I’ve been away from this blog for sometime. I suppose I’ve been too busy completing my book manuscript, which is now finally finished (and there was much rejoicing, “yeah!”). Now the semester has returned, and I am teaching three very different courses: a general education course in literature, a new media course in a learning community, and a graduate seminar on technology in English education. All of these courses though have me thinking about the shape and function of college curriculum. I suppose this begins with the grad. seminar where we are talking about how schools are tied to literacy (beginning with Plato’s Academy) and that this might suggest that new media will lead to some new form of educational institution/experience. Well that has gotten me thinking about how I imagine college education “should” work or “could” work. The bottom line is this: college education can really on function if it is the “tip of the iceberg” of learning. When I say this, it isn’t to suggest that students need to do more or that they are lazy or something because the college curriculum just isn’t structured that way now, nor does the educational experience before college prepare one in any way to learn in such a fashion. I already said something like this to my new media students, and I say it regularly to students in my creative writing courses. In a college course I can only assign you a certain level of work, but if you really want to become a new media designer or a writer, you will need to go much farther than I am asking you to go. This makes sense in these classes because I imagine that the students have personal motivations for being there (unlike a general education course where they are required to be there). So for education to develop, there would need to be more individual motivation for learning. This is something that would need to be fostered earlier in the educational experience. Clearly my perspective is the we focus too much on delivering specific content/skills and not enough on helping students develop such motivations. In the “future,” content delivery and skills acquistion will be far easier and more accessible. Hell, you can already earn an MBA online. Furthermore, continuing education will be a regular feature of most careers. We can no longer pretend that we can give students what they “need to know” in school, but perhaps we can assist them in becoming learners.

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