I recently read Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning by José Antonio Bowen (2012). My Department Chair, Dr. Joyce Farrow, put this one on my radar screen. Thankfully.
My top takeaways:
· Education has become, and will increasingly be, a highly competitive marketplace. Adaptability and nimbleness will win the day.
· Design of learning tasks must be framed in a customized and personalized way for the individual learner.
· We each have a personal epistemology, in that we take what we have learned (knowledge and skills) and frame it against our own contexts (beliefs, motives, aspirations, needs).
· Technology is a tool. Like all tools, it can be leveraged to accelerate movement toward desired outcomes -- in our case, LEARNING -- or if wrongly chosen or poorly deployed, it can inhibit the learning.
· As educators, our product is LEARNING, not the diploma or degree.
· In educational institutions, the educators/teachers had better be the most passionate and aggressive learners. If not, they will rightly be deemed irrelevant.
My favorite quotes:
“The problem of teaching, therefore, is not getting the facts but the context from my brain to yours.” (p. 87)
“Bain (2004) came to the same conclusion: The best teachers focus on challenging students in a supportive environment where failure is tolerated.” (p. 93)
“Today’s employer now expects anyone coming for an interview to have studied the organization’s website carefully.” (p. 151)
“Every profession is becoming more like law and medicine: there is now more information than anyone can memorize and more need for analysis.” (p. 184)
“Record companies fought the demise of the CD because they mistook the delivery system for the product.” (p. 259)
Dr. Bowen wrote this book in 2012. I read it 12 years later. He proved to be downright prescient in some of his predictions about where education was/is going. Sadly, we remain mired in some of the same educational paradigms from which he was trying to lead us.
Worth the read for those who love education.