It's interesting that the US military is very quietly restructuring its own educational and information-sharing process, and perhaps even in a revolutionary way, especially in the use of wikis to allow soldiers to share their insights from actual experience. (Thanks, Tony Wagner, for pointing this out to me)
Yet I read a guest-column in Thomas Ricks' blog* at Foreign Policy which suggests to me how the flaws of top-down education models might have crippling results for the nation
Col Lawrence Sellin, who was punished after writing an article critical of the reliance on PowerPoint simplifications to replace actual thought ("ISAF Joint Command -- Power Points 'R' Us.") made me really think about what happens when teachers see themselves as experts, and their role as filling captive heads with digested, systematized knowledge.
The money quote for me is, "[PowerPoint] can confuse the volume of information with the quality of information." On a lesser scale, it's the confusion of info I see when flipping through student notes after lectures, even on PowerPoint, or reading chapters of a book, before they have been taught how to identify what's important for themselves. The entire goal of the task for them is to take notes and leave the thinking for others.
The result is superficial acceptance of questionable assumptions and occasional falsehoods, an over-reliance on the trivial, and the creation of false analogies. And for the speaker, it is never to be challenged, never to question the veracity of what one thinks to be true, or to grow in any meaningful way.
The result we see in the classroom is desultory paper-shuffling and audible relief when class is over. When applied on an institutional level we get...well...what has the last ten years taught us?
By the way, if no one has ever seen the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address, it's the single best demolition of the format I have ever seen
*I know this wasn't Sellin's main point in the article, but it's important to me, anyway
No comments:
Post a Comment