Deeper

Passing through my Google reader this weekend I came upon a post by Loic LeMeur, the European entreprepreneur and organizer of the massively influential LeWeb conference. In this post, Loic has posted a survery simply asking people if Michael Arrignton should be invited back to this conference each year. Arringotn is the blogger behind TechCrunch, one of the world's most widely read tech blogs.

Interestingly though, from Loic's post, the sense I get is that people in Europe are not really enamoured with Arrington's approach to life. A type A personality, Arrington wants to write blog posts in between courses at restaurants. In his post, Loic discusses the issue of bredth vs. depth and wonders if it is cultural. Do North Americans approach things with a breadth approach, attempting to pack things in every moment while Europeans look more for depth?

While I don't have enough experience with education systems world wide I can definitely see that most North American systems are based on giving students access to a wide breadth of information. We often value exposure more than understanding and talk about "covering" our curricula. Internet service and large libraries are seen as a good thing as they give students access to a lot of information. For many subjects that we are required to teach, our curricula are jammed so incredibly full that there is no possible way that they can be completed and teachers need to make choices about which chapters they are leaving out in a textbook or which unit of outcomes you are leaving behind. Faced with an onslaught of standardized testing, some people don't have this choice and the documents take precedence over the kids sitting in the chairs.

What would a set of courses based on depth, but combined with solid online and offline resources look like? How would it be different?

Here are my thoughts:

- Students would definitely be given fewer short term assignments and more projects.
- It would be vital that students have good online search skills so they can access information from a lot of places in many different forms.
- Students would need to be able to evaluate information well because as they search the web more deeply, they would run into a lot of questionable resources.
- Time schedules would need to look different. It is almost impossible to dig deeply in a forty minute period. Students would have to be working in large blocks of time.
- Students would need access to people, not just information. They should be encouraged to email, phone, Skype, leave comments for and get into discussions on listservs with experts. Again, this takes time and having a set of questions due next class does not encourage this to happen.

In a globalised society with the pace of information change that we are seeing, we need to ask what the use is of a broad curriculum. Curricula that have increased in size and number of outcomes in an attempt to keep up with the information that is available will instead continue to fall farther and farther behind. Information is expanding far faster than our documents. It is not possible fo our students to take it all in. There is no way to keep up.

Our response needs to be to give up. We will never keep up so why try? Instead of trying to jam more and more information into a limited amount of time, we instead need to be looking more closely at the depth of our curricula. Once students learn well how to use the resources available to them, they will be able to tackle any topic they are passionate about. There is no doubt that the net gives us great access to information and that breadth of curricula is both easy and tempting. But like all routes you can say this about, it's value is questionable.

Photo Credit: Deep Blue Something: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/148926445_3b3cb3a598.jpg

Tags: loiclemeur, michael arrington, techcrunch, curricula, education, school

Comments

[Jess McCulloch]

I've been saying the same thing lately about all the tech tools being used. It is too easy to get caught up in all the different things to try, and lose site of providing really deep and meaningful learning opportunities. The technology will only amaze and excite for a finite period of time, and after that you've gotta have something substantial to go with. It's similar to curriculum - you may be able to engage kids in all sorts of different interesting intriguing subjects, but they will need skills to really take their learning further through deeper understanding.

Thankfully I will be in a school next year that has 4 x 75 minute classes per day and no textbooks - or very few for reference reasons. The idea being that there is enough time to have deeper discussions, and not ones that go by a book - but rather ones guided by what the students really need and want to know.

Great post.

[Clarence Fisher]

Jess this is a valuable point and one I should have touched on in this post. The quest for the latest tool often drives us into shallow waters. The danger is the technology driving the learning instead of the other way around. Thanks for this reminder.