Students are as eager to learn as (I imagine) they always were. With incredible advances in classroom technology, 24x7 networked resources, etc. it's not that students aren't interested in learning new things, it's that instructors for the most part are stuck in an older paradigm. A classroom is a different learning environment than a computer and an ethernet cable, or a video game console, or whatever is on the horizon.
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I'm sure you're right...up to a point. But aside from technologies that extend/web enable traditional classroom methods (Internet-based distance learning and campus intranets employing instructor moderated chat rooms for example) could you describe some of the other novel approaches that, as you see things, are not getting sufficient respect/acknowledgment here?
I'm also curious to learn what people outside the US bubble think. How're things in India, Japan, S. Korea, etc?
I think this thread, although ostensibly about reports of decline (or, as Yoshie describes it, increases) in student performance and general cleverness, has curiously morphed...at its edges...into a battle between (mostly) Matthew, who, if I'm reading him right, believes that young students are simply focusing on different things than previous generations (less Moliere, more, well, something else that's relevant) or being under-served by a failure of institutions to employ new techniques and those who insist the fading away of venerable, measurable types of academic achievement is a sure sign of the shot-to-hell plane plunging earthward at a decisive velocity.
.d.