Unplugging the Classroom: Teaching with Technologies to Promote Students' Lifelong Learning

Unplugging the Classroom: Teaching with Technologies to Promote Students' Lifelong Learning provides techniques to help teaching and learning in an age where technology untethers instruction from the classroom, from semester seat-time, and from a single source of expertise.

The book brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse academic fields, including library perspectives, and presents interdisciplinary discussions from both theoretical and applied areas. It is unique in its goal of bringing educators and librarians together to explore the challenges that are faced by students and faculty in any time, any place, any path, and any pace learning.

In spite of the fact that the mobile revolution has definitively arrived, students and faculty alike aren’t ready to make the leap to mobile learning. The pressures of technological advances, along with the changing nature of learning, will demand increasingly profound changes in education. Researchers have begun to address this issue, but the revolution in mobile communication has not been accompanied by a concomitant growth in pedagogical resources for educators and students. More importantly, such growth needs to be under-girded by sound learning theories and examples of best practice.

• Provides a hands-on resource useful to both novices and experts for technology-enabled teaching and learning
• Gives both discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary perspectives
• Discusses discipline-specific mobile applications
• Offers an opportunity to meet the needs of contemporary learners and foster their competencies as lifelong learners
• Addresses emerging issues in technology and pedagogy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: May 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780081020364

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Preface

Sharmila Pixy Ferris and Hilary Anne Wilder

As educators, Pixy and Hilary work to promote student learning. As educators who are passionate about learning, we are always searching for ways to create learning experiences that promote meaningful learning—where we define meaningful as learning that impacts our students’ lives outside the classroom. And as idealistic educators we find fulfillment in kindling a love of learning in students, what Plutarch called a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth (Plutarch, Moralia). We feel that the 21st century offers us unprecedented advantages in promoting meaningful learning and inspiring in students a desire for knowledge.

The 21st century uniquely positions educators to revolutionize teaching and learning. Through the millennia, education meant learning from the accumulated wisdom of others. In the first millennium (of Western civilization), learning was largely personalized and one-on-one, often only formalized through apprenticeships. In the second millennium, the printing press slowly enabled a formalized learning structure, through the wider dissemination of information. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that our current educational system developed. For about two centuries, learning was focused on the classroom and expert authorities, while wisdom was disseminated through common texts (for details, see Wilder & Ferris, 2006).

While this received wisdom model still dominates education today, we are now in an Information Age where technologies, particularly educational technologies, are in a state of high interpretive flexibility (Brent, 2005), allowing us to change the focus of the classroom from an emphasis on accumulated wisdom to learning that can occur any time, in any place, take any path, and proceed at any pace. This change is much needed as, following decades of transformation in the 20th century, higher education is facing profound changes in the 21st century. The 20th century introduced a focus on learning for specific outcomes (e.g., professional/career success, informed and productive citizenship) or even innate curiosity; the 21st century introduced a focus on adult learning, andragogy, distance education, and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Many of these emphases were associated with, and promoted by, technology.

From well beyond the 20th century, we have always looked to technology to promote teaching and learning—starting in the first millennium with the written word, and in second millennium with the technology of the printed text. While we’ve all heard the dire warnings predicting the demise of tertiary education as we know it, due in part to new technologies enabling learning that can occur any time, any place, take any path, and proceed at any pace, we have always known that learning, whether for professional/career success, informed and productive citizenship, or just innate curiosity, is a lifelong pursuit that does not stop when students leave the ivory tower. Contrary to the critics who cast academics as antiquated pedants who believe that students only learn by listening in rapt attention to their lectures, good educators are always searching for ways to create learning experiences that promote the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that will help our students with their continued education both within their specific field of study and, more generally, as autodidacts.

We define autodidactic learning as happening outside of the classroom (any time, any place) with students asserting a greater control over their learning (any path, any pace). The traditional university experience prepared students with all kinds of wonderful just in case knowledge and understanding, imparted by an expert within the confines of that professor’s classroom. Now that expertise is readily available outside of the classroom, so we need to consider how to ensure students are able to best avail themselves of it just in need within their professional and personal