The beginning of chapter 5 in our reading for Kist this week talks about Brett Moller using Facebook as an educational medium in the 21st century classroom. A very important point about education is brought up whenever Kist says, "...this project [using Facebook] was a kind of mind-shift for the students, in that they had been trained that school is about 'regurgitating information.'" That concept of "information regurgitation," is harmful to a person's educational development and is something that needs to be changed in the modern day school systems- especially public schools.
For example: K-12 history classes. All history classes are based on in elementary and high school, at least in my experience, is repeating "facts" back to the teacher in class. Yes, I did put "facts" in quotations marks for a reason, but that's another discussion for another day/blog. Unfortunately, this setup causes kids to mostly despise history classes, such as myself.
However, my freshman year of college I had a professor named Dr. Senecal. The first day of her class, I was intimidated because we had no textbook (we read novels the whole semester), and all of her tests and quizzes were essays with absolutely NO multiple choice at all. I ended up loving it though. The class was amazing and I learned more than I have in any history class ever. I got A's on every quiz and high B's to low A's on every test. Some memorization was involved, obviously, but it was simply memorizing minute and trivial details. Those details contributed to ideas and those ideas are what we used in our understanding of the history being taught to us.
More of this needs to happen in public schools, and not just in history courses, but EVERY course.
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