A group of Dutch pupils and students are in strike! They are demanding more theoretical lessons and knowledge transfer from good teachers. Latest movements in Dutch education heavily rely on the self constructivistic learning by students. Many school management teams, also in my experience, forget that students also need a lot of guidance to be able to work in a self constructivstic way. As a result, teachers are not available for mentoring students and many feel abandonned and dont know what to do.

 

Does this mean that we need to go back to more cognitivist ways of education? No, at least not in my opinion, but we need to pay a lot more attention to our students than we do now. That includes helping them to make choices in their learning processes. Today I read an interesting article on the development our brains in relation to how we learn. Jelle Jolles, University of Maastricht, is performing research in this field. His most intersting claim is that our brains develop till we have reached the age of 20. This means that the brains of teenagers, members of the net-generation, are still in development. Jolles argues that the brains of teenagers are not yet able to learn in a large degree of freedom. "Young children and teenagers are perfectly able to choose something thats here and now. Planning, on the other hand, or choosing something of which the consequences become visible at a later stage is much much harder. Students need therefore a lot of guidance from teachers and parent". Jolles' argument is very interesting, especially when we look at the current developments in Dutch education. It at least supports the claim for better guidance. But are students really physically not able to learn independently or can't we just train them to learn in an independent matter? I always look at my own school career in these matters. At primary school we always had to work independently, from first class on. We had to work with a week chart and had to plan our activities throughout the whole week. It always worked very motivating for me as for the other kids in our class. The most intersting thing happend when I entered high school and had to listen to my teachers and had to work so NOT constructive or independtly.....my grades dropped. I was not used to learn in that manner.

 

I still havent figured out what THE solution would be....

Hey digital immigrants! Are you allready frustrated? Wondering day and night just how to catch of with those tech savvy kids of the Net-generation? Here is a great instructional film on How to beat your children at video games.

 

I've found this movie on VideoJug, a great site thats kind of like YouTube. It contains loads of video's, but the difference is that they are instructional video's. Some of them are actually very helpfull in our daily lives. Just like the other day when my car battery was down, I looked up the video on How to jump start my car. There I was, jump starting my car without help from others. Aint that great (I'm not very much a mechanic...)

 

But ... eh...let me know when you've beaten your kids with the video game!

In Wired Magazine, there's an article about the CIA recruiting new talent trough the use of facebook. Very interesting to see how large (government) agencies are realizing there are other (new) ways to find young and ambitious new workers. As the author of the article says:

 

 

There is also another interesting aspect to this development, which concers e-portfolio's and students personal use of social software. In a way your personal facebook page instantly has become your showcase portfolio when agencies start using this method. It brings up loads of questions on the fragile line between personal and professional (or educational) use of the internet. It also makes us aware that the information we, and especially the young ones, put on the internet can be used for other reasons than the ones we had firstly intended. It also brings out the question wether educational institutes should continue to provide IT-systems (such as blackboard portfolio) to their students, or do these kids prefer to use their own tools?