Malcolm's essay “NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon” has gotten me thinking all weekend about my own “daughter 1 and daughter 2” who are scheduled to enter college (unless their 529 implodes further) in 2015 and 2017 respectively.
*Note: This essay is to help me think through an article I'd like to write – hopefully with my brother – so consider it a process of publicly thinking – critiques requested! Maybe I could convince Malcolm to run this as a “counterpoint” piece.....
The main critique I have of Malcolm's piece (see comments) are that from my observations students today continue to accept the traditional “college bargain” of a lecture model and information scarcity, even if the tools they use have changed. Same music, different instruments.
These critique is mostly informed by spending time with my brother at an elite institution we will call “Duke”, where he is currently a senior. I've visited Max a couple of times in Durham, accompanying him to class and taking his friends out to dinner for Asian fusion.
The class I sat in with Max was in economics. Max liked this class. I saw a traditional lecture in a lecture hall, with about 50 students, with all the students sitting politely while Facebooking away (and sometimes taking notes). The class was “student centered” in the sense that the professor lectured interactively and related the material to topics that might be of interest to the students, but a visitor from 1808 would not feel out place in the lecture.
Over dinner I asked Max and his (soon to be graduating) friends what would they do to change or improve their college experiences. They talked about parking. They talked about the food. They talked about the dorms. They talked about basketball tickets. They talked about wanting to be part of the local community. No one talked about getting rid of lectures. No one talked about how they wish their classes employed “social learning”. No one talked about how they wanted their classes set-up so they could be “producers” and “creators”. They didn't mention “active learning” or “constructivism” once.
Now maybe my sample was too small (5 slightly tipsy college seniors slurping down noodles). Maybe I asked the wrong questions. Maybe they thought their friends brother was a dork from another planet. The point is that I don't see todays students at elite institutions demanding a change from the central orthodoxy. If they are demanding a move towards student-centered learning that leverages technology to turn larger classes into “virtual seminars” then I'm not being invited to the meetings.
For what it's worth, my brother and his friends agreed with my diagnosis. They are simply not perturbed by the lecture. They figure that some professors are great lecturers, some are bad, and most are in between. They are lucky to get the good ones, and will try to sign-up for those classes. But sometimes a bad or even average lecture class is the price one pays for working towards a major and for getting the prestigious credential. Besides, it's not so bad as even in the worst lectures you can catch-up with friends on Facebook!
My theory is that my brother and his friends, the technologically sophisticated students whose technology is embedded into their daily lives (as Malcolm describes), honestly don't know that there is an alternative way to organize an education. They accept the status quo because they do not realize that this status quo was created, was constructed, and is not pre-ordained. They accept the status quo because they have worked all their lives to get into the elite institution, and the last thing they are going to do now is challenge the organization of the institution they have sacrificed so much for (in both effort and treasure) to attend. Besides, they don't have time to challenge a faculty-based system, they are way too busy. Even if they had an alternative model, could articulate a different reality, it would not be a rational act to try to change a system that is both based on tradition and would only yield (marginal) changes long after they walked out the gates.
What fascinates me about college students today is the mismatch between the number of domains they are “2.0” vs. where they seem to me to be “stuck” in a “1.0” mode. They are 2.0 in how they interact with many of the institutions and industries that defined so much of our economic and cultural life over my lifetime.
My brother and his fellow college students don't go to the movies. They download. They don't buy albums, they download songs. They don't watch TV (they don't own TVs), rather they download or stream – and consume on their laptops or iPods. They make calls from their smart phones (they don't have land lines). Actually, they text from their smart phones, share images from their smart phones, Twitter from their smart phones, watch videos from their smart phones (and tomorrow they will be interacting with their schools CMS and consuming curriculum from this device).
This has not just been a change in the tools they use – but a change in attitudes and behaviors. Since they are no longer recipients of what the broadcasters or studios are putting out they consume a much larger variety of media then I ever imagine existed when I was 20. They develop deep interests in things I know little about, and then proceed to spend enormous amounts of time with the communities and artifacts of that community. The arbiters of “popular”, the record companies, to 40 lists, movie studios, TV schedulers etc. who held so much power for so long are simply irrelevant to my brother and his cohort. Much as I wouldn't have wanted to own a music label or a CD store in the early years of the 21st century, I wouldn't want to be a major investor in movie theater chains, television or radio stations, or any business that relies on a scarcity of content and controls on the format to survive.
So as technology has enabled today's college students to both disagregate and construct their own media experiences, to bypass traditional industries and institutions so as to make them irrelevant (just ask them what they think of the RIAA or the MPAA), the same technology has only changed their educational experience at the margins. They love lecture capture but accept the lecture. They appreciate the PowerPoint uploaded to Blackboard but never question why they are not creating that PowerPoint on the material to begin with. In so much of their life they have upended traditional relationships between the “producer” and the “consumer”, using tools such as the Web and mobile devices to become the producers and making choices about how, when and with what devices and formats they will be consumers. But throughout much of their educational career they remain consumers working under a model of information scarcity.
So what is to be done? How can we work towards a world so that when my girls go to college in 2015 and then 2017 that the world of the 40 to 60 person, faculty-centric lecture is as much as memory as desktop computers and record stores? How do get to NetGen 2.0?
My sense is that students will not start “demanding” an active-learning, student-centric approach until we hit a critical mass of courses that allows our students to visualize alternatives to the status quo. I also think that the transition to “active-learning” courses will not follow a linear but exponential curve, as we move into a convergence of technological fluent faculty, greater traction for the “learning” movements on campus through faculty development, seminars, workshops etc. - and the ubiquitous penetration of easy to use tools for authoring, collaboration and dissemination.
Should the lecture disappear altogether by the times my 2015 and 2017 students start their college experience? I assume that we will continue to have both gifted lecturers and some instances where large lectures are the best way to organize learning. I assume that lecture classes will predominate at larger schools as the economics of educational delivery, being a labor intense business, will require the productivity yields possible by having one professor “teach” large number of students. But I also expect that by 2015 my kids will truly be NetGen 2.0ers....in that they will be as unlikely to accept the status quo in their courses and institutions as todays students have rejected the status quo in their participation in the worlds of music, television and the movies.
Josh, these are all worthwhile considerations. I think the "NetGen" label refers to a technical paradigm, one that may or may not find expression/implementation in the higher ed context.
By the time they are seniors, it may be too late. I was struck by our own clicker assessments and that there was resistance on the part of students, to the tune of "why are you making me think?" That is, by the time they are seniors, they've figured out how to play the game of getting a A. Anything that runs counter to that paradigm of how you "do" a course will meet with some sketpicism if not resistance. I think we need to get them hooked on active engagements as early in their Dartmouth careers as we can.
In the two times I taught my Nietzsche course here, the first time was primarily with seniors, the second, with entirely first-years. The seniors seemed to be coasting, whereas the first-years were more engaged.
I think it would be rewarding to consider your assertion about your daughters, that "...they will be as unlikely to accept the status quo in their courses and institutions as todays students have rejected the status quo in their participation in the worlds of music, television and the movies." By 2015? Maybe. By that time, most of the junior faculty will be NetGens 1.0. Who knows, if my older daughter is able to complete a PhD in Biology, then she'd be one of them. This is a conversation we should definitely keep going.
Posted by: Malcolm Brown | November 17, 2008 at 12:51 PM