Category: Education

Learning happens

I’ve been trying to practice more mindfulness lately and one of the things I’ve noticed as a result is how often informal learning happens. It made me think that we should create more opportunities for that – after all, isn’t a teacher one who creates opportunities for learning?

A few examples:

  • At an informal PRSSA get-together, we were sitting around a table munching on chips & salsa, and students were exchanging interview experiences. People would tell stories, share advice and resources. It hit how much the students were learning about job interviewing during that relaxed, informal conversation.
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  • When I was a graduate student at Purdue and had first started teaching, other grad. students and I would often get together and “bitch” about students and teaching. I’m now realizing that those bitching sessions were actually learning sessions – we learned a lot from each other about classroom management, assignments, and new exercises to use in our classes.
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  • I was sitting in my office with a couple of students earlier today talking about a report they have to write about Career Launch Day. One of the students interrupted me to ask “Where did you learn this? How do you know so much?” Compliment aside, I realize her question marked an instance of learning. She was learning something new during our informal conversation.

My previous employer, the University of Dayton, had launched this program to encourage informal interaction between faculty and students. For example, I could host a book club at my house, and the university would pay for pizza. I left UD before I got a chance to take advantage of that program, but I now understand they were on to something: Creating opportunities for informal learning.

The Clemson culture is more formal than UD, where it was usual for faculty to go out to lunch with undergraduate students – so, other than PRSSA meetings, I don’t see many opportunities for informal learning here.

How can educators create more opportunities for informal learning? Or should we? Will students count it as “real” learning? Will administrators?

Even outside academia, I hope we’ll take that second to acknowledge and appreciate when learning happens – many times not at formal lectures and conferences, but on the beach or over a beer…

Do you have any informal learning stories? Care to share?

M.A. in Twitter studies

My department chair sent me this piece of Higher Ed news about a new social media Master’s program in the U.K.

The article hints to a bit of a debate about the utility and need for such a program. In case there is one, let me throw in my 2 cents: TV watching doesn’t make one an expert in media studies; Same with Twitter and Facebook use. So, as long as the M.A. program doesn’t just teach people how to tweet, it should be an interesting one!

How do you learn?

I just love this ad:

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Learning how people learn and then customizing education to fit their needs – we need to recognize that learning today might not be what it was back when people looked to the teacher for all information and guidance.

How do you learn? How does learning happen for you, naturally, outside of the requirements of school? Tell me a story of when you wanted to learn something and you learned it. What motivated you? What did you do to learn? How did you learn? Did you learn? Is that knowledge still with you?

The teacher’s (emotional) life

[This post is also inspired by this amazing memoir/reflection on academia, A Life in School.]

Academics’ emotional lives are not often topics of discussion, though depression is rampant among academics – I remember seeing an Art Bochner column in Spectra on the topic.

Academics, especially those in the humanities, live very isolated lives. We’re trained to be independent thinkers, we’re not required to work together, and we are evaluated individually – sometimes we’re in competition with each other. So unlike other professions, in our workplace there’s no community to belong to. No team spirit. You’d be amazed to see how little conversation there is in the hallways of Communication departments.

But we’re human, and we find the community we crave in students. For one semester, 1-2 times a week, we’re part of a group, leaders of a pack.

And it’s more than that: Teaching, to me, is an act of care and love. I don’t understand how you can teach someone, how the minds can come into communion, in the absence of care and love.

Every semester, I get emotionally invested in my students’ success. I wake up at night worried about their assignments and email them ideas; I worry about them finding jobs and internships; I cry because I’m so proud of them when they succeed. I don’t always do the best thing (I’m still learning and growing as an educator), but everything I do comes out of a place of love.

And then the semester ends.

I hate being left behind in the empty classroom.

I usually cry.

I can’t handle the thought that this wonderful little community (with its quirks, inside jokes, and little traditions) we have created in class is gone.

Dr. V 3: Friends

I don’t think this is healthy. But no one ever talks about it and how to deal with it. I think teachers need emotional support and training – how do you deal with the many emotions associated with teaching, with working with people?

I don’t know, how do you deal with them?

What does blogging teach?

[cross-posted from my teaching blog PRinciples]

I’ll be honest with you, I used to think that making students blog for a grade is a bad idea. I mean, making them put themselves out there?!

