campusreview. com. au on campus might include a crowdsourced event or a kick-start. There are all these different ways they’ re going to go out into the world and deliver their message and solve problems.
We shouldn’ t just simply limit it to text, which is what universities and schools are primarily known for. Think about it. To this day, most of our testing is done on paper and most of our testing for math and English is simply text based, but that isn’ t the way we’ re working in the real world. We’ re scanning websites, reading magazines, getting newsfeeds and doing all kinds of things.
The power of image is also so important today. We know that as early as 6 months old a child is not only listening but seeing and those memories become experiences, and experiences are the way we learn.
Video has been around for a long time. How can universities use video now in a new way to enhance the learning experience on campus and off campus? I showed a couple of examples [ in my presentation ]. For instance, at Dartmouth University they are rethinking the way they do their freshman English class, which is a writing expository class. [ During students’] first year in their university system, they [ now ] ask them to do a video essay. They have to go find a reading they’ re doing – in [ one ] case it was The Scarlet Letter – and then find a way that it’ s relevant to the themes going on today. One student compared Fox News Network to the people who were prejudiced against Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter and that prejudice [ against ] being different and not following what everybody else is doing.
I had my students go out and in five days they had to make a five-minute video that used only five steps to teach someone how to do something. I didn’ t do any demonstrations. It had to be posted to YouTube in order to get a grade. Everybody in the class, 100 per cent, 22 out of 22 students were able to do that. What was so interesting about that, is that it wasn’ t a formulaic assignment, it was an expressive assignment.
Every video is very, very different; every student felt comfortable or powerful teaching one thing they knew very well. Many of them revealed things about their family, their cultural values. One of my Hispanic students followed his father to the outdoor central market to watch him buy avocados and go home and make avocado dip. Another student talked about her experiences with cooking and how she had developed her taste buds and her ability to discern different flavours.
Each one of the students dug deep to find something they could share to a targeted audience. That’ s the kind of thinking where you can become authentic, you can become expressive, and you’ re thinking about connecting with people.
In the workplace – in the real world – the people who do well every day are the ones who make compelling, persuasive presentations. They know how to use PowerPoint and Excel, but they do it to convince people their projects are worth funding, their ideas will make the company more strategic, that they will solve wickedly complex problems. Those are the kinds of people we need, people who have voice.
In your experience, what are some of the common challenges we face to embedding these types of technologies into universities? I think we should go back to thinking about problem solving and open-ended discussions. I think what we’ ve thought before is that if we give them the tools, that’ s enough. I’ m doing something called challenge-based learning, where I’ ll show students maybe one video and say,‘ Today, go out and solve a problem.’
To give you an example of how I did that, they all have an iPad and I teach a course on lynda. com called the iPad Classroom. I said let’ s in one week create an alphabet book for children who are between the ages of 6 and 8. They said,‘ How are we going to do that? We haven’ t even taken InDesign or Adobe Creative Suite. This is our very first design class.’
They went out with their iPads and they each drew from a pot a letter of the alphabet. They had to find that letter already existing in space. They found topography, they had to do framing, cropping, point of view, and then they had to find an illustration for that letter. At the end of one week, we’ d put the book together, sent it off to Blurb, and now it was available to the whole world.
That’ s the kind of thing you can do with technology. You can do things so much better. The other thing that was interesting about it is that if one of us had tried to do it, it would’ ve taken 14 weeks. I like to say to my students, no one ever climbed Mount Everest alone. It takes lots and lots of people to get just one person up on that mountain. You will never in the 21st century be working alone on these big complex problems. It takes all our brains and all of our passion at the table. n
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