University of Meaning

Known for its educational innovation and experimentation, I went to the Antioch College in the 1980s. The most notable thing (my own estimation) that I brought away from my experience at Antioch was a simple, but powerful, understanding that I was responsible for my own learning. This, I believe, was an institutionally shared and promoted value. It was also an extremely novel idea at the time. This meant that I had to communicate with my professors about what my goals were, and ask them to assist me in the participatory design of my own learning. Was this always how it worked? No, sometimes it was just another class with another professor “explaining” their own way of things to me as if it were, or should be, my way too. BUT sometimes it did work, and during those “sometimes,” egged on by my own potential, I discovered new meanings for myself.

Right now I am reading Tara Brabazon’s, The University of Google. She blames the Internet for many real and unpleasant problems we face today in higher education. She recounts “horror” stories from her own experiences where students do not seem to take their studies seriously. They assume that last minute calls for help will be readily addressed. They place other commitments above their coursework. They opt out when more personalized attention is offered. She laments that students' need for real connections are being replaced with technological “solutions” such as e-mail communications, flexible learning, etc., that are actually creating more distance between them and the space of learning. I can follow this line of reasoning to a point—I too find some aspects of the technologically-mediated world challenging. But is it really what is creating the distancing effect for students?

What compels students to learn? My suspicion is that we all want to learn, or at least started off wanting to learn, and the real question should be “What holds people back from learning?” It isn’t technology. What I hear reiterated in Brabazon’s descriptions of her interactions with students is an old and prevailing student attitude that higher education experiences aren’t all that meaningful to them. Are they simply jumping through hoops? Perhaps they are not getting lost in a technological shuffle—they are just getting lost. Let’s face it, if they thought it worth their time, they would go to class.

So, what might bring them back? My first thought is to try creating assignments that have real life outcomes. I worked on a project last year with a class that created a podcast series about silenced or marginalized conflicts happening in the world. The professor asked the students at the end of the term to compare this project to writing a term paper. I was surprised as some students described their resentment of working on papers that only their professor will ever read. If we want students to be “in it” for more than a grade, then we have to design assignments that do more then simply “prove” that they learned the material. Assignments need to act as more than assessment tools. The assignments need to be relevant to students’ interests and reasons for taking the class in the first place. They need to allow the students to create their own meanings.

Brabazon, T. (2007). The University of Google. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Pub.