Anti-teaching ... really?

In my day job, I have to deal a lot with trying to get adult-education teachers and vocational trainers into the 21st century. In other words, I have been tasked with helping get our collective head around the latest information and communication technology (ICT). It's not an easy job, and it's not a pretty picture. This is not because this class of educator is particularly put off by new technology, it's more of case of them not seeing why it may be useful. After all, we've been talking at students and seminar participants for years now, and nobody's really complained, and they seem to be getting it, and their employers are generally satisfied ... so why all this new stuff?

I find the question particularly legitimate. Have we really shown that there is any advantage to ICT in any classroom. On the one hand, we have the fact that an increasing number of our learners are simply at home in the new technologies. In one of the EU projects in which I am involved (TeNeGEN: Connect the TEachers to reach and teach the NEt GENeration www.tenegen.eu), this was the starting point for developing materials and courses to help get our target group more up-to-speed with their students. Sure, we're making some progress, but there is a deeper issue involved, namely change.

It's not so much that our target group educators are anti-technology, for I'm convinced that most of them are not, rather, we need to think about new ways of structuring, organizing and facilitating instruction. As was mentioned in the last posting, involvement and interaction and doing and experience are especially important factors in the learning process. We've known this for a long time now, but only recently has enough momentum built that we can actually start acting upon this knowledge.

One of those whose blazing the trail into the areas of new learning is Mike Wesch at Kansas State University. If you haven't already, I can only recommend and encourage you to stop over and take a look at his "Brief Philosophy of Anti-Teaching" which was originally published on the Savage Minds blog. This is a great introduction to thinking differently about what we're doing in the classroom. And, for those of you who are more visual, there's a YouTube video from him that is worth a watch, too.