“Remediating” education?
This course has been an valuable journey — gaining an understanding of where we’ve been in terms of text, where we currently are in the negotiation between print and hypertext, and where we might be going (the losses and the gains). I think this is true of the entire MET program — seeing where we’ve been, where we are and where we are going.
What strikes me as significant is that the foundational principles, or ideas, are nothing new. They have strong ties to visionaries in the past, who perhaps were the pioneers in their fields, who saw the potential of technology to revolutionize learning and access to knowledge. Same goes for instructional strategies and methodology — what we know and read about is not new, it had been researched and documented by education philosophers in our history.
It is odd, then, when you consider that our approaches still mimic those of the industrial age – despite wide access to information, knowledge and multimedia? Why are we lock-step in the traditional ways of presenting information?
One of the reasons, speaking from my own experience, is the lack of resources/time to plan new approaches carefully. Another systemic barrier is that the curriculum has not changed in response to our changing life-worlds. Other challenges might be institutional obstacles and technological shortfalls.
These all are excuses…but should not stand in our way to remediate education so that it better accommodates our diverse learners. We need to apply remediation to education – to take the approaches that are successful and meaningful, but to add to them other approaches that promote technological literacy and other ways of knowing/communicating, in order to provide a relevant, immediate and transparent experience for diverse learners to construct knowledge from.
J@net
Hi Janet,
Thoughtful post. There is much need for remediation in our ways of approaching education, generally and on a narrower scale. How we view learning is still shifting all the time, which it always will I think, as we understand more and more about how the brain works and how individuals construct their own knowledge.
It is important, as you mentioned, that there are many excuses we could make as to why things are the way the are within education, whether curriculum or our current ideas of institutions, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of making changes all the same. How we make these changes (once we decide what/how) will be facilitated by our ability to communicate efficiently and openly, which is one of the best things about communication technologies. Opening classrooms yes, opening schools, definitely, but opening the communication lines between individuals who have the passion, skill, and willingness to move education to the current era. That is the power of what we are doing in programs like MET. Realizing that there are others out there who want to know how to initiate change and how to grow within the field of education.
Hi Rochelle:
Thanks for your response. Yes, having the passion, skill and willingness to pioneer new ways of doing things is critical. It also requires confidence in bringing about change, something that the MET has helped me develop. I was worried that my post was too regressive, as I sometimes get impatient with my colleagues for being “old school” and teaching only the way they were taught. But I will soldier on, and hopefully support them to try new ways.
Cheers!