Rethinking (College) Education – More Writing on the Wall

My previous blog post entitled, The Writing is on the Wall. Why Isn’t Anyone Reading It?, provided some research, statistics, and rationale on how institutionalized education is failing today’s students.  Michael Wesch, of A Vision of Todays Students fame, produced the following video, Rethinking Education.  It provides some additional thoughts about how institutionalized education – university in this case – is not serving today’s students

Here are some key points form the video:

• People came onto Wikipedia to edit. What are these people getting out of it? Why would they do this?  They are not getting any marks – no university credits.  What would people construct knowledge on that basis? There are 80,000 new Blogs a day.  The public is engaging in a level of writing and political thought and opinion-building like we’ve never seen before.  Where are our students in this?  They are filing out exam booklets. – John Wollinsky

• We may need to seriously rethink the university and its future. Michael Wesch

• University culture is focused on what we do in the classroom, how it ends up on the exam booklet and will I get published in a journal– in that way we are missing the boat.

• The formal education system has not even begun to catch up with the new processes.

• The public is living and breathing within a much large sphere of information and knowledge.  That critical openness to knowledge is something our work had better address or we are ill serving our students.