Sunday 13 July 2008

Higher Education embracing change

Last week I was invited to speak to all the teaching staff at City College, a higher education institution in Brighton, UK, which in its own words:

Each year over 2,000 full-time learners, 13,000 part-time learners as well as many international and European students choose City College as their education provider.

The main thrust of my presentation was to stimulate a recognition that the connected world we now live in forces a deep reassessment of traditional teaching practices. Michael Wesch and his Vision of Students Today helped set a context for how learners views, context and behaviour has changed as a result of the every day technology they use. Meantime Father Guido Sarduci demonstrated the elephant in the room in most education and training activities - we forget most of what we are presented with.

I went on to explore the principles of follow-through, and how in an age where we can have constant, mobile access to the internet, with all its knowledge repositories and applications, we can now design education and training to support us when we learn rather than when we are expected to learn (two fundamentally different things).

The economics of knowledge acquisition and skills development have changed. We can, as I like to say: Learn Less, More Often.


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