Oct 18, 2007

We Do it For the Letters

There is no doubt that technology is changing the ways that students learn and how schools teach. However, the two are happening at very different speeds. The University of Kansas Digital Ethnography Group has just released a video that showcases the reality of students today, and it has taken the blogosphere by storm.

Information is not scarce, it has no set form, no restrictions to its movement and no end to creative possibilities it represents. Yet, we as students are being taught in a classroom with walls, on a schedule with deadlines, from a text book (that most of us never read) with right and wrong answers. If information is abundant, free and moves with ease why are we being taught in a system with so many limitations?

The reality is that most of us students go to school for the degree, the letters that will forever follow our names, the letters that will get us jobs and open doors. We go to school more for the degree than for the actual knowledge. Information, the basis of knowledge is free and can be accessed on our own time line, in a way that interests and benefits the individual. It seems that it's the letters that cost money, not knowledge.





Part one of the series is also very cool.

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