Maurice Coleman, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Paul Signorelli and Tom Haymes talked about Tom’s upcoming book Learn at Your Own Risk: 9 Strategies for Teaching in a Pandemic and Beyond, which will be published very soon. The book details how to design a human-centric future of learning emerges from pandemic teaching experience. According to the books’s press release:
Learning is a process of conversation, between the teacher and students, among the students, and, most importantly, within the minds of the students themselves. We have lost sight of this as teaching technology, starting with the blackboard in the mid-19th Century, emphasized the broadcast of learning rather its facilitation. Remote teaching has exposed the cracks in this approach. From the book, “To make something digital is to make transparent all of its flaws. What we are seeing right now is the lifting of the veil that has obscured the vast majority of teaching that occurs in our classrooms on a daily basis.” We can do better. We owe it to our students.Learn at Your Own Risk represents a set of 9 strategies designed to help teachers rethink how they reach their students; using technology to bring the student to learning rather than using it to fling learning to the digital winds. The book starts with the central premise that there is no substitute for the human connections at the center of learning. Technology can augment but never replace those connections. Digital technology also gives us opportunities to manipulate time and space in ways that were impossible when we relied exclusively on the physical world to communicate with our students.
The book is both strategy and practical advice. Besides the quick guides, there is also a deeper dive into the strategies.
Due the podcast, Tom made the point that we have been humans conforming to technology, rather that conforming technology to humans. Technology allows us to build education that starts and ends with the learner.
After talking about education, we turned our attention to conference, and then thinking about what is occurring in other countries.
You can listen to the full episode on TalkShoe or through your favorite podcast platform.
FYI… Paul Signorelli’s book is coming out soon (Dec. 15) Change the World using Social Media. Jill Hurst-Wahl is giving an eCourse on copyright starting on Feb. 1. Details about U.S. Copyright Law in the Library: A Beginner’s Guide eCourse are on the ALA website.
T is for Training 