First and foremost, there is no substitute for the power of personal interaction between students and students, teachers and teachers, or students and teachers. As Janet Stemwedel eloquently points out in a response to yesterday's post:
I'm all for any technology that provides useful tools with which to build an intellectual community, but all the tools in the world won't make any difference in the absence of people who are ready and willing to be active participants in that community.
At the same time, educational environments must keep pace with the changing cultural practices of younger thinkers. In their present configurations, the educational environments we live in -- those that profess to be engaging and stimulating places of critical thinking may be outmoded and inadequate.
Sometimes I feel like the educational environments we teach in, such as the large lecture hall or the filled-to-capacity classroom are the intellectual equivalent of a catacomb. There may have been a time when these educational environments were effective for fostering a passion for life-long learning, but in today's increasingly stratified world -- a world where people are increasingly segregated by conditions of knowing and mediated experiences -- educators are challenged to keep pace with how people learn.
I should clarify what I mean when I suggest that people are increasingly segregated by conditions of knowing through mediated experiences of learning. Any learning environment, I believe is mediated experience. A classroom, lecture hall, video or even this weblog, for example, mediate conditions of knowing because they act as intervening agencies in an exchange of ideas. Some of these learning environments are more effective than others.
Similar to how people no longer consume information through a single source or channel of news, the cultural practice of learning from traditional sources such as in the classroom or in a lecture hall is also changing. There are few people that have the time to read a single newspaper from cover to cover on a daily basis and feel satisfied with the news they have consumed. In today's media-rich environment, an individual's social-identity as well as self-identity is shaped through multiple mediated experiences, all which may constitute ways of knowing.
This weekend's photojournalism retreat was a great example of how one-on-one learning far surpasses anything people can learn from a weblog or in a classroom. The interaction between students and Mike Franklin, our visiting photojournalist in-residence, was rewarding in ways that would be hard to match otherwise.
At the same time, once the weekend has ended and students have returned to their busy lives, there needs to be some ways of extending the conversations that were started. Blogging and podcasting offers educators an inexpensive and effective way of continuing the conversations.
Blogging can become part of a routine that transforms education into an extended conversation rather than a lecture.