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OMG: Universities are Change…Change…Changing???

August 1, 2007 By Will Richardson

George Siemens pointed to this article at News.com titled Web 2.0: Big app on campus. Some of the highlights:

“That interaction between student and professor is going to become more prominent where you have already read about or watched the lecture online. The days of the large university with a 300-person lecture hall are over,” said Schooley. “Universities will be built very differently, with the concentration on workshop life.”

And:

“Every term I would get someone coming up and saying ‘Dr. Hartman, here’s the paper from the five of us, but I did most of the work.’ Short of rolling out the Spanish Inquisition, there’s not much you can do about it at that point,” said Hartman. “With wikis, I can see who pulled the load and who didn’t do anything.”

And:

Universities are not just limiting tools to professors and classrooms. Students are given server space to develop Web sites, RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, videos, discussion boards and e-mail groups for clubs, groups and political campaigns.

Dang. Does this mean we have to start preparing our high school kids for that?

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Comments

  1. Carl Zetterlund says

    August 1, 2007 at 8:49 pm

    That sounds great! My concern is all about execution. I recently graduated from the Univ of Texas at Austin. I recall having tons of tools available for teachers and students. UT was usually pretty good at it, but many teachers are just stuck in their old ways.

    Getting Web 2.0 technology is great and is the first step by making teachers change and incorporate is another.

    Anyway, the article is a great sign that progress is being made :).

  2. mrsdurff says

    August 2, 2007 at 12:05 am

    I just took an online course with a very traditional online industrial age professor and I so wish I had the web2.0 challenges mentioned here. I think I would have been able to do such a better job.
    This begs the question, exactly which tools need we implement and facilitate at the k12 level in preparation for the work world and/or the college/university world. familiarity with which tools is not essential at the k12 level?

  3. Alan Levine says

    August 2, 2007 at 12:56 am

    Interesting set of examples slapped with a “Web 2.0” label – email to new students? Blackboard? iTunesU? Camtasia? Posting videos on a server (and yanking them away at the end of a semester)? Second Life? That’s “read/write” web?

    Then again its wrong to focus on the “tools” which will continue to be in flux, tossed, beta, turned over. It’s the processes of learning, of operating in a collaborative space, of communication of evaluating information, of content creation that matter.

    It’s not the tools that matter, it’s the craft.

  4. Aaron says

    August 3, 2007 at 10:33 am

    Wow Will, I am begin to understand your belief that we are teaching the wrong skill set in our school. If the colleges are focusing on these collaborative networks, we as secondary educators need to prepare them.

  5. Jonathan Orr says

    August 12, 2007 at 12:17 am

    When talking to high school educators I think this could be a powerful article for them to ponder. I keep getting the statement “We are preparing them for college, we should teach them like they going to college.” I can now respond yes we should, because college is not what it used to be and here is the proof of the change that is occurring. Getting E-12 teachers out of their comfortable ways is going to be a very difficult task and this post/article is another tool for us to use.

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