Dan Brown's Open Letter to Educators video (2009) features a student who is disgusted with “institutionalized education.” Brown suggests that education be free and individualized as institutionalized education is outdated due to the abundance of free information on the Internet. He also states that our educational system is not preparing students to be successful in the future as it takes more than plain facts to expand creativity, generate new ideas and empower others to change the world. This philosophy is held by many people today. In order for our education system to continue to reach students and empower them with knowledge and ability to change the world we need to make some radical changes. Students today are not different than they were in previous generations; their tools for engagement are different (Milman, 2009). Due to their regular use of new tools, their brain signals are double the amounts of people who do not use technology regularly (Small, 2008). Although it has been proposed adult students learn best utilizing a constructivist approach, the constructivist theory of education was proposed decades ago, before technology had the opportunity of upgrading our brain patterns and firings between synapses (Sonwalker, 2005). The purpose of this paper is to discuss neoconstructivist theory and some instructional tools to promote it in an effort to help educators better serve students.
Shifting the focus of education to the student's needs involves creativity and new ideas in order to empower our students to change the world. Milman labels today's students as having “neomillenial learning styles” (2009). Neomillenial learning styles are based on:
Fluency in multiple media and in simulation-based virtual settings;
Communal learning;
Balance among experiential learning, guided mentoring and collective reflection;
Expression through nonlinear, associational webs of representations; and
Co-design of learning experiences personalized to individual needs and preferences (Dede, 2005, para. 2).
Many adult students have competing priorities with education. They have to work, provide for their family, and commute to school. This make the educator's job of engaging the student even more challenging (McClenney, 2008a). Emerging media foster psychological immersion through the use of the computer to provide access to distant experts for students, offering students multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) interfaces and mobile wireless technologies. The use of these media shapes a person's learning styles and has multiple implications and uses for education (Dede, 2005)
Sonwalker (2001) has identified millennial students as having five fundamental learning styles. They are apprenticeship, incidental, inductive, deductive, and discovery. Apprenticeship learners utilize a building block approach for learning that could be approached with the step-by-step method of procedural learning. The incidental learners are event based for concept introduction and questioning thoughts. Inductive learners are first introduced to a concept using specific examples that pertain to a broader topic. Deductive learners learn best by simulating trends and presentation of graphs or other data. Discovery learners are doing and testing their knowledge with practice (Sonwalker, 2001).
Instructors should facilitate the learning process by actively involving the student and creating an environment where the student is responsible for their own successful learning. Instructors give the student the tools for success and guide them toward the learning outcome. This teaching guidance is direct instruction, not minimal direction. This offers the student the opportunity to discover and learn through inquiry and experiential learning with the support and guidance of the instructor and media (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark 2006). Students who are engaged in their learning utilizing both in-class and out-of-class activities demonstrate the most success in achieving their higher education goals. In a Community College Survey of Student Engagement study completed by the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (McClenney, 2008a) results showed the most successful students were engaged in and out of the classroom on projects.
McClenney's (2008a) Essential Elements of Engagement High Expectations High Support Report was a field test survey that was administered to 89 community colleges and utilizes responses from 57,547 students within the United States.
Be willing to consider everything. The mistake we make so often is thinking we can improve a largely dysfunctional process by making small, incremental changes.… If you're not willing to rethink everything, you end up simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and there's no way we're going to bring about significant change doing that (Steven Murray, president, Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas). (McClenney, 2008a, p. 3)
Today people “expect to be able to work, learn and study whenever and wherever they want to” (Johnson, 2010, p. 4). The role of the way we prepare students for their future lives is changing. Society has new forms of authoring, publishing and researching due to new technologies. Students often view traditional published texts as outdated because it takes longer to publish in hardcopy than it takes to publish on the Internet. Due to larger capacity of bandwidth, storage devices, and high speed wireless technologies it is quicker and less costly to download books to a laptop or mobile device. Today's students prefer e-books, as they offer more portability and versatility than the traditional texts (Johnson, p. 6). Many instructors utilize open source texts (Hood, 2010) or allow students to download materials from their websites for instructional purposes for the course. More people all over the world are utilizing mobile technologies for their education as a common tool. Wireless technologies allow access to augmented realities, social networks, distance learning, and a wealth of other media for learning and communicating (Johnson).
