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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Get your letters today! Many are still unclaimed! I may forgotten to link to someone who already did it; if so, please let me know. This is taking a while, so I think I will start stealing the answers that others have already provided...

Comments

[pearmeson.livejournal.com]

No answers precisely, but I've been thinking about the same stuff a lot -- you and I seem to hit on similar issues at the same time. Probably if I wait a few months you will have written a python app to solve the problem. :)

As for the big picture, as several people have noted, methods should be secondary to goals. A clear idea of what you as a teacher want for the students, an understanding of what the students themselves actually want, and what the institution, family, society and other "stakeholders" want should be the first step (or at least concurrent with figuring out the methods). I'm into social constructivism, being a "guide on the side" as Steuard says. I do think the facts, inasmuch as there are facts, are out there and available (at least in the areas I would be teaching, .

For those that see education as fact-centered, or certification driven, it is probably pretty obvious how to take advantage of new technologies. It is probably less obvious to most people how to use the new technologies in that constructivist kind of way -- though to be frank, it is probably less obvious to most people how to do constructivism at all. The fallback position of every teaching strategy I've ever seen is the instructor standing in front of the class and talking -- because we all understand how to do that, have seen many examples of it, and have very little positive feedback on changing that (I had a student eval. this past semester that said "I shouldn't have to pay $30,000 a year to be made to feel uncomfortable while doing something the instructor should have been doing himself." -- after I had them work problems in groups for half of each discussion section, rather than show them how to do them myself )

I've been playing with moodle and .lrn a bit. I'm intrigued by moodle and its social constructivist philosophy of education -- but not as a standalone "content vehicle." I most want to play with stuff like that to help me develop curricula, course formatting, etc., and have it available for comment and feedback, and possibly advertising. When a class starts, I'd probably want to keep some of it available for student reference, and to ease some of the communication -- kind of like Martin has been doing with his wiki. So I know the students can find helpful material that is formatted to work with the classroom goals.

I'd also want to take advantage of discussion forums, wikis, and the like to have students create some of the material, discuss the work, figure out how to present it to others, etc. This may actually help some students feel more enagaged than being physically present in a classroom would -- some of the studies on online learning have found that students are _more_ likely to feel engaged through online discussions, because they don't have fear-of-speaking-in-public issues.

I think is right that one of the clearest uses of technology is in visualization, animations, interactive tutorials and the like. MIT has been playing with a particularly expensive form of that (http://icampus.mit.edu/TEAL/).

I'm encouraged that a lot of people are thinking about this -- there's been a group recently started here at BU in the physics and astronomy departments, discussing different aspects of education. We're bringing in a couple of speakers to talk about the "clickers", about TEAL, about book writing and course development, and we're all bringing in different issues that we want to learn more about. Good times. It reminds me of Professor White's class back at Mudd.