But then I realized that blogging is a necessity – and there’s no other way to learn it. Just like I teach news releases, I have to teach blogging. Just like students have to write news releases, they need to blog, too.

Some students might find out that they hate news releases. Others might find out they hate blogging. I say, it’s better to find out earlier rather than later, so they can adjust their career paths and expectations.

The semester’s coming to an end, and it all of a sudden dawned on me that blogging has taught my students some very important lessons, which will be useful even if they don’t choose to go into PR:

  • articulating thoughts and opinions
  • taking responsibility for thoughts and opinions by making them public
  • attributing ideas through linking
  • networking online, building relationships with like-minded people through commenting & linking

If you have tried blogging, can you tell me in the comments:

What has blogging taught you?

Soul Murder (revisiting EDUCATION)

M. Wesch is at it again. His latest blog post revisits his video A Vision of Students Today and the inadequacy of the current education system. He calls it soul murder, referring to this book.

Wesch nails it right on the head when he explains that our education system, rooms included, is designed for a world in which information is scarce.

In this world, the teacher is the provider of information.

This is not the world we live in anymore.

The problem in our world is not access to information: It is access to too much information. Education should solve a new set of problems.

I don’t have THE answer – neither does Wesch, though he’s much closer to it than I am. But I can’t help but think about it most of the time. Here are some thoughts about what education should do to serve students in this day and age:

If the teacher is no longer the provider of information, maybe the teacher should be a guide to (parts of) the information space. A coach.

The teacher’s job becomes (not an exhaustive list):

  • to guide students through advanced, highly targeted search techniques in several (kinds of) information spaces
  • to help students map out the fragmented, multivocal information space; or to provide through schemata for reconciling this pluralirty and fragmentation (postmodernism, anyone?)
  • to help students make judgments about selecting and evaluating information
  • to coach students about synthesizing and organizing these different types of information
  • to teach students the skill of decision making: students should make decisions about the most effective ways to present information – instead of giving them recipes for papers, allow students to make decisions about presenting information
  • to create learning experiences where students use the above techniques to solve real-life problems
  • to adapt teaching style to students’ learning and technology usage styles
  • in short, to coach flexible and nimble thinking, decision making, and adaptable communication/writing skills

What do you think? What are the ways in which the education system is failing? What should education do for students? What should the teacher’s job be?

Students live-twitter class

It’s long overdue, but here is my post about the PRinciples class session that was live-twittered.

I started class with these instructions for students:

  • Unprotect updates (settings)
  • Use Web interface & reload page often
  • Use #principles hashtag – twemes
  • Tweet: Important ideas, Links, Comments

Then I set them free and started lecturing about social media: What it is, and how it has changed power dynamics in society. I remember telling students that social media lets people inside the Golden Wall – telling them that as I was speaking, they could twitter what I said, and that was scary: What if I said something stupid? I also told them that social media makes it possible for individuals to have voices as loud as those of rich organizations.

Then Laura Fitton (@pistachio) joined us on Skype, and the live-twittering continued.

During that one hour, the conversation coming from our class was at the top of twitter conversation tracking boards twitscoop and current.fm.

The most powerful take-aways for me were:

  1. We LIVED the concepts I had just talked about at the beginning of class. We saw our voice climb up among twitter conversations. Tweets from a small group of mostly young women were at the top of the charts. We experienced the shifted power dynamics brought about by social media.
  2. For me as the teacher, the experience was terrifying and liberating. It was like living the nightmare that you’re naked in public. My students might not tweet negative things about me, but if I do say something stupid, as I often do, it doesn’t stay within the classroom -it’s out there for the whole world to see. So, CAUTION: This exercise is not for everybody. It certainly wasn’t for this NYU professor.
  3. Learning happened – quickly and powerfully as an avalanche. It was important to give students time to reflect on what they learned. Here are some of their reflections: Alyssa, Cara, Michael, Sallie.
  4. The downside: This experiment made apparent several opportunities for twitter spam, which I won’t explain because I don’t want to teach people how to spam.

You can read everything that was twittered during class, or just my favorites. Students still twitter during class, and I see and comment on their tweets afterwards – it’s allowed and encouraged, but not required – they should be free to take notes in whatever medium serves them best. I would like to experiment in the future with collective note taking (I’m looking into NoteMesh) and with CoverItLive.