E- Learning

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Some paraphrased thoughts from Leonardo's Laptop by Ben Shneiderman

Memorable educational experiences are joyful and transformational. They enrich students with increased knowledge and skills, provide them with a satisfying sense of accomplishment, and reshape their expectations. In these compelling situations, students are driven by intense motivation that propels them to solve challenging problems and fills them with the thrill of accomplishment. They are proud of what they have done, have a clearer sense of who they are, and are ready to take greater responsibility for their education.

Engaging experiences are often generated by an individual or team project that leads to a satisfying outcome. Enthusiasm is often high in class plays, orchestral performances, debate team tournaments, and science fair projects. Active learning intergrates the new computing to create collaborative team experiences based upon ambitious, authentic, service oriented projects.

The old education emphasized acquiring facts and chunks of information that could be packaged into small teachable and testable units. Memorizing dates for Napoleon's rule, names of the U.S. presidents, or rivers of Africa is less relevant in an age of ubiquitous information. The new education accentuates critical thinking, analytic strategies, and working with people: family, friends, neighbors and colleagues, and citizens and markets. These goals are tied to improving communication skills and creative problem solving.

The old education emphasized competition, especially when students were graded on a curve. Since only a fraction of the students could earn an A, the need to beat your classmates and attract attention often dominated the need to learn. Students were prohibited from reading each others work and required to work independently. The new education emphasizes collaboration, often requiring students to read each other's work. When the goals shift to improving the quality of every student's work, the grading must shift to allow every student to earn an A (See Chart). This does not mean the lowering of standards, but a greater effort to motivate and guide every student to reach high levels of skill and knowledge.

Information and communications technologies facilitate active learning and collaborative teaching methods. Students can create remarkable products and coordinate their work more easily using these technologies.

Paper and books changed the content of education because memorizing lists of English royalty or medicinal plants gave way to consulting extensive royal genealogies or detailed pharmacological tables. Powerful technologies change our expectations and curricula.

Paper has an even more potent role than as a storehouse of knowledge. It achieves remarkable power when it is a blank sheet, inviting student creativity. But transformational insight that students should be more than copiers took centuries to emerge, and must have been difficult to promote. By now, teachers assume that students should write as well as read.

Listening to radio and CDs and watching TV and videotapes have been proposed as educational panaceas, but they too have become only multimedia components to be wheeled into the classroom. These are largely passive media, offering limited capability for students to be creative, unless educators shift their focus to student content generating using these media. Once again, it is taking decades for educators to recognize that the most potent use of videotapes happens when a teacher offers blank ones to students.

Similarly, computers and the WWW cannot be a solution to educational needs unless the creative components are included. We have to do more than teach our kids to surf the web; we have to teach them to make waves. Finding web resources is fine; creating new ones is the key to the new education.