My father taught sixth grade in the public schools for thirty-odd years, and always griped about the teacher training workshops that they were periodically subjected to, in which some expert would be brought in to talk about the wonders of the latest fad in pedagogy, while all the teachers in the school struggled to stay awake.
I'm sure he'll be amused to know that the same thing happens at the college level, where Laurence Musgrave is cranky about faculty development workshops on teaching with technology. This bit ought to sound familiar to, well, anybody in academia:
[O]ne of the reasons I'm cranky today is because most faculty development workshops I've attended assume no knowledge and experience on the part of those being lectured to about the latest advances in technology, learning style, and interconnectivity.
Nobody asks us what we already know and do. Nobody wants to know what the personality of our learning is. Nobody really wants to hear what we have to say. We're stuffed into row after row of folding chairs facing the PowerPoint torture of illegible pie charts, tables, and data we need to remember so that we'll be better prepped to perform in the learning community breakout sessions just after the chicken wraps at lunch.
A lot of the time, it's even worse than that. An alarming number of technology training workshops start with explanations of how to use a mouse, or topics just slightly above that level. I'm not actually all that good with computers, but I can usually figure out most of the features of a new program in the time it takes the trainers to explain the start-up screen.
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The DCist blog runs an occasional column of things that its readers overhear. By far the best one was this exchange:
Meeting at the Pentagon, during slide number 36 of 51:
Presenter: "At the end of the day, Lean Six Sigma is a process that will eliminate waste from your processes and products."
Audience member: "I take it that you forgot to apply it to this briefing."
(Dead silence for almost a full minute.)
Presenter: "Next slide."
Those who can, do.
Those who cannot, teach.
Those who cannot teach teach teachers.
Those who cannot teach teachers manage.
Those who cannot manage get government grants.
Thsoe who cannot get government grants consult.
Those who cannot consult reproduce.
W. Edwards Deming and Continuous Improvement tell us that a defective product is to be immediately removed from an assembly line and the cause of its defect traced, identified, and eliminated. Social engineering is Continuous Disimprovement: Defective products are massively subsidized at the expense of working products, and the source of their defects is mandated.
Los Angeles Times 22 Feb 2007, page F3. Black lava ground dressing costs $6.25 for a 70-lb bag or $0.09/lb Recycled green glass cullet costs $2/lb. Tell Uncle Al how massively subsidized local garbage can cost 22X more than remotely mined and transported rock.
And those who can't teach and are pretending to teach teachers also run assessment.
Podcasts. That's the wave of the future. It's going to change the way we do things in the university. Soon the traditional lecture will be as extinct as the dodo.
Don't these new age technocrats know that the university has already been transformed at least three times before? There was television back in the 60's. It was going to make the actual physical university disappear. Don't forget cheap portable tape recorders in the 80's. Play a cassette and skip lectures. Then there was the World Wide Web in the 90's. Who need lecture theaters when everything's on a webpage?
Who hires these expert idiots?