(Now that the Blogger site is up-and-running again--since it going under maintenance when I tried writing this post on Thursday and Friday--and now that graduation is complete, family has left, and things are slowly going back to something resembling "normal," I'm finally able to post!)
Another finals week--the last one of my undergraduate career--is over for me. I think this is the time I should say I feel like I'm on top of the world, because college graduation is the big-time. Or maybe I should say something like "it's bittersweet"--that it's a relief to be graduating after years of hard work but that I'll miss the college lifestyle and its late nights, walks on campus with friends, study groups, and "study groups." But I'm not really feeling that college grad euphoria or nostalgia. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet. Maybe it's because I know that there's more to come after this in grad school, which in a way makes this feel more like like a brief respite or or a stopover. Maybe it's because I'm a student/learner at heart and see the pomp-and-circumstance ceremony and the diploma, the official certification I'll be receiving that's supposed to prove...something, as no big deal compared to the deeper experience of having been baptized in inquiry. Whatever it is, it's a unique feeling.
But it’s also exceedingly arrogant. Not in that horrible outright way, but in that more subtle you-don’t know-how-good-you-have-it kind of way. The other day I was talking about all this with someone who’s been like a mentor to me the past few years, and she pointed out that there are millions, billions of people who will never have the opportunity to go to college. I guess it’s easy to forget that college isn’t just a “natural” part of life, like going through puberty or having kids or dying. People don’t have to go to college—most people don’t even have a choice about it. This thinking about college as just another thing (and something that’s treated as more of a nuisance than anything else) is such a Western, middle-class, GenMe phenomenon it’s almost not even funny. And it’s not that I think of college as a nuisance—I love college, but sometimes I forget just how much of a cultural phenomenon it is, and that many of my baseline (i.e. not anthropologically critical) thoughts about it are a product of my cultural environment. And altogether, it's been an incredibly enjoyable part of my life. The best years yet, so they say (and so I say, too). My friends, family, and faculty have all been amazing, and so have the ideas and the subject matter and all the rest of the experience. So I probably should give myself a hard slap on the face and remind myself of how much of an honor/accomplishment/privilege it is to be a college graduate.
So, why all this reflection about graduation and college when I’m ultimately blogging to post my final video project of Digital Ethnography? Well, I guess I could post the video without sharing these thoughts, and I might even been thanked for that. But honestly my thoughts about education and its methods, its format, its non/effectiveness, its future have exploded since I started the class. With the help of Dr. Wesch and all my fellow Diggies, I’ve been introduced to whole new ways of thinking about education, and I’ve been challenged (sometimes painfully so) in a lot of different ways. I’d always considered myself a bit of a traditionalist (whatever that means) when it came to education. I preferred (and in some cases still do prefer) the smell and feel of books, using notecards to organize research, listening to old-style lectures--the ones where a professor just stands and talks to you as one who knows so much about the material and is excited about it and talks about it almost as if it were a legend passed down over generations. And I used to prefer it almost begrudgingly over the "newer" kind of methods, with professors using PowerPoints and interactive Clicker quizzes/sessions and all these various kinds of online/computer assignments But I had never really asked myself why that was the case. At some base level it almost felt like the new digital technologies were edging-out the older forms, and sometimes I’d get a bit defensive about it. But over the last year, and especially over the last semester, I’ve realized that it’s not like that or about that at all. Books and notecards are, like computers and blogging and video-editing, just a form of technology. And yes they’re different and do different things—that’s a given. But the real issue at hand isn’t the technology, but rather the learning process. It’s more important to focus on trying to encourage the inquiry process and to help students get to the levels of procedural and constructed knowledge. It's more important to get students excited about and engaged in the material, to the point that they're even talking about it outside of class (without having that being forced upon them by homework or stress/fear over not doing well on the test). That’s really what needs to be reformed, far more than the infrastructure.
And that’s really the message I’m trying to convey in my video. The “walls” of education don’t need to all be thrown down and replaced with bright new shiny tech-friendly walls. I think the success of education reform in the future depends on focusing on the learning process and on being FLEXIBLE about how students get there, while of course being aware of all the other aspects about college students and education that my fellow Diggies have so wonderfully explored this semester. Too often (and I count myself guilty of it), this whole old/traditional vs new/reformed/tech-friendly issue gets painted in extremes. Too often it's set up as a false dichotomy--that one way is old and broken and should be discarded, or that another is too new, doesn't focus enough on fundamentals, is unfeasible in terms of access and unrealistic in terms of students putting in the necessary effort--when it seems that the reality of it is that we need a little of both approaches and more importantly that we need to be flexible about using them.
This semester has been a wonderful challenge for me. I've learned so about how the "modern," tech-utilizing approach works and how it can be used to produce some incredible results. I feel as if a whole new repertoire has been opened to me now that I'm capable of utilizing the video format and the other digital tools. (For instance, I love my old notecards and I'll still use them in many cases--but think about how much I'll be able to do with a program like Microsoft OneNote, or something like Diigo?!) I'm already thinking about ways I'll be able to use video and other digital technologies to work on research projects that I'm truly passionate about, and it's so exciting and there's so much potential there that I just want to write them all down right now--but I'll spare you from another tangent for the time being.
In fewer words, what I want to say is that I think this class has been a resounding success on multiple levels (personally, academically, functionally), and I'm excited to get to use what I've learned for research in the future. So without any further ado (if you've read this far, haha), here's my video:
No comments:
Post a Comment