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Are you skipping school?
March 17th, 2010 by Mike Knutson
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a college professor who was bemoaning the lack of initiative by students. If I understood correctly, his main point was that students today lacked the motivation to apply what they were being taught. I’ve known and respected this professor for a long time, and I value his insights. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Internet and social media were changing how young people learn and that the problem was an institutional and pedagogical problem, rather than student problem.
The above conversation was still fresh in my mind this morning when I stumbled across a video production titled “Re-Imaging Learning in the 21st Century” (thanks for sharing @kristinwolff). A production of the MacArthur Foundation, the video described some of the key findings the foundation has discovered about education through their Digital Media and Learning Initiative.
By nature, I’m attracted to anything that talks about “reimagining” the future, but I found value in how the video simplified the complex issues surrounding how technology has impacted learning.
As the video highlights, the Digital Media and Learning Initiative seeks to build a new vision for education based on the following three core principles:
- The shift from education to learning.
- The shift from consumption of information to participation in production.
- The shift from thinking about institutions to thinking about networks.
I particularly like this last principle – learning from networks rather than from institutions. It’s how I learn today. Rather than attend a place or institution to learn, I reach out to my network – particularly my online network.
Twitter, Facebook, and the ReImagine Rural blog enable me to connect to people who: share valuable resources with me, help pick me up when I’m down, and offer insights on ideas and projects that I am passionate about. It makes my lifelong learning more relevant, social, and interesting.
Like everyone, I sometimes get bogged down in the grind of work, and I feel that I don’t have time to participate in my social networks. What I’ve come to learn, however, is that it’s sort of like skipping school, and the quality of my work suffers.
This realization has caused me to wonder: how many other rural community leaders are skipping school by not taking advantage of the opportunities created by networking?
Tags: education, McArthur Foundation, social media, social networking
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