Today’s teachers are experiencing a new kind of student. I enjoyed the brief summary provided by the following article:

Waters, John K. (12/13/2011).  Broadband, Social Networks, and Mobility Have Spawned a New Kind of Learner. THE Journal. Retrieved 12/19/2011 from http://thejournal.com/Articles/2011/12/13/Broadband-Social-Networks-and-Mobility.aspx?Page=1.

Quoting from the article:

Students are different today because of technology. Every educator knows this, of course, but this change is about much more than agile thumbs, shriveling attention spans, and OMG'd vocabularies. According the Pew Research Center, the combination of widespread access to broadband Internet connectivity, the popularity of social networking, and the near ubiquity of mobile computing is producing a fundamentally new kind of learner, one that is self-directed, better equipped to capture information, more reliant on feedback from peers, more inclined to collaborate, and more oriented toward being their own "nodes of production."

I guess I am getting out of date. I don’t know the meaning of OMG’d vocabularies. Even after spending time browsing definitions of OMG on the Web, I am still not sure what the term means. I gather it stands for “Oh my gosh.” Or perhaps, “Oh my goodness.” I still don't know what OMG'd vocabularies are.

The key idea in the article is that most teenagers make extensive use of the Internet. While some of this use is related to the school curriculum, most is not. What I found interesting is to compare the “new kind of learner” with my impression of the school curriculum content,  instruction, and assessment.

Take the statement of learners being self-directed. Standards, textbooks, and teachers mainly define the school curriculum. Such a curriculum is not one that fosters and makes use of learners being self-directed in the curriculum areas.

Back when I was a teacher of teachers, I was always somewhat amused by the skills preservice teachers displayed in “leading me astray.” A well-posed question would invariably lead me off my lesson plan. And… I reveled in the glory of this happening! I had written the books that were assigned reading in the courses I taught. So, it made little sense to me that I should “lecture” about their content. What was fun was to get the class involved in exploration of related and new ideas—what should education be like as computer technology gets better and better, and more and more available.

However, the precollege teacher is constrained in such deviations from the required curriculum. And—in my opinion—there’s the rub. Computer technology empowers its users. Our school system is not very good at taking advantage of such empowerment. My students recognized this challenge, and we often discussed how to be an effective change agent in a school.

I repeatedly came back to the idea expressed in the following question:

If a computer system ca solve or substantially help in solving a type of problem we are studying in a course, what should students be learning about solving this type of problem?

A related question is memorization versus information retrieval. As information retrieval system get both better and more comprehensive, a “memorize, regurgitate, and forget” approach to education becomes less and less appropriate. Each teacher can make changes that move curriculum content, instruction, and assessment more in the direction of learning for understanding and learning to make effective use of information retrieval systems.

What Teachers Can Do

In each of my IAE Blog entries, I briefly explore an idea that to me seems related to improving education. The key idea in this particular blog entry is that the world and students in this world are changing faster than our educational system can accommodate the change. Tea hers and parents are part of this changing world and they are faced by the problem of trying to accommodate to the ongoing changes. 

It seems to me that this situation creates a great opportunity for teachers and parents to initiate conversations with younger folks about the challenges that each individually and as a group faces. In my opinion, such given and take open conversations should be a standard part of the content and instructional process in each course/subject students are studying. In such discussions, teachers can learn from their students and vice versa.