| Ricci Street
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Ricci Street is not a software program, it's not a pedagogical system, it's not a textbook, it's not a finished project. It's a toolkit of technologies and the beginnings of an online community. The more teachers build course webs and take stewardship of content, the greater the value of the community. For the students, this value will grow more exponentially than linearly.
Explore and discover. To prosper on Ricci Street, remember the mindset that Matteo Ricci brought to his work: evangelist, gadfly, maverick, and trailblazer.
Back in the 13th Century, the modern university was born around books. There weren't very many of them, so they were kept in safe places. Scholars gathered around the safe places that held the books, often chained to the wall. Students gathered around the scholars, who read from the books. The students took notes.
In many of today's classrooms, not much has changed. The teachers are presumed to have all the knowledge and they dole it out in fifty-minute lectures.
This is scarcity thinking. Here's abundance thinking:
In the 21st century, the university is re-born around information. There is no need for safe places to keep it. There is too much of it and it is everywhere and it is free. What about the scholars and the students? Where will they gather? At the Bistro, you can talk about it.
For most teachers, the new skills they must learn are hypertext design and graphic design. Just as it's hard to coach a game you've never played, most teachers need to surf the Web with their eyes more open to design.
In my experience, people learn by doing and performing, not by listening and taking tests. Although I was familiar with constructivist learning, two essays helped shape my thinking at the time I started making webs.
The Shroud of
Lecturing
by Stephen E. DeLong
First Monday, Vol.2 No.5, May 1997
At a fundamental level, the Web challenges the authority of the professor in the classroom by democratizing information. It shifts the focus from production and delivery to customer and content -- from professor and lecture to student and information.
Teaching
for Understanding: Educating Students for Performance
Educational Issues Series
Wisconsin Education Association Council, 1996
Many teachers were educated in classrooms where the role of
the student was to memorize information, conduct well-regulated experiments,
perform mathematical calculations using a specific algorithm, and were then
tested on their ability to repeat these tasks or remember specific facts. All of
us -- parents, teachers, retirees, business people, citizens, employees,
students -- face a scale of educational change for which our experiences have
not prepared us. Our beliefs about "how schools ought to be" are in
tension with new expectations of "what schools ought to accomplish."
The ideas which are central to an education which defines competence as the
ability of the student to apply knowledge and skills to unfamiliar problems are
not new. These ideas were found in traditional apprenticeship programs, were
implicit in settings where daughters and sons learned life sustaining skills
from parents, and they were central to the successes of all traditional peoples.
Face to face interaction between teacher and student and among students is still crucial and is still central. In the traditional classroom, the dominant mode of information transfer from teacher to student -- the much-maligned sage on this stage -- is a relic of the information-scarce 13th century. In the classroom supported by Ricci Street,
teachers can take questions, get formative
feedback, demonstrate techniques, tour new web pages, supervise student groups,
evaluate student presentations, bring students to consensus on important class
issues, capture student learning on video rather than with pen-and-paper tests. Listen.
students can make presentations, critique
others' work, debate, listen to critiques of their own work, explore the web and
share their discoveries, read,
email notes to themselves, write and post messages to discussion forums, work in groups,
brainstorm, reach consensus on important class issues such as evaluation
criteria.
Information transfer can occur online outside of class at the students' convenience.
Using the World Wide Web to Enhance Classroom Instruction, by Norman Mathew and Maryanne Dohery-Poirier, is especially good on the control shift from teacher to student.
Taking full advantage of the potential of the Web requires teachers to think about learning and teaching in new ways, as well as to master the technology itself.
The Power of the Internet for Learning:
Moving From Promise To Practice (excerpts
| full report)
Report of the Web-Based Education Commission, December 2000
The Digital Disconnect: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and
their schools
Pew Internet Project, August 14, 2002
For a larger context, see The Control Revolution.
The ideas on this page are meant to be provocative. Let's talk about it at the Bistro.
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