Why is there such disparity in approaches to teaching and learning?

I wrote this post on the week 3 forum in response to the following suggestion: 'The future is here, it's just not very evenly distributed' (William Gibson):

Perhaps one reason for this is that in education 'nobody dies' - i.e. the worst that can happen is that students learn nothing. In pharmaceutical research, if a drug is found to be harmful it is instantly withdrawn. With car safety testing, a new improvement is quickly made mandatory - or at the very least is implemented by most manufacturers to enable them to argue that their car is as safe as that of their competitors. But in HE it doesn't seem to matter if one teacher is amazing, innovative and produces satisfied students while another stands at the the front and talks at them for an hour.

Perhaps the growth of market forces in the global HE market and arrival of many more private providers will finally tip the balance away from subject specialist knowledge and towards good teaching practice. If students/customers are increasingly able to vote with their feet, universities will need to articulate their value propositions more clearly to respond to their students'/customers' needs and wants.

In the light of the Fullan article about Steve Jobs' approach to product design, another thing springs to mind. Jobs is credited for initiating the revolution in 'consumer tech' - in other words, products driven primarily by what consumers want rather than what companies want to sell them. Jobs' touch of genius was his ability to predict and create something that consumers wanted before they knew what it was. If we were to translate this concept into Higher Education, what would the revolution in 'consumer education' look like?

A large percentage of the current provision could be viewed as constituting the range of average, tried-and-tested products that universities want to sell, rather than the cutting-edge, innovative 'iPad-type' products that consumers really desire. What would these educational products look like? Highly interactive, personalised courses that you could modify and adapt according to your personal tastes? Where the curriculum was negotiated between student and teacher? Where the delivery of the course was tailored to your needs, incorporating whatever blend of technology and face-to-face that you wanted?

Or will it take another Steve Jobs to invent something that we can't currently conceive of wanting, but which will revolutionise Higher Education when it arrives?

The importance of real-world problems in teaching professional practice

The article by Donald Schon highlights the problem in professional education whereby 'what aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach'. This made me think of the Lave article and his argument for the importance of situated learning - i.e the need for learning to take place in the context of real-world problems.

When I write the Professional Practice unit for the MA in Digital Scholarship I think it will essential for the curriculum to be situated within the relevant areas of professional practice of the students. Wherever possible, students must be presented with opportunities to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems so that they appreciate the 'higher ground' of solving complex problems using relevant theories and the 'lower ground' of murky, everyday problems that are more difficult to solve.

The Schon article makes me understand and appreciate the significant differences between 'theory' and 'practice'.  There is a need for both in teaching professional practice, and it is important that one is not prioritised over the other.

I also found interesting Schon's observation that in the early years of the 20th century 'professionalisation' meant replacing artistry by systematic, preferably scientific, knowledge. And yet as confidence in professional knowledge has grown, 'educators have begun once again to see artistry as an essential component of professional competence'. There is a clear link to the Lave article here with regard to the notion of apprenticeship. My personal feeling after reading both Schon and Lave is that the benefits of the apprenticeship model identified by Lave - i.e that apprentices learned not only the specific knowledge but also a range of other 'life' skills - seems to provide a more rounded educational experience than the professional, research-driven university model.

What is great teaching?

In his Teaching as Learning in Practice article Lave makes an observation that "it may be worth inquiring how it is that most of us are able to remember great teachers, but do not have routine ways to talk about what great teaching is".

I found this particularly perceptive as it made me reflect on memories of great teachers from my past and try to identify what made them 'great':

• Matthew Scott: I can hardly remember any of the content he taught us, but he made me feel like I could 'be' a composer.
• Gill Nah: Although I remember some of the content, it is the memories of how she made me feel like I could 'be' a teacher that are most prominent.

Thinking about how teacher colleagues perceive me, my feeling is that they may like me because I try to empower them and make them feel capable of achieving things with technology of which they did not believe themselves capable.

However, there is an interesting tension here because there is also a strong instructional element in teaching staff about e-learning technology. But it strikes me that providing a context to e-learning instruction - i.e. 'situating' it - is important so that tutors understand the 'why' about what they are learning.