Thanks Vanalyne, for bringing up this important aspect of learning. Indeed, what's often forgotten around these discussions is that learning is social. When I think about what I learned during college that was ultimately most important to my life, it seems to me that most of it would have been impossible without both the open-ended social interaction that occurred in the classroom and the informal conviviality that occurred outside of the classroom. I am skeptical that this can be replicated in solely virtual environments. <br>
<br>Lucia<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:30 AM, VANALYNE GREEN <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:v.green@leeds.ac.uk" target="_blank">v.green@leeds.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<font face="Skia, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Hi, from someone who hasn’t contributed in a while. Perhaps this voice will seem a bit out-of-place, so I take that risk. I’ve followed snippets of the thread about education and I feel as if I’m living it out in the UK higher education system. <br>
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What often seems missing to me from the discussions is the idea of a ‘scene.’ I’m not discussing parties, though that may be included, in a college education. What I really mean is an environment that is less about what happens in a course and more about what happens outside the course but because of good leadership or teaching. I felt fortunate to have that at Cal Arts. One of my teachers (Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), gave us problem sets where we had to create simultaneous social situations in and around her class. This made the teaching less centered on the teacher and a thousand times more dynamic. What I wonder is: how to create ‘scenes’ via courses that are more dependent on web-based learning? <br>
<br>
I use Project Implicit as a starting point for talking about unconscious bias but there has to be a lot of work done in advance of students taking the test to make the classroom environment safe enough to talk about their ‘scores.’ I almost always encourage or have as a problem set the creation of a blog. Sometimes this works better than others. Sometimes, particularly shy students are liberated into speaking and being leaders in the class via the web. We use Facebook to organize events and create profiles for work done in the course. <br>
<br>
The blog activities often do have the effect of creating a scene outside the classroom, but this notion is far far away from what I think of when I think of distanced learning and is highly contingent upon time in the classroom. <br>
<br>
Gates’s latest, by way of puzzling out my question.<br>
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<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/" target="_blank">http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/</a><br>
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Oh, and I use your chapter on collaboration, Trebor. <br><font color="#888888">
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Vanalyne</font></span></font>
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