As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits <i>all</i> students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires <i>all</i> young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

<p>The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) <em>7 Things You Should Know About...</em> series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:</p> <ul> <li>What it is</li> <li>How it works</li> <li>Where it is going</li> <li>Why it matters to teaching and learning</li></ul>

And so, the challenge is that when I try to divest myself of my teacherly voice I need to remember that this process is not about losing the voice of the expert but about losing the voice of the traditional authoritarian teacher who enters the classroom as an official persona armed with a pre-defined set of goals and very specific lesson plans for his students to follow. It is about giving the students the freedom to engage with ideas that they find relevant and interesting, not about dictating every step of their learning process.

I believe that it is important to lose the authoritarian voice, the controlling voice, but not the voice of an expert who chose to teach because of his passion for the subject. The students need to see that the instructor is someone who lives and breathes whatever it is that they’re studying, that they have in their midst someone who has a wealth of expertise.

As it turned out, this was one of the best courses, online or onsite, I have ever taught. Not only did I witness enormous engagement among almost all of the students, but the level of learning was much higher than in previous years.

The feedback from the students on the course was very positive, better than I had received for the onsite course in previous years. One of my favorite written student comments was, "… I don't know how this course could be taught as effectively in the classroom."

Start here: Why should my son or daughter have to pick a single college and with it only the teachers and courses offered there?

Similarly, why should a professor pick just from the students accepted at his or her school? Online, the best can pick from the best, cutting out the middleman of university admissions.

Once you put all this together, students can self-organize with teachers and fellow students to learn what they want how and where they want. My hope is that this could finally lead to the lifelong education we keep nattering about but do little to actually support. And why don’t we? Because it doesn’t fit into the degree structure. And because self-organizing classes and education could cut academic institutions out of the their exclusive role in education.

the standards require teacher-candidates to exhibit knowledge, skills, and dispositions that equip them to teach technology applications. Candidates also have to show they can use technology to support student learning of content.

<p>Joel Colbert, who heads the committee on innovation and technology, says the handbook seeks to make the point that stand-alone technology classes are now obsolete. </p> <p>“We are saying that’s not the way to integrate technology into teacher training, because each subject area uses technology differently,” Colbert says.</p>

As a result, while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text (Hartman, Dzubian, and Brophy-Ellison <a target="_blank" href="http://www.webcitation.org/5Xw4B5bKP">2007</a>).

However, these digital texts do not necessarily lack style, coherence, or organization; they simply present meaning in ways unfamiliar to the instructor. For example, a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.

Texts that do not look like books or essays and that are structured in unfamiliar ways may leave educators with the perception that the authors of these texts lack necessary literacy skills. Are these students missing something, or are they coming to us with skills as researchers, readers, writers, and critical thinkers that have been developed in a context that faculty members may not understand and appreciate? The striking differences between the linear, print-based texts of instructors and the interactive, fluctuating, hyperlinked texts of the N-Gen student may keep instructors from fully appreciating the thought processes behind these texts. Learning how to teach the wired student requires a two-pronged effort: to understand how N-Gen student understand and process texts and to create a pedagogy that leverages the learning skills of this type of learner.