Improving the Climate for Personal Engagement: some thoughts on Learning Technologies

I've been thinking about Education for about 40 years, trying to figure out how to pursue it better for myself and (for the last 25 or so years) how to become a better practitioner. I've explored quite a few delusions and dead ends in that time, and also found a number of paths that I've kept my enthusiasm for, and that I'm still working on. I have some basic convictions (among them: that eduction is something you do to yourself, and the power of Hugh of St-Victor's dictum: "omnia disce, videbus postea nihil esse superfluum" [Learn everything, you will see later that nothing is superfluous]) and a feeling for some tools that seem to work to realize the convictions.

So much of conventional classroom-and-textbook education seems drudgery to the students (and, often enough, to the teachers) who pass through it, and absence of enthusiasm for and commitment to learning is pretty much epidemic throughout North American educational systems. The most common term used to epitomise this malaise is "boring", and the attitudes and mindspaces which lie behind that characterization need to be much better understood if we are to combat it successfully. Why is 'school' (education, learning, study) perceived as "boring", and what escapes that numbing indictment?
I think it comes down to personal engagement, a compound of intellectual intrigue and a sense of personally active participation. When these qualities are missing, when the student lapses into passivity, responsibility for the process and results of learning evaporates, and he or she becomes an outsider who sees little point --the activity is "boring".

For teachers, maintaining the personal engagement of a classroom full of students is a monstrous challenge. We've all had the experience (probably pretty rarely) of being in such classrooms, of sensing the energy of an engaged group, but as teachers we know that our power to create such a state ourselves fluctuates, and we also know that the state can't be imposed --it grows and spreads in a group, but it's rarely simply an expression of the personal charisma of some sage-on-stage. I don't think you can learn (or teach) how to make it happen, or not in any conventional way.

Everybody has had the personal experience of fascination with something, of the power of one's own mental focus upon an activity, of the moment when everything seems to cohere into insight and mastery. We know it happens, but it seems that we can't make it happen, and we certainly can't live perpetually in that blissful state. We settle for occasional epiphanies, and maybe try to convey to others what they felt like, or what their insights revealed.

How can we encourage such personal engagement in our students? Personal example is one obvious answer, but it's only a small part of what's necessary, because people need context (opportunity and appropriate medium) to practise the complexities of skill and knowledge and integration from which their own epiphanies can develop. The traditional evaluative tools of research papers and class presentations and viva voce and written examinations don't serve this purpose very well (or not for most students, most of the time), sanctified though they are by precedent.

The traditional evaluative tools certainly have their place in formal education, but they do tend to place teacher and student in adversarial positions, and thus inspire attitudes and behaviors that are counterproductive for both parties in the interaction.

I think we need to develop ancillary processes and structures to facilitate personal engagement in and personal responsibility for learning, based not on the familiar dyadic teacher-student relationship, but upon creation (by teachers and students) of material for wider audiences --other students, colleagues, extramural readers and viewers.

I'd like to see students (and faculty, for that matter) equipped, challenged, encouraged and inspired to create formal and public expressions of what they learn --to practise responsible scholarship for wider audiences than the traditional professor-student dyad. A side benefit would be that people learn presentation skills (which are a very minor part of the traditional model) by doing, and by looking at examples of what others produce.

The web provides the medium for creation and distribution of such presentations, which can be crafted using hypertext, images, sound, video and manipulation tools. Course projects, akin to augmented research papers, are one form, but I also imagine something more accumulative and evolutionary, akin to a portfolio of connected work, culminating in a graduation project, the traditional form of which is an honors thesis.

The main difference between this model of web-based senior project and the traditional thesis is that the latter is primarily an exercise in form, and results in content which is quickly consigned to dead storage in library archives. The web-based project centers upon content, and may take many different forms. It has the further glory of being allusive --(hyper)linking to other work done by its creator, and to the work of others. But above all the web-based project is a public expression of individual interests and development, a product in which the creator can take pride.

There are precedents for this sort of project, and I think there's a liberal arts college that has a requirement along these lines (though I can't at the moment recall which it is --sounds like something Earlham or Beloit might have thought of).