TITLE: Students Getting There Faster
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 26, 2011 4:41 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I saw a graphic
over at Gaping Void
this morning that incited me to vandalism:
A lot of people at our colleges and universities seem
to operate under the assumption that our students
need us in order to get where they need to be.
In A.D. 1000, that may have been true. Since the
invention of the printing press, it has been becoming
increasingly less true. With the invention of the
digital computer, the world wide web, and more and
more ubiquitous network access, it's false, or
nearly so. I've written about this topic from another
perspective
before.
Most students don't need us, not really. In
my discipline, a judicious self-study of textbooks and
all the wonderful resources available on-line, lots of
practice writing code, and participation in on-line
communities of developers can give most students a
solid education in software development. Perhaps this
is less true in other disciplines, but I think most of
us greatly exaggerate the value of our classrooms for
motivated students. And changes in technology put this
sort of self-education within reach of more students
in more disciplines every day.
Even so, there has never been much incentive for people
not to go to college, and plenty of non-academic reasons
to go. The rapidly rising cost of a university education
is creating a powerful financial incentive to look for
alternatives. As my older daughter prepares to head off
to college this fall, I appreciate that incentive even
more than I did before.
Yet McLeod's message resonates with me. We can
help most students get where they need to be faster than
they would get there without us.
In one sense, this has always been true. Education is
more about learning than teaching. In the new world
created by computing technologies, it's even more
important that we in the universities understand that
our mission is to help people get where they need to be
faster and not try to sell them a service that we think
is indispensable but which students and their parents
increasingly see as a luxury. If we do that, we will
be better prepared for reality as reality changes, and
we will do a better job for our students in the meantime.
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