I agree. I was replying to Steve's assertion that it is not necessary to 'redesign teaching' (except in response to natural disasters) with a counter assertion that this isn't a choice that's been brought about by web-based technologies - it's happening anyway. M-H Michael Baron wrote:
I think the core teaching skills remain the same. It is only the delivery methods that evolve over the time. I see evolution of the classrooms as normal. The world is changing and the education industry is chaging with it.
On 5/23/07, Mary-Helen Ward <mhward@usyd.edu.au> wrote:
I'm not clear who 'we' are (people on this list? Academics?) or why we would limit this engagement to the US. Shifts in the technologies of learning are happening worldwide.
Teaching is always being redesigned - the classrooms my children sat in in the 70s and 80s bore little resemblance to the classrooms I sat in the 1950s. The classrooms my grandchildren sit in today are very different again
M-H in Australia.
Steve Jones wrote:
<nostalgia>That takes me back to my UIUC days, and PLATO...Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations.</nostalgia>
(That probably gives away my age as much as admitting I have a "record collection.")
These are the kinds of discussions in which I wish we could engage many U.S. faculty and administrators. One of the things I'm seeing on a lot of campuses the last couple of years is excitement among administrators about "blended" learning because it promises to free up classroom space, which ties into two important administrative matters, namely an interest in increasing enrollment as a means of increasing revenue, and an interest in keeping a lid on construction costs (or, in some cases, the cost of leased space). I agree that those are important matters, but I disagree that they are sufficient reasons to "re-design" teaching (though maybe in really dire circumstances, along the lines, say, of what happened in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Katrina, it would be justifiable as a temporary solution to buildings that must be rehabbed and are unusable in the meantime).