Striking the Balance

Todd did a nice job of modeling the concepts he was trying to get across in his presentation. As educators, selling our ideas is certainly one of the challenges we face in our attempt to revolutionize education. We are not trained in marketing. Consequently we have great ideas that we try to roll out with out laying the foundational pieces necessary to get the buy in of stake holders. Our world intersects the public at so many points that we simply must get better at "selling" what we're trying to do, why we're trying to do it and what the benefits are for everyone involved. Effective communication is so very important.

I really wish Steve's presentation had followed suit. His content is very relevant and important, but it really needed to be delivered using the very strategy he was trying to promote. Academic lectures shouldn't be held to a different standard if learning is truly what the end goal is for a presenter. No matter what level we're working at we've got to model what we teach. In the book Switch the authors provide several examples of where important cultural/societal changes were successfully implemented as a result of incorporating the philosophy of educational entertainment. It's a powerful strategy. To tell us about it without incorporating it's principles into the presentation is counterproductive.
 
Sugata Mitra's work and the corresponding results he achieved make perfect sense. If you’ve ever watched children play they follow similar patterns in their unconstructive play.  There are those actively involved, those that are immediately watching and those that are removed and watching. They all learn. Think about it. How many video games come with instructions? None. And those that do aren't read by kids, but by adults whose frame of reference involves reading the instructions to find out what to do and how to do it. Kids learn by simply experimenting with the game and device, assessing the response to their actions, modifying their actions to achieve a different result, observing, modifying again, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat. Fear of failure isn't a barrier to learning the way it often is in public schools. If we could manage to remove the fear of failure I'm left to wonder just how much more could our at risk students learn. There is a balance that must be struck though. I believe there is learning that simply cannot be  attained intuitively, or is done so very inefficiently. I think the real point behind his work is to restructure the learning environment so support student-centered exploration while at the same time being very deliberate and conservative in our interventions.