What do you want from a teacher?

[pmb]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education. I'm pretty sure that having a teacher is essential to the learning process, but the contents of a lecture/class/lab/whatever now have to be ... what? Certainly different in some way - slowly dealing out facts in dribs and drabs is old school (hah!) and boring, ignoring those facts and zooming in to discuss implications and intuition is nice, but lends itself too readily to surface-level-only understanding.

The middle path seems like a nice compromise, with facts dashed across the board quickly and then intuition discussed aloud followed by homework assignments that require a solid understanding of the facts, but my own intuition is screaming at me that I am looking at things on the wrong axis somehow. Like I have divided everything into left/right and ignored some crucial up/down aspect that will simplify the whole matter.

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class? Facts? Intuition? A bit of both? A check mark on your transcript? Are online classes consisting of prerecorded lectures a good idea? Would you go to school via podcast? Why or why not? What would the podcast be missing that more traditional schooling provides?

Answers that include how class should change in light of emerging technologies and trends like MIT's Open Courseware initiative will be given double bonus extra credit.

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Comments

[cabanasloth.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting question. After some thought, I'm going to have to disagree with your premise:

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education.

While this may be true in some fields (e.g. computer science), it remains far from true in others. What information there is readily available and packaged at an instructional level in neuroscience (to take one arbitrary example) is typically both superficial and ~10 years out of date. In this respect, the internet is really little different from a second textbook. Thus it hasn't had a fundamental impact on the relationship of a teacher to their class.

I'll skip over the "what should teachers teach" aspect of your question, since far smarter people than I have tackled this one, and get on to "how class should change in light of emerging technologies":

What *would* make a difference would be widely available and high-quality instructional animations. The difficult aspects of what I teach aren't the static "facts" as such, as my kids can do a fine job rattling those off back at me, but gaining an understanding of the underlying dynamic processes that we're trying to describe. Here's an example: the most difficult thing we've taught so far this semester is basically "how your eye builds a bandpass filter" (keep in mind these are sophomore psychology students, so using the words "bandpass" or "filter" is right out). To try to get this across, I end up jumping around in front of the class and waving my arms a lot, but what I'm *really* trying to do is to convey a sense of the dynamics in the eye ("light *here* makes this cell want to fire more, but at the same time light over *here* makes the cell fire less..."). You could replace me with a nice instructional video and everyone would be both happier and less embarrassed.

But, those things are both difficult and time consuming to make, and I'd argue they require a level of specialized knowledge of the subject matter that is actually *beyond* that required to teach in front of a class - if the details of a certain part of this process aren't clear to me, I can just gloss over it as I'm presenting it, but if you're constructing something for widespread use, you'd better get it right. The set of people who have both the skills to create an animation *and* the level of subject knowledge to make it accurate is not only finite and small, but those people have lots of other things to be doing with their time.

This isn't something that can be solved by an increase in bandwidth. It *could* be greatly helped by a freely available and easy to use animation tool - Flash might actually suffice for this.

(In a similar vein, I'd argue that Powerpoint (etc) has actually greatly *helped* the quality of instruction in my field, since it allows complicated diagrams to be easily reproduced on screen in front of a lecture hall. This helps immensely when you're trying to convey static information (e.g. parts of the eye, what goes where...) but doesn't do a hell of a lot for dynamics. Now, where are the static diagrams we're showing on Powerpoint coming from? Well, they're coming from the interweb, and so this particular widespread availability of information has been quite helpful - but fundamentally you aren't getting anything different from a really nice powerpoint slide than you could get from a similar quality page in a textbook.)

So there.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

While this may be true in some fields (e.g. computer science), it remains far from true in others. What information there is readily available and packaged at an instructional level in neuroscience (to take one arbitrary example) is typically both superficial and ~10 years out of date. In this respect, the internet is really little different from a second textbook. Thus it hasn't had a fundamental impact on the relationship of a teacher to their class.

Perhaps a good rule of thumb might be that people should try and gravitate towards fields with the crappiest and most out-of-date textbooks, because those are the fields where research and progress is the most active....

The most interesting parts of CS (to me) are also those that have almost no textbook, and it sounds like ALL of neuroscience is like that.