Blogging Your Education

about how her students are changing in their expectations and needs from their time in college. They are pushing against the traditional structures, asking to mix the classroom experience with online community and off campus travel, capturing all of it in their Weblogs with the voices of teachers and mentors and loved ones mixed in. I love that image...seriously love it...the reflective, interactive chronicling of learning. The getting it down, capturing the experience if for no other reason than to acknowledge it, and to help it take root.

This is about relevance of the education to the objective of life.

One of the reader commented

The only quibble I have with your comment is when you say, "... seriously rethink what we do in the classroom..." Why do we need to stay in the classroom? I think the growing irrelevance of the school system is mostly the artificial structure of classrooms that we have created over the years. To make learning relevant to our students, we need to be thinking of knocking the classroom walls down and moving away from classes that meet one block a day or whatever.

There are several industrial age devices in the current schools which block significant changes; Fixed group (classroom) and fixed time block. Another issue we should also consider is the possibility of more fluid groups, including mixed age, ability and talent.

Blogging is ONE of the many ways that students can use to collaborate. Blog is a collaboration tool. Not any more, not any less. The use of any tool is up to the imagination of the users. In an education situation, assuming that the role of teacher is still here, teacher will become the main people designing the environment to foster appropriate learning for all the member of a group, including different members' interest and ability.