A new face

I found myself on a university campus today.  International students were learning English.  They had plans of continuing their educations at American universities, but had begun their educations by bringing their language skills up to near-native fluency levels before trying to listen to professors teach them their career knowledge.

The lesson started with a short speaking exercise in which each student answered a question from the professor.  At the first grammatical mistake made, the student had to stop speaking.  There was nothing from a book.  They listened to a song so they could learn vocabulary, cultural implications of phrases, idioms, and native pronunciation.  A speaking exercise occurred where students sat across from each other in rows.  They were given a topic and 3 minutes to discuss it.  When the 3 minutes were up, one side of the row moved one chair to their left so students could have new speaking partners.  Other activities came and went since this was a three-hour class.  One was a reading activity, but there were no books.  An internet website was used for the activity.  And one activity involved writing but there was no pen or paper.  Students were writing in an online journal, not with the end result as an essay but as a check for specific grammar evidence.  Writing was to support their speech.  They practiced listening by watching a psychologist speak on YouTube about how the brain remembers.  Comprehension check of this was done by oral rather than written questioning.

Amazing. A whole three-hour block of time with no books, no labs, very little reading and writing except to enhance their speaking abilities.  Now that's a good environment for learning a language.  And when the students came to class they had either a phone or a computer.  They sat at tables.  Each table had a plug built into it for their devices to charge.  The lesson included use of a USA Today app so that students could choose two pictures to complete an exercise where they came to a podium to speak about the pictures.  When it came time to type into their journals about a third of the students use their thumbs and fingers to type on their phones.  The others logged into their journal by computers and typed away. 

In just a few short years, this classroom experience, which has already been transformed from the laborious days of books, writing, and labs, into even a better environment because it will have a seamless environment between the real and virtual worlds and include even less writing and more interaction as a way of learning.  I cannot wait for the next five years to complete the evolution from a learning culture heavily invested in books, classroom, reading, writing, and desks in rows to a world of three dimensional learning, sometimes virtual bringing anything you want to study, no matter how remote, and sometimes real, interacting with physical object and people around you.

Yes, there was a ten-year war from 2007 to 2017.  Technology and visual presentation have annihilated education as it happened in 2007 and before.  The dinosaurs who wanted the status quo before all the changes have begun to die.  Now there is nothing holding the next phase of virtual and real integration from happening.  Alex Kipman in the video below will preview what is already being done and which will be done on a more widespread basis in the short term ahead. 

Can you imagine how much easier space exploration and colonization will be when students began learning with what happens on this stage?  (Most pertinent to the answer to this question is the 4 minutes between time slot 10:00 and 14:00 in the video.)