“The American Association of Colleges and Universities has launched a program called Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) to pinpoint the knowledge and skills necessary to prepare students for future careers, ensuring that all students receive the same high-quality liberal education, and revising and improving the pedagogy and curricula” (Cohen, 2009, p. 14). LEAP recommends that educators help students become “intentional learners.” We can foster intentional learning by following their recommended Principles of Excellence:
Principle One—Make essential learning outcomes a framework for the entire educational experience: connecting school, work, and life.
Principle Two—Focus each student's plan of study on achieving the essential learning outcomes and assess progress.
Principle Three—Immerse all students in analysis, discovery, problem solving, and communication, beginning in K-12 and advancing through college.
Principle Four—Teach through the curriculum to far-reaching issues (contemporary and enduring) in science and society, cultures and values, global interdependence, the changing economy, and human dignity and freedom.
Principle Five—Prepare students for citizenship and work through engaged and guided learning on “real-world” problems.
Principle Six—Emphasize personal and social responsibility in every field of study.
Principle Seven—Use assessment to deepen learning and to establish a culture of shared purpose and continuous improvement (Promise, 2007, p. 40).
Colleges and universities have a moral, ethical, and societal obligation to focus on increasing student achievement and goals (McClenney, 2008b). America has a crisis in human capital that shows an unmet need for highly skilled and educated workforce. Our country pays dearly each time an American student slips through our collective educational grasp (Florida Council of 100, 2009). Constructing learning needs to use technology to support teaching for understanding in today's society (Sherman, 2005). “Consistancy between theoretical conceptions of learning and teaching practice has shown to support effective applications of technologies to increase achievement” (Sherman, 2005, p. 11). Teaching our neomillenial students can utilize an updated constructivist theory of education even in distance education. The traditional constructivist principles are learner-centered, interesting, real-life, social, active, timely, and offers feedback and support (Hirumi, 2002). “It is evident that new ways of teaching and learning must be devised if our students are to be prepared for the 21st century” (Hirumi, 2002, p. 500).
Funk (2003) offered an example of the newly revised constructivist theory. In her story the instructor does not give the students the formula for Pi and then problems to practice as traditional instructors would do. Instead, the instructor gives the students a blank tablet of paper and tells them to write down all they would like to learn about math. He then told them they would need to know the difference between a sphere and a circle, showing them physical examples of each. For homework, students are told to find as many circular objects as they can find at home and list them on their tablet with the distance across the circle in inches and the distance around the circle in inches. The instructor gave them further instructions on charting this information for organization and readability. After successful gathering and organizing of the information the instructor gave them the definitions of the measurements: circumference and radius, while asking the students if they noticed any type of relationship between the two numbers. Then the instructor had the students draw a third column next to the circumference and radius columns for each of the circular objects they had listed in their notepads and told them to divide the numbers in the first two columns. By doing so, the students found what Pi is on their own. After so many of the same answers, the students would never forget that Pi is 3.14 (Funk, 2003). The students in this example taught themselves with the instructor's guidance: a constructivist perspective.
Students today learn from a variety of methods and media. “Social media is the use of today's technology to distribute information and encourage people to connect with others who share a common interest” (SocialMediaToday, 2010). Social media can include classmates online in a distance education course, webpages on Facebook, e-mail encounters, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other sources. Distance educators have an opportunity to maximize utilization of these channels of communication to help teach their students. Learning in virtual worlds builds communities of practice and teach people to learn from play (Oliver, 2009). If the online activity is to be considered as a legitimate peripheral participation activity lesson it must:
have genuine relevance to the learning community,
less risky, less intense, and supports more participation than is normally the case, and
involves interaction with classmates (Oliver, pp. 447-448).
There are rules of engagement the instructor must lay as groundwork for these online activities to be successful learning modules. Cooperative learning takes greater effort by instructors to achieve but also produces higher results from the students. It creates more positive relationships and promotes greater psychological health and social competence (Johnson, 2007) Numerous studies have shown that society needs to upgrade the education of its citizens. Many colleges and universities offer their faculty staff development to develop their technology knowledge and skills. Most universities offer for-credit classes and degree programs in instructional technology and distance for the instructor (or potential instructor) to learn effective uses of new educational theories and technologies. Our nation owes its citizens the benefit of a marketable education so we may continue to be productive members of society.
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