a new Commons. And it will flourish free of the constraints of buildings, and, if we let learning move to where it is needed, we will enrich the lives of all those who can’t find their way to our buildings, or can’t afford the price of admission.
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Spotlight
Curt Bonk: “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time." "Students want feedback on everything they do. You know what happens when you give feedback on everything they do? You die” (Stone Soup with Curt Bonk: Armchair Indiana Jones in Action by Stefanie Panke). Daniel McGee: "Successful [Calculus I] students appeared to need a unified approach, which emphasized verbal situations, geometric figures, algebraic expressions and the relations between them" (Study Suggests the Need for an Intergrated Learning Styles Approach to Calculus by Jessica Knott).
Kathlyen Harrison and Michael Gilmartin: "We highly recommend [Triptico] for teachers that want to improve interactivity, foster competition, and engage students in the learning process" (Triptico: A Powerful and Free Instructional App).
Niall Watts: "I cannot see a MOOC like ‘Designing a New Learning Environment‘ replacing a university course.... Nor do I see such a MOOC as a ‘taster’ for Stanford. The MOOC is a completely different experience, a bit like a virtual learning environment open to the world" (The MOOC, an Incubator for Great Ideas: A Personal Experience).
Tim Holt: "What happened to these professional learning communities is that they had simply become meetings where teachers and administrators looked at student data and were trying to outwit the test" (An Interview with Tim Holt, Author of ’180 Questions’ by Bonnie Bracey Sutton). Dan Branan: "I see studies like this one [Colorado Department of Higher Education study] as a first step in establishing the legitimacy of online educational experiences in the sciences" (Not Satisfied, but Hopeful, About Online Science). Bert Kimura: "If paper and pencil testing is absolutely required in a class, it probably shouldn’t be offered as a DE class. Not today anyway" (Remote Proctoring: More Questions Than Answers). Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (How Will Traditional Leaders Fare in the Wave of Open Courses?) Janet Buckenmeyer: "It takes more time to design and develop the [online] course. It takes more time to monitor students in an online course.... How are faculty compensated in terms of workload and pay for the additional work an online course requires? How many students should be placed in an online course?" (A Talk with Janet Buckenmeyer on Issues in Online Course Development, by Lynn Zimmerman). Billy Sichone: "My phone has been a valuable asset as I can check the internet for information at any and every time. For instance, I once took an international trip to two countries in a row and the phone was my only source of assignment submissions etc. I did not miss out at all" (A Student’s View of an Open University: An Interview with Billy Sichone, by Stefanie Panke). Julia Kaltenbeck: "Seek ways to build and maintain your community! The community is the single most important success factor in crowdfunding and social payments. To put it simply: No community, no funding" (Julia Kaltenbeck: How Crowdfunding and Social Payments Can Finance OER, by Stefanie Panke). Jessica Ledbetter:
"What keeps me going is that I’m actually creating things I might not find the time to do otherwise. It’s nice to be able to learn with others and see what they’re doing. I always learn by looking at others’ code" (Open Learning at P2PU: An Interview with Jessica Ledbetter, by Stefanie Panke). Susan Murphy: "We are all so afraid that we're going to miss out on something, so we just skim and scan and re-post without really taking time to consider the source. We sometimes forget that there are real people behind the avatars. And that it's worth getting to know more about them" (The Human Face of Twitter: An Interview with Susan Murphy, by Jessica Knott). Judah Schwartz "is a remarkable pioneer in our field because he saw technology as a way of looking at mathematics in very new and alternative ways....He likes to say the Ptolemy observations of the solar system were accurate. There was just one thing wrong with them and that was they were basically incorrect" (Judah Schwartz: Through the Lens of the Computer, by Frank B. Withrow). Jessica Knott: "While a lot of these younger students are pretty gung ho to go forth and innovate technologically, they will be stymied in many cases by an aging infrastructure and restrictive technology rules. Perhaps even by the culture of co-workers who discourage them from using tech in their teaching" (An Interview with Jessica Knott: Teaching an Online Class on Course Development). Emily Hixon: "If a teacher thinks that she/he is going to be able to talk 'at' students and they will learn, she is mistaken. Teachers must be prepared to engage students and use technology to support an interactive, meaningful approach to learning" (Integration of Pedagogy and Technology in Teacher Education: An Interview with Emily Hixon, by Lynn Zimmerman). Henry Neeman: "Today, there are a number of ways for citizens to access supercomputing. Often, these are known as 'science gateways,' and they provide a simple interface to a complicated back end. An example is nanoHUB, which K-12 and postsecondary students can use to do nanotechnology simulations" (Supercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman). Parry Aftab: "Unless we can make the technology safer and provide the right skills to use it responsibly and teach cyber-self-defense, we can’t expect students to use it, enjoy it or benefit from it. We owe it to the kids" (Cyberbullying: An Interview with Parry Aftab). Nancy Willard: "It sure does not help us in transitioning to Web 2.0 if the news is that cyberbullying is at an epidemic level. But it isn’t. And my approach will demonstrate the positive norms of students, which should also translate to greater willingness to also use these technologies for instruction" (Cyberbullying: An Interview with Nancy Willard).
Marc Prensky: "Instead of just spending, and often wasting, billions of dollars to create things that are new, let’s try harder to fix what we have that’s already in place" (Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools). Idit Harel Caperton: "I think students learn more effectively by creating and/or building an entity for public consumption and through collaboration, connecting a learning community and using their creativity — learning to problem solve. . . . I am a longtime advocate of 1:1 learning environments in which each student has access to his/her own computer and broadband connection" (Idit Harel Caperton – An Interview at the Edge of Change, by Bonnie Bracey Sutton and Vic Sutton).
By Bert Kimura
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
