Functional adventures in the deep end: The evolution of a pragmatic 48-month undergraduate curriculum By C. Harold McManus, Ph.D. ? 2010 Excerpt 4/10
Making an Environment High Touch
Exposure to advanced gaming systems from a very young age and the explosion of information technology in middle and high schools have made your first-year students technologically savvy. Still, a singular emphasis on technology, software, and hardware will not produce sustained growth and retention in students who have used technology throughout their entire lives. An emphasis on what Naisbitt (1984), in his seminal book Megatrends, called “High Touch” must be accentuated as one introduces IBL in the classroom. Naisbitt (1984) stated, over twenty-four years ago, that “the gee-whiz futurists are always wrong because they believe that technological innovation travels in a straight line. It doesn’t. It weaves and bobs and lurches and sputters” [p. 37]. He also stated, “We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature” [p. 36]. High Touch emphasizes the human interaction in the human-technology interaction. Even technology-savvy students will benefit from the High Touch experience.
In a High Touch environment, each student is challenged to become an information-developing and problem-solving scientist. IBL allows students to learn how to learn and this meta-cognitive approach is at the core of developing an informed scholar who understands how knowledge is developed and utilized. Knowing about knowing is the beginning of critical thinking (Brown, 1975). These meta-cognitive skills can facilitate the development of critical thinking and students who think critically in an asynchronous web-enhanced curriculum will lead to a metamorphosis of both the teaching and learning process.
This metamorphosis of teaching and learning provides new challenges and responsibilities to both educators and learners. Students will be challenged to form their own questions about what they want to know in an articulated area and to answer those questions with research sources of their own choosing. These students will gain a deeper knowledge of the subject matter and develop the skills necessary to teach, research, and learn in other topic areas. Educators will be challenged on their views of course ownership (Blumenfeld, Soloway, Marx, Krajcik, Guzdial, & Palincsar, 1991). IBL, in a web-enhanced environment, provides the High Touch focus that will prove conducive to the growth of the modern scholar.
Summary of High Touch in Chapter One
· It is important that curricula keep pace with technological and philosophical changes in the academic landscape.
· An emphasis on what Naisbitt (1984) called “High Touch” will bridge the gap between technological advances and human needs.
References
Blumenfeld, P. C., Soloway, E., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Guzdial, M., & Palincsar, A.
(1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. Educational Psychologist, 26 (3-4), 369-398.
Brown, A. L. (1975). The development of memory: Knowing, knowing about knowing,
and knowing how to know. In W. H. Reese (Ed.) Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 10, 104-152). New York: Academic Press.
Naisbitt, J. (1984). Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives. New York:
Warner Books.
The next installment: How to develop a Decentralized
Classroom
“Centralized structures are crumbling all across America. But our society is not falling apart. Far from it. The people of this country are rebuilding America from the ground up into a stronger, more balanced, more diverse society. The decentralization of America has transformed politics, business, our very culture” (Naisbitt, 1984. p 103).