Students are evolving. The student 2.0 is an altogether different animal than the student 1.0. And our classrooms are ecosystems, an environment all their own, where we each must decide how to engage this new species of student. But the walls of our classrooms have been breached. The front of the classroom lies in ruin, and the teacher standing behind a lectern has become an anachronism. The entire system has suffered a swift and certain decay. Now, we teeter at a slowly disintegrating threshold, one foot in a physical world and the other in a virtual one. I feel some brief nostalgia but scrabble eagerly, hopefully from the rubble.
Our students are no longer just bodies in desks; they are no longer vessels. They have become compilations, amalgams, a concatenation of web sites. They are the people in front of us, but also their avatars in Second Life and the World of Warcraft and the profiles they create on FaceBook and MySpace. They speak with mouths, but also with fingers tapping briskly at the keys of their smart phones. When they want to “reach out and touch someone,” they use VOIP, AIM, and Twitter. Shouldn’t student-centered learning address itself, as fully as possible, to this new breed of student? Shouldn’t we understand our students as more than just inert flesh?
Shouldn’t we, ourselves, evolve into teachers 2.0? After all, the expert is dead, murdered by the all-knowing Wikipedia. Students now hold an encyclopedic wealth of information literally in their hands, available to them at the press of a button or the swipe of a finger across a haptic touchscreen. The teacher is no longer just a depository and depositor of knowledge. Our job has become altogether more complex. Now, we are in a position akin to that of a juggler, provoking, reflecting, interpreting, a deft act of balance and patience. Too much of our teacherly voice, and the learning shuts down, degrading into a stilted game of bounce the idea off the professor; not enough, and it atrophies. The teacher 2.0 must shift the focus from individual learners to the community of learners, drawing new boundaries that reflect a much larger hybrid classroom. Now, our work in the world must be done also online.
Jesse,
ReplyDeleteI like the terms "student" and "teacher 2.0." It visually conveys a meaning that implies change and, of course, a change that has to do with the Web and new technology.
I think it is crucial that we shift our language to catch up with the reality of what technology has done to the traditional roles of student and teacher.