Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
mamamusings: teaching new technologies.  This is an interesting article about what it is like to be a teacher for a technological subject for which the content (and the precursor classes) advance rapidly. At the same time, Liz also says something that gives me a lot to think about. At first blush, I like the idea a lot:

"The future, I think, is to let go of the traditional approach of teaching how to do things in a specific language, and instead offer a more studio-like environment in which students are given access to resources and tools, and then work on developing a project. (We teach most of our classes in 'studio mode,' but in most cases they’re far from real studio approaches—they’re lectures with occasional hands-on exercises.) Surprisingly, it’s the students who are often most resistant to this mode of teaching—we’ve successfully conditioned them to see school as a series of core dumps, and switching gears into a more user-directed model often generates resentment and confusion rather than enthusiasm and creativity."

I think this ties to how we learn by exploring and doing and failing and figuring it out as we go, not in advance.  I also think we learn when the learners generate the learning.  I think the teacher should sit outside the circle, not in the middle.  How do we do that?  How do we make it satisfying for teachers to have empowered students?


posted by Dennis at 5/3/2004 04:16:38 PM