At a meeting to discuss the findings of a university task force on teaching and career development, Harvard professors called student apathy for learning–expressed by classroom Web surfing and lack of energy–an “elephant in the room” contributing to a decline in the quality of classroom and general education at the university.

(Via Web Surfing is Elephant in Harvard Faculty Room)

When I’m not on the clock at CSP, I spend a lot of time reading and researchign about technology in the classroom, and community building collaborative tools. I even developed a WebCT course to teach the use of wiki’s, blogs, and podcasts in the classroom.

I believe this particular issue has two different solutions:

• Students do need to be held a higher level of accountability.
• However, classrooms need to become more interactive. There is no longer any need for information dissemination.

You actually can find anything on the internet these days. Students can find answers to any question on the internet with only a few clicks. What they can’t learn on the internet is how to think, how to interact with other thinkers, or especially how to develop their own thoughts. These are the types of experiences and education using collaborative environments in the classroom can provide.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under communication, instructional technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.