I was recently a guest speaker in a local private university. The course was Advanced Public Speaking and the topic was "visualizing information". At the end of the design workshop, one of the 12 backward hat wearing, mac book toting, slumped shouldered, upper middle class students turned to me and said "this is the first 2 hours in my three years at school that I paid attention and learned something." This university is currently 21k a year. Sixty-three thousand dollars is a high price for boredom. Boredom should be free.
This experience left me with a single question "when did our educational system become the equivalent of a generational lobotomy?"
Check out this cool video and think about how we could do it differently.
Boredom Should Be Free. Education Should Be Meaningful.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Posted by A. Martin at 11:42 AM
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1 comments:
Pretty cool. Thank God for liberal arts schools... I certainly don't have the problem of being a number in a crowd at Washington & Lee and now that I'm taking upper level classes they're mostly under 20 people and discussion oriented with minimal chalkboard writing.
One thing I think we could improve a lot upon is our integrated use of technology. We have Blackboard, but only some professors use it so it kind of defeats the purpose of it. Interestingly enough, my music professor, who isn't even allowed to teach 3 credit classes by himself because he doesn't have a PhD, is the best at facilitating an engaging learning environment, in and out of the classroom. He posts all our projects to our MUS397 podcast here: http://music.wlu.edu/content/blogcategory/44/89/ so we can all appreciate and learn from each others' work. Every Sunday night we have a film screening dealing with that week's topic. He's even working heavily with the administration on finally getting iTunes U up and running at the school.
Man, I'm so pumped for this summer.
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