"Student-centered" is the only choice in the wired classroom

I was at a conference about effective use of technology in the post secondary classroom. Since I was teaching at a university where every student had a laptop, I was keen to attend a session on classroom management in a wired school. The presenters were from a college in the states that had a "laptop program" (students were required to purchase a laptop as part of their tuition) and they had been struggling with ICQ - the instant messaging software of choice at that time. Their faculty were clinging to the traditional lecture-style and it wasn't working - students were just ignoring them and chatting online. I hoped to hear about some innovative teaching.

To prevent students from messaging one another, they had placed mirrors all around the walls of one classroom and then positioned the students facing away from the instructor. The students could see him in the mirrors, and he could keep an eye on their computer screens while he lectured at them.

I also visited an elementary school in Maine shortly after their Maine Learning Technology Initiative had been launched - putting a laptop into the hands of every student. In this grade 7 classroom, the teacher was not working nearly so hard to maintain CONTROL - no mirrors. She was working with her students on a problem that involved some internet research, and her students were enthralled by their beautiful new iMacs. In fact, the students were working with each other while the teacher circulated, helping-out.

What seems so brilliant to me about technology in the classroom is not that computers themselves are so powerful, or even that they provide the teacher with so many more options for teaching (although they certainly do). A computer in the student's hands gives her a window outside the very narrow possibilities of the dull classroom. And to escape through that window, she needs a certain set of skills - an ability to solve the hundreds of problems that arise from even simple computing. In those students in Maine, I saw energy and enthusiasm...they had been entrusted with some real power over their own experience.

Choosing to take a student-centered approach to teaching used to be up to the teacher. Arguably, a teacher-centered approach has never really resulted in effective learning, but it might have looked effective - once. In the wired classroom, it is all the more obvious that students don't learn well from "the sage on the stage". In the wired classroom, student-centered is the only way.