Serendipity35

Today I am presenting at Seton Hall University on "Redefining Universities, How We Teach and Learn" as part of a day of sessions for faculty.

I will be adding some additional resources to continue the conversation that started last week about how universities A) are changing  B) need to change  C) are having change thrust upon them. (There are some interesting comments on the original post.)

Don Tapscott has been on this track for awhile now. Check out this video of his presentation on the tvo.org site. There's a good conversation on this with him and others on This Week in Tech podcast called "Steal This Diploma" at http://twit.tv/197.

Three books by Don Tapscott that address this generation that has been "bathed in bits." Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, the earlier Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

His new article, "The Impending Demise of the University, has a gloomier title than my own post.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University and the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril."

Here's a site by Mary Zedeck with the presentations and resources from the Seton Hall University series.