Assignment: Read Jamie McKenzie’s work entitled Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free Range Students – Part One and Part Two. It was written in 1994 yet describes what many of us are told should be the student or teacher of the ‘future’.
- Is the future here? If yes, how is that the case (site examples)? If not, why not?
- What do you think about his ideas?
- How far away or close to this idea are we at present?
Part one: McKenzie paints a picture of students with access to seemingly limitless information resources on the web, but warns that large volumes of this information are the mental equivalent of junk food, and gorging or regular consumption may lead to unhealthy addictions. McKenzie implores us to teach students to become infotectives. He describes infotectives thus:
a student thinker capable of asking great questions about data (with analysis) in order to convert the data into information (data organized so as to reveal patterns and relationships) and eventually into insight (information that may suggest action or strategy of some kind) (“Students as infotectives” section, para. 2)
They are puzzle-solvers who synthesize and evaluate the information they encounter. Their skills are thinking, researching and inventing.
McKenzie essentially presents the case and a basic outline of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), with students coming at the Internet and its information with a question, and finding the answer to the ill-formed problem. McKenzie doesn’t use the PBL framework but touches on the same ideas of ill-formed problems, guiding questions and students finding their own solutions. The examples provided aren’t completely PBL, but are perhaps one step removed with their defined lack of knows/need to knows, feedback, and collaboration, but they do contain a presentation element as a capstone. Like PBL, however, the focus is constructive. The section on “Eisenberg’s Big Six” remedies some of these absences.
[Part 2]
Three levels of thought must occur concurrently and recursively:
- Envisioning – Top level, 50,000-foot view of things. Dreams, fantasy, imagination, visualization
- Inventing – Middle level, where the visions are turned into reality. Questions about what might work, how that happens. Innovation comes from this level.
- SCAMPERing/Rearranging – evaluative stage. SCAMPER comes from Osborne and modified by Eberle, refers to the mnemonic: “S=substitute. C=combine. A=adapt. M=modify, magnify, minify. P=Put to other uses. E=eliminate. R=reverse” (Osborn, cited in McKenzie).
- Is the future here? If yes, how is that the case (site examples)? If not, why not?
- What do you think about his ideas?
- How far away or close to this idea are we at present?
