pubTalk

These days, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about information communications technologies and considering how they transform what and how we teach in public affairs. Research over the last twenty-five years shows adult learners need situations that interrogate what they know from experience, consider and observe alternative perspectives, provide practice opportunities, and allow them to receive feedback. Traditional classrooms have not been built this way. (For a graphic illustration of the problem go to a YouTube video "A Vision of Students Today� by Assistant Professor Michael Wesch).

Web 2.0 has created platforms (which many young people use frequently) that enable active engagement, peer learning, and peer assessment (see the "Machine is Us(ing) Us,� also by Michael Wesch). All types of information is accessible at all times. In this context, professional education must engage and enable a structured way of using information to understand complex situations and solve problems. It must facilitate the creation of new solutions. If research is correct, such learning enables professional practice where people move beyond competency in route skills to adeptness in problem framing, solution implementation and improvisation when the unexpected emerges.

This is exactly the type of outcome that we want for students at the Humphrey Institute and participants in our non-credit professional development programs. Teaching in this way, though, requires faculty embrace the new paradigm and re-tool themselves with the new resources tools. Yet, I am heartened. The University of Minnesota is making some purposive investments in this regard and more faculty are taking advantage of them. There are new course ware programs (See MinnPost article for an open source platform being used by more people, including me). There is a faculty fellowship to support new experiments with teaching and technology. Webinars are increasing in use and more units, including Humphrey, are moving more courses to on-line formats.

Higher education is no longer shaped by faculty lecturing to a large lecture hall, writing on the chalk board, and requiring students purchase expensive text books and paper course packets. Instead, more of us are embracing the new information environment and using it to support the type of transformational learning we are in the business to accomplish. The current problems of the day require that of us.