It's All About the Learning

Web 2.0 for Passages 2008View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 stanly)

View my page on Work Literacy

View my page on College 2.0

Crunch time here so very little blogging time. Besides, I must say that trying to whip your dissertation proposal into shape leaves little incentive for more writing.This terrific white paper on collaboration, though, caught my eye. [Link to full article at Anecdote]. Actually, what caught my eye was this sentence in the introduction:Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught.Now, as a "teacher" of long standing and a concerned community college professional, that concerns me. Why are we "rarely taught" to collaborate? As discussed in this white paper, tomorrow's workers will need to collaborate as never before. And, sheesh .. aren't these new millennial gensters supposed to be master collaborators to the exclusion of any interest in one-on-one discussion?Is it possible that formal educational didactic environments remove natural instincts for collaboration in favor of "group work" that most people I know claim to hate. Maybe our formal learning "group work" needs to start with teaching our students HOW to function in those groups; teach them HOW to collaborate. Consensus building, constructive evaluation, evolving leadership all are components that would serve our students well.

The instructional areas of our community college are just starting to be exposed to the "Millennial Generation" and are very perplexed by what they see. Our faculty senate just sent a letter to our compatriots in other community colleges in our state to see if they have developed any answers to "problems" like:"apathy with classroom participation and discussion lack of responsibility for outside assignments lack of etiquette toward instructors/students disregard of proper cell phone use".Our vice-president of instruction pointed to this You-Tube video:Her take was that those of us who are members of the "Baby Boomer" generation have forgotten that we were probably the most disrespectful, rabble rousing, standards changing bunch in a long time and that our teachers MUST have had to change things to accommodate our learning needs.We have conversed extensively about the traits of this new generation, but it doesn't seem to have an impact with us as we continually try to "teach" using the techniques we learn best with, rather than those preferred by these new learners.I ran across this comparison recently in an Eric document that illuminated these differences for me.(Kiesa, A., Orlowski, A. P., Levine, P., Both, D., Kirby, E. H., Lopez, M. H., et al. (2007). Millennials talk politics: A study of college student political engagement: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)).