A Reflection on a Michael Welsh TED Talk

Learning in New Media Environments



Mike starts off talking about his experience in a remote village in Indonesia that had little contact with the outside world, and the substantial changes that occurred when a new media was introduced.  From here he launches into the main point of his argument that the current structure of university classrooms breeds common issues that teach students to ask the wrong questions.  His goal is to move students from learning discrete content knowledge to learning skills that are usable across subjects and media and gives a few examples of how he has used media to move in that direction, focusing on a project that involves student making simulations of world history and trying to solve the problems that come up.  Students are rarely completely successful at the project but they leave the class with lots of the right questions.

It's an interesting video to watch as someone who is still taking university courses.  On the one hand I have lead a rather accomplished academic career and consider myself a "knowledge-able" learner as he terms it, and I achieved this is the same system he is critiquing.  His talk definitely made me think about how much more entertaining and fulfilling the path could have been should I have had a majority of the instruction from teachers like him.  The courses I am currently in are a blend of the old and the new models, and both still seem to serve the students well for their intended purposes.

Since I am in a graduate school of education with a well respected staff, I can assume that the majority of professors have seen this video or one like it that espouses the same educational ideals.  Assuming that they all agree that the old model needs fixing, the fact that not all of them have shifted away from it speaks to the difficulty of the task.  Either due to some innate difficulty or that we have been steeped for so long in the old model, or some hybrid of the two, it is apparent that is not a proverbial flick of the switch.

For my own teaching this means that I must reflect purposefully on all my methods and how they are helping students become "knowledge-able" and guiding them towards the right kinds of questions.