3/08/2006

Dr. Mark Taylor - hmm.

Dr. Mark Taylor's keynote on Tuesday was very entertaining, no question. I was very interested in his afternoon presentation on pedagogy for the postmodern "Gen NeXt" student. It, too was was entertainihng and informative. But on the way home that evening, something kept nagging at me.



I realized that the instructional techniques he advocated - making the content relevant to the learner, engaging the learner in authentic, meaningful activities - is really nothing new. We've been talking about that in terms of educating adult learners for a long time.



That's good news - the same techniques that work for our non-traditional adult students also seem to be tailor-made to reach the young adults in our classrooms as well. Might we just call it "effective teaching?"



The bad news is that there's STILL a market for someone to travel around the country telling this to teachers and administrators.


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2 Comments:

At 1:35 PM, March 08, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree, Corrie. I had the same thought in a session on PBL where the presenters made andragogy an important theme and stated that PBL is good for adult learners because X, Y and Z. I asked myself, "Is it any different for any other (non-adult) learner?"

likes to know why;
more productive if task-oriented;
needs to relate to personal/professional life;
likes to be involved in planning and evaluation;
thinks instruction is better if it is problem-oriented

OK, that describes my 6-year old!

 
At 1:49 PM, March 08, 2006, Blogger SkyDaddy said...

I'm really looking forward to the day when we can drop "e-learning" and "distance learning" and "andragogy" and "PBL" and just talk about "learning."

 

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