Posted to Diigo 06/17/2010

1034. Lost Arts of Teaching « Tomorrow’s Professor Blog

• the push to use technology in the classroom has diminished the roles of teaching and education
• Easily the best-named session of the conference was “We Can’t Give Enemas Online — Strategies for Moving Nursing Faculty to Online Programming
• If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like?
• Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?
• “There is a science and an art to teaching,” he said. And if technology is part of the science, it’s time to focus anew on the art
• there were repeated calls to take back the classroom
• “when you are lecturing, you are unfolding ideas, and on the screen you have an immediate snapshot.”
• the act of writing on a board more accurately conveys the path of an idea

  A good faculty member, he said, must be like a good comedian – “knowing the audience, responding to the audience” and either extending one line of thought or regrouping when something hasn’t worked
• Faculty members who base their classes on PowerPoint seem to lose that flexibility, which is crucial to reaching students. “Just because your machine tells you to go, you go.”