Admittedly, I am having trouble developing a title for this post. Broadly speaking, the idea behind my thoughts is that most of my education has been done under a paradigm characterized by two things:
- I am a consumer of information.
- I am a producer of information only for the professor.
Now, obviously most professors and students alike understand that the professor is ultimately not the final evaluator of the quality of a student's preparations. This privilege belongs to those who will consume whatever the student produces in their professional (or personal) life. Moreover, the student will probably have the ability to largely select the audience to whom their work will be offered. Although many professors and students will readily acknowledge these truths, ultimately, our approach to classroom pedagogy does not prepare students to be producers of information for the audience of their choosing.
Honestly, there seems to be much room to modify the classroom experience for students such that they become not merely consumers of knowledge, but that they might also be producers of knowledge for an audience of their choosing. Certainly, there is not total freedom in this respect, as one of the most important responsibilities of a professor is ensuring the students have mastered the requisite body of knowledge. So, there probably will remain some aspects of the "professor as audience" characteristics of the current classroom. I do believe, however, that education can be greatly enhanced if the transition from receptor to transmitter can be facilitated in the classroom. In this regard, I am reminded of something I read recently that makes this point: "Program or be programmed..." [OK, so the idea is the title of Douglass Rushkoff's book... Reviews welcome!]
To this end, I wonder if there's not also room for explicitly incorporating production into more engineering classes. We have some aspects of the production model in place for capstone and senior design courses, and much ado has been made about problem- and project-based learning. But what about the use of communications as a way to ensure mastery? I was recently reading an old blog post on Academhack about changing the approach to teaching writing. In this post, a professor had been assigned to a class that had shown difficulty learning to write effectively. While the professor had been advised to provide "more structure" for the students, the students were directed instead to write and produce a short documentary. [This killed about 50 birds with one stone, but I won't get into that here...] Because the students were given control in an assignment that built on their skills and interests, their attention remained sharp during the entire semester and the pedagogical results were encouraging.
I'm thinking that requiring students to produce media for the broader public, or whatever audience interests them, will help them internalize mastery of the subject material in a way that is well situated into their increasingly media- and information-saturated lifestyles. In my experience, I have found it to be widely accepted that teaching a subject is the most effective way to ensure mastery of it. Why not incorporate some of these aspects into the student's experiences in the lower-level or fundamental engineering classes? Admittedly, engineering curricula are very demanding, and such approaches may be too risky. In the interest of full disclosure, I do not plan on routinely using these ideas to teach my courses [yet]. Furthermore, we often have design aspects explicitly incorporated into our curricula, so this may be a moot point in the eyes of many students and professors. But certainly, such approaches may hold out promise for ensuring students understand the broader social, policy, and economic implications of the technologies they are developing...