who are the sheepwalkers–students or us?

I have been doing lots of thinking about purpose. I Just can’t seem to “go along to get along.” I don’t want to be a “sheepwalker.” and I don’t want to create sheepwalkers. My purpose is to live every day, right out loud, and in connection with other loud people.

Then there is my job. Many times in this blog I have complained about trying to figure out my role as the “teaching person” in a technology group. I am living in the crevice of a transformation that is happening in so many areas. What I am thinking about today is that transformation is hard and takes a long time. No less a person than George Siemens echoes my feelings:

Feeling a bit hopeless…

I attended a keynote presentation today - the equivalent of last gasp of traditional education viewpoints. The bulk of the session focused on essentially saying “don’t use technology in teaching, be engaging instead”. …

Higher education is deeply entrenched in its historical rituals; research, tenure, publishing, and recognition. Teaching has been largely ignored. But, I think that’s changing. Statements of “scholarship of teaching and learning” are more common in mission statements, now even reflected in tenure considerations. The dichotomy of teaching and technology is falsely conceptualized…and arguing too strongly in either camp essentially reflects preservation of ideals rather than true consideration of the learning, the context of learning, the nature of society today, the type of future learners with inherit, and so on.

I agree with Siemens, but I also have to take it one step more. The comment “don’t use technology in teaching, be engaging instead” gets me right where I live. People commenting on his blog post rightly asked “Why is it either/or?” But no one looked at the logic embedded in the second half of that statement. Is it really the highest calling of a teacher to “be engaging?” Night club singers, comedians, and dramatic actors, yes. Teachers? I don’t think so. Engaging students in learning is different from “being engaging.”
My understanding of learning has changed so much in the last ten years. I feel physically ill when my own children talk about their school daze in a system which insists on shoveling content. I now what what a course can be like. I hope for my own kids that they will someday get to experience learning with mentors like Barbara Ganley . I think courses at their best are learning communities. And community is at the heart of Web 2.0. You can argue wether we are creating networks or ecologies

but to do that is to have skipped past the part where you change your notion of the passive learner. And this where sheepwalking comes in (you knew I was getting back to that, right?)

Professors often complain about their students, how they don’t engage in the life of the mind. But what are we doing that either creates or combats this? There are 2 major roadblocks: 1. students who get to higher ed have been really successful in a system that rewards sheepwalking. 2. professors have come out of that system too, and in fact still live in it.

So when a teacher opens the class saying “we are going to create the syllabus together,” students freak and drop the course. And if students aren’t happy, the faculty member’s student evals are low, that affects their pay and tenure. A recent article in the Times about Harvard’s move to focus on good teaching has been getting passed around on our campus. I asked someone who sent it to me what faculty reaction they had heard. It was predictable: nothing will change until the tenure process rewards teaching.

Are we saying that we’ll wake up after everyone else does??

And that is why I continue to work in a Teaching and Technology Center. Because it is really about learning communities and the internet makes so many things possible. The conversation has to happen on many levels at once: how do people learn? how can we help them learn? what is worth learning? I find that the people least likely to Baa-aaa these days are my ed-techie friends! It is a great place to be : )