The Classroom is Flat

There's so much on my mind this morning. As someone who at this point I am sure succumbs to a very mild form of insomnia, I can tell you that it can be quite liberating mentally. Trust me, I have tried all sorts of techniques to regain my sleep state but none have them has been foolproof. My brain amazes me when I can almost feel my synapses firing and making all kinds of orderly and non sequitur connections and frankly, it keeps me awake.

One of the techniques that has never worked for me is reading a book. I don't read books to be entertained anymore. Fiction is so out. I mostly read to learn and be amazed at things I never knew before. But that doesn't stop me from trying to read a book to go to sleep despite it being an activity that usually activates my grey matter. My latest effort has been Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat," a book I always meant to read when it released but only remembered when I spied it at Half-Price Books for six dollars this past May.

The book now has me thinking about the flattening of education. One thing we examine constantly at my school is the generational gaps between our students and teachers and how we can fill those gaps by better understanding their expectations. Some have said that The Millenials, as they have come to be known, expect products or in our case, knowledge, to be handed to them without much effort. In faculty meetings, this idea usually inspires some rounds of groaning and gnashings of ivory tower teeth at the idea of corporate culture infecting the pristine halls of academia.

But corporate culture has come to be a part of our general culture, like it or not. People expect some service and they expect that provider to meet them at where they are. So I can't blame the current crop of students for having these expectations. How do I meet them where they are at, to use the parlance of our times, while still doing my best to push them to greater heights? According to Friedman, one of the biggest flatteners of our world has been access to technologies that allow us to connect to both people and information at a moments notice and that is what is keeping me awake this morning. I am brainstorming possibilities of what this concept looks like to educators, what sorts of solutions we might already have or that we might find, and what those solutions mean to future of academia.

I have not been a huge fan of academia at any level throughout most of my educated lifetime. I have had some fantastic teachers, however, and I would wager that none of them made any impact on me because they made sure to follow policies and procedures to the letter or to uphold every esteemed tenet ever devised by the system. They made an impact on me because they did something I saw as unique or, in some cases, simply listened to where I was coming from at any given time on a professional or personal level. I'm trying my best to be like them.