Barbara Cambridge on "Educational Question of the Year"
What knowledge or skills will students need most to be effective citizens of our world in the future?
Thinking and acting out of the box present the biggest challenges for us in higher education. Developments in our society, in technology, and in what we know about learning mandate our imagining and implementing new ideas about education. Because we must value lifelong and lifewide learning, we need new ways to provide educational spaces.
I'll think aloud about two kinds of spaces, both supported by the technological advances that enable new ways of generating, recording, and assessing learning.
Connected learning
So long as we divide learning into semesters and into credits, we limit the integration of learning across formal and informal settings. One reason that I am an advocate of eportfolios is that they break through the need to evaluate at arbitrary times and to isolate classroom learning from other sources of learning.
Since we know that integration both supports and is evidence of deep learning, we need a way for us to reflect on and analyze our learning in our various roles, including but not restricted to the student role, and to do so throughout our lifetimes. I like the term lifewide because it validates my multiple roles as association administrator, mother, friend, teacher, lay leader in church, reader, theater goer, and so on. In each experience and setting, i.e in each space, I can connect what I've learned in other roles to the current one I inhabit. One way to enable that connection making is through an electronic portfolio in which I bring together my experiences and reflections to make common sense of them.
Connections with others
We talk about being a global society. To enact that global connection, we need virtual communication that enables understanding and learning how to thrive with differences among us. Where do we in education provide space to explain why we believe and act as we do? Individual and group identities can easily become stereotyped without sufficient unpacking of those identities. Examples are the underprepared student, terrorists, the dean, community colleges, a part-time faculty member, or a Middle Easterner.
Electronic portfolios can include evidence and reflection that disable easy stereotyping. Especially as we operate in a global context, we need to use technology effectively to provide space for generating better understanding of one another.
I think that we need to think unconventionally about structures and practices that enable us to promote and value lifelong and lifewide learning and to connect with one another for the common good.
Barbara Cambridge
Barbara Cambridge is the director of the Carnegie Academy Campus Program, senior associate director at the National Council of Teachers of English, co-leader of the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, and faculty member and associate dean of the faculties at Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis. Previously she held various roles at the American Association for Higher Education, including vice president for fields of inquiry and action, director of the Assessment Forum, and director of the Teaching Initiatives.