e-poche.net

I don’t think the point is really whether students are blogging or not,
but actually whether or not personal webpublishing is moving them (and
the institutions) in a healthy direction.  In a short piece
hinting at the end of the university as we know it, Alex Halavais says:

What do students learn in school? If the student is aggressive in pursuing
their education, there is a great deal that can be learned in terms of the
accumulated knowledge in various fields during the four years of an
undergraduate degree. But more and more, students who take advantage of this
constitute an extreme minority. Most students are happy to surf through four
years and come out with a degree and the (seeming) economic advantage it
brings.  Read more…

Surfing?  How about being led around like sheep or coerced like
convicts in a prison yard?  They’re told what to learn, how and when
to learn it.  And can we even call it learning when it is so
assessment driven?  When I think back on my undergrad education 10
years ago, I remember hardly any of my ‘accumulated knowledge’. 
But give me a test and look out, I can compete with the best of
‘em.  So how do we change this?   James hints at a
possible direction:

…when
you lock someone up their whole life and you open the gate, they won’t
leave unless someone is really helping them out. Even if you give them
a key.

Um, where to from here then?

Well,
I reckon that personal publishing and related technologies will only
take off in education in as much as education, and especially online
education, is able to accept volatile design, incorporate subversion
and respect and facilitate the development of creative independent
thinkers.  Read more…

Yes, and in order to do so, universities must ‘open
up’, give more freedom to students, implement  qualitative
assessment, and foster a cooperative, supportive learning
environment.  This ‘new dynamic’, as James puts it,
can indeed play an important role in the process of encouraging
learners to take more control over the direction of their learning
processes, but educators and institutions must begin recognizing and
placing value on such practices.  If students come to surf through
an institution, maybe we can make the kind of waves that’ll take ‘em on
a wild ride and learn what surfing is really all about.