Hoarding the good stuff. The conversation continues at Gardner Campbell's site. A few steps down into the comment thread, he speculated that we might need to make undergraduate school less like high school and more like graduate school. That reminded me:

... of a startling fact I ran across on the web site of Vanderbilt University. It’s contained in this photo caption from the university’s online Viewbook:

“Vanderbilt undergraduates coauthor 25 percent of the research papers published by our faculty and share in presenting their work at professional conferences. For example, Centennial Professor Arthur A. Demarest involved students in one of the world’s largest excavations, the Petexbatun Regional Archeological Project in Guatemala, right.”

Hardly any American college or university can make a claim like that one about collaborative research, I suspect, but they could all achieve a 25% rate if they cared to. My quick conclusion from facts like that is: we generally offer plodding, condescending undergraduate educations that don’t link the real excitement and exploratory, explanatory power of our fields to the world students know. We don’t invite them to hang around where the new work is being done in our fields because we don’t think they’re up to the task. We lose contact with them and they lose their faith in the ability of the university to connect to people’s lives.

But on good days it’s easy for teachers to see that students want more meaning, more connection, more community, more agency, in their lives. Pushing aside the institution’s bad habits of alienation and delayed gratification, internalized by teachers and students alike, is the hard part.

In another part of the thread we're circling around the problem of alienation. My two bits worth:

I like your idea about the corrosive skepticism and would be interested in thinking more about it. When you talk about soulless scaling I think we may be circling around the same kinds of experience. We’re trying to put a name to some of the alienation that is so easy to witness in schools, yes?

Perhaps you’ve had the same experience as I have — when I occasionally ask students why school is so often / too often mediocre or worse, they perk up wonderfully, though sometimes cautiously, as if it might be some sort of trick to spend time talking about what they’ve really experienced.

These interludes make me wonder whether students would call much of their school experience an exercise in delayed gratification. As if educators endlessly say to students, “Oh, the good stuff? No, we won’t be getting to that anytime soon. Maybe in graduate school…”

Gardner tidies up after my utopian musings with a good realistic glance at the economic reality -- which comes down to the decisions citizens and legislators make about funding our schools. [0 & P]

Beyond cool. Most of the web comments I've seen about Michael Wesch and his Web 2.0 video are synonyms for "cool" - and it is very cool. But "cool" itself -- or saying something is "cool" -- is sometimes a fancy kind of disengagement. The web is beyond cool, but we're having trouble finding the words to wrap around or extend his potent display of the 2.0 story.

By placing a copy of the video on Mojiti, Wesch invited others to join in, writing their comments right on the video, amazingly. (Another synonym for cool. My bad.) He's trying to live up to his own message, something educators often fail to do.

Picture a short lecture on critical thinking, say... [0 & P]