Pop quiz: What educational system are these statements describing?

• Nowadays more [students] attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing.
• During a [teacher's strike] I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.
• So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading…“Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea.
  
• We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In this light it is natural that…we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.

It’s an op-ed in today’s New York Times about public elementary and secondary education in Mexico. But – and perhaps this is me simply being bitter in a long semester, three days before spring break – I am often left feeling statements like the ones above could just as well apply to public higher education in the United States.

Believe it or not, this Prezi has some educational value and I’ll be using it in my Cyberculture & Digital Media class on Monday:

Swartz on Feb. 10, 2007 Creative Commons/Quinn Norton/Flickr

I spent part of the snowed-in weekend reading Slate’s comprehensive profile of Aaron Swartz, the computer wunderkid who committed suicide last month while awaiting the outcome of court proceedings stemming from charges that he violated copyright law on a massive scale. The reporting was exhaustive and the writing was crisp; it was more biography than profile and helped put Swartz into context for someone like me, who thus far has primarily been exposed to the story via 140-character accusations from his supporters and detractors.

But on another note, it got me thinking in a different direction. I loved this quote from one of Swartz’s many blogs, written in the summer of 2000, when he would have been heading into the ninth grade:

Seriously, who really cares how long the Nile river is, or who was the first to discover cheese. How is memorizing that ever going to help anyone? Instead, we need to give kids projects that allow them to exercise their minds and discover things for themselves. Instead of stuffing them with ‘knowledge’ we need to give them the power to find out what they want to know.

He’s had (and still has) a point, one that the education system may take decades or generations to catch up to. The knee-jerk reaction among educators is to immediately bemoan the fact that students quickly look whatever they need to know on smartphones and laptops. As someone a hell of a lot smarter than me once said (in a discussion unrelated to this post), the promise of the Internet was that you could know everything, but the reality of the Internet is you don’t have to know anything whatever you need to know is theoretically in your pocket.

If we could reconfigure secondary and higher education to become an exercise in taking collected knowledge into solving problems, if we could do more than simply pay lip service to “developing students’ critical thinking skills,” and if we could actually get students over their fear of failure (and willingness to offer answers only when they are certain they know them), if we could get students interested in learning for the sake of learning (instead of grade collecting and resume building) we may be onto something.

That’s a problem I wish Swartz had lived to help solve.

Undated photo of Tent City from the Bridgewater State University Website.

In each of the six Novembers I have taught at Bridgewater State University, a small but growing band of students have lived in tents for five nights. It’s part of the International Tent City program, designed to raise awareness of homelessness and simulate the tent cities homeless people live in throughout the world.

Some students spend a night in the tents for extra credit in a class; others spend all five nights (and last week, when this year’s event was held, that was pretty hearty given temperatures that dipped below freezing). The program has become so popular in its six years I heard unconfirmed reports of alumni coming back to spend a night or two in the awareness-raising event.

The timing of this Pete Earley post on his decision to not spend time pretending to be homeless and write a book about the experience contrasts nicely with Tent City at Bridgewater State. Book publishers have loved this idea ever since George Plimpton suited up to train with the Detroit Lions and write Paper Lion. It can be entertaining reading, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the experience. Continue Reading »

Here’s a storify chronicling the highlights from what was, hands down, the best assignment I ever gave as a college instructor. Students from three classes live-tweeted network coverage of the election to #12DC last night, and they seemed to love it. Will be writing more later today/tomorrow once I’ve met with the students who participated to get their take.

The #12DC Project: Live-Tweeting The Election

Students from my Online Journalism and Social Media & Journalism classes at Bridgewater State University covered shifts where they watched an assigned network and tweeted out news as it was reported. Some students in my Digital Media & Cybeculture class also volunteered help.

I call bullshit on this post, as I tend to do with this particular blog, which is essentially a place for college professors to bitch about their students (if you have or will have college-aged children I suggest taking a look at this site somewhat regularly to get a feel of what the people you’re paying to educate your kids really think about your kids):

Overheard

Two students were talking about a trip to California, during which time they’d have a day for just one Disney Park.  Which one to choose?

“Dude, just go on Wikipedia and get a list of rides for each park.”

“No way, Dude! I want to be sure I get the right information!  I guess I should go to a Disney site, right, to make absolutely sure?”

Ahhhhhhh.  I see.  So when it is REALLY important, then, they DO know places to look to be sure they are getting the right information!!!!

It was a short week but I pushed my students into deep thought. This morning I read this quote from a David Foster Wallace speech about Franz Kafka and figured it was worth sharing:

D0 you think it’s a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-clown drinking and generally ecstatic Dionysìan-type reveling? It’s not. College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified and dealing with their terror in a distinctively US way. Those naked boys hanging upsìde down out of their  frat house’s windows on night are simply trying to buyI a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced thern to think about all week.

Not sure why this is shocking: Universities are failing at teaching social media

The only people who still think colleges are about job training are, well, everyone not in the system. Colleges and universities like to think they are above the petty work of vocational training, except when it comes to selling the school to prospective parents and their students.

In my experience, there are an alarming number of college professors who still see email as a burden as, in the words of one former colleague ”it means students can contact me on the weekends.” And this was a professor in a communication studies department.

With that mindset, maybe college students are better off doing what they have always done: figuring out how to use and dominate the technology on their own.

All three of my classes at Bridgewater State University will be using Twitter this semester. Here’s the primer I’m offering each class on the first day of class (it’s a Prezi for the stand-alone lecture, but some of the slides contain succinct advice for more effective Tweeting):

Every vote helps, and every time you share the link to my SXSW panel proposal on your social media outlets of choice, you save a puppy.

Well, I may be making that last part up, but it would be great if you could visit this link, vote and share so I can talk about the “Higher Ed Crisis: Remaking The U.S. University” at SXSW in March.