Customizing Class

It has been my pleasure to speak with so many brilliant minds coming at the challenge of education from an impressive variety of perspectives. This morning I was able to speak with one of those bright minds; University of Kentucky professor and Online Community Manager Christopher Rice (you can find him on Twitter @ricetopher and on his blog.

Christopher has been an educator for over a decade and brings a passion for technology, not from a geek perspective, but as someone searching for a way to make classes of 300 personal or at least a little more customized. Chris is an anthropologist by training which gives him great insight into human behavior and helps him to provide for the increasingly complex nature of student engagement. Chris shared with us an exciting series of stories and insights around developing and implementing uses for existing and generally free technology in the classroom. Currently, Christopher is working on launching the "Big Blue Network" a Ning based online community and supported by Hobson's.

My big takeaways from our call were:

1. Professors need time to enrich the classroom experience but that the tenure track gives no credit for that work, only for publishing.
2. People often think in extremes. Technology is this or that. Its either Second Life or Powerpoint. In light of this perspective, there seems to be a huge opportunity to visualize and prototype the digital classroom experience at a high fidelity.
3. Teachers are not continuing to learn about technology (this came up in my interview w/math professor Maria Anderson – another education hacker). This means we are a) not giving teachers the time to learn b) the rewards for learning c) properly presenting the value of learning it.
4. Despite the changing relationship with teachers due to the ubiquity of information there are still ways to create a powerful and valuable teacher student relationship.

We know that cloud computing can reduce the cost of IT in schools by up to 75% by eliminating the need to manage installations and local errors. That we are only just beginning to understand the real value or software that is freely available and widely used by students on education. Tools such as Google Docs, FaceBook, Second Life and Twitter are emerging models for compelling conversation which is what learning is based on. Engage students where they are, not where you want them to be.

The following questions and clips have been culled from our hour long discussion. Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback.

1) Was there any resistance to the adoption of technology from the faculty or University of Kentucky in general? (Download audio)
 

2) Has technology adoption in the classroom been hindered by the broken promises of the past? (Download audio)
 

3) How is the student and teacher relationship changing because of the information available to students? (Download audio)
 

4) Is there an issue of the student teacher relationship changing because of the availability of information? Or having to treat students more like peers? (Download audio)
 

5) How are you using Second Life in your class? (Download audio)
 

6) What are some of the challenges using Second Life for your classes? (Download audio)
 

7) Is the Second Life format liberating for students? (Download audio)