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Learning should be fun
May. 9th, 2007 10:11 pmI teach a (very) small computer class (average size= 2 students) on Wednesdays at the branch library where I work. As I become more confident, I'm realizing how very bland the instruction materials the course is (loosely, at my discretion) based on are.
For some reason, many people seem to think that education should be structured and formulaic, like a post hoc analysis of material all laid out with categories and vocabulary lists and everything.
Sometimes this is quite useful.
But there isn't enough attention paid, I think, to making a formal lesson that mimics the experience of actually just learning a little bit of something, at random, because it's interesting.
So tonight our small class of me+two was doing beginning internet. And I was showing them how to do searches in Google, how to narrow searches with well chosen keywords such as a place name. I showed them how to type in addresses of websites (this is a very basic class). And you know what? It was all a bit boring. So I showed them how to find satellite photos of their neighborhood and then took them to YouTube to look at videos. They loved YouTube. They could have spent an hour there - even though they have trouble navigating the mice, pointing, and clicking, the point-click to reward ratio was so high in YouTube... they felt like they better understood why their kids/grandkids liked to play on the Internet. And then I showed 'em my MySpace page to demystify MySpace a bit. And they had a pretty good time and were sad to go.
Because sometimes, education should just be more like going over to your friend's place late at night and getting shown some random kinda cool thing that makes you curious and entertains you. So says I.
For some reason, many people seem to think that education should be structured and formulaic, like a post hoc analysis of material all laid out with categories and vocabulary lists and everything.
Sometimes this is quite useful.
But there isn't enough attention paid, I think, to making a formal lesson that mimics the experience of actually just learning a little bit of something, at random, because it's interesting.
So tonight our small class of me+two was doing beginning internet. And I was showing them how to do searches in Google, how to narrow searches with well chosen keywords such as a place name. I showed them how to type in addresses of websites (this is a very basic class). And you know what? It was all a bit boring. So I showed them how to find satellite photos of their neighborhood and then took them to YouTube to look at videos. They loved YouTube. They could have spent an hour there - even though they have trouble navigating the mice, pointing, and clicking, the point-click to reward ratio was so high in YouTube... they felt like they better understood why their kids/grandkids liked to play on the Internet. And then I showed 'em my MySpace page to demystify MySpace a bit. And they had a pretty good time and were sad to go.
Because sometimes, education should just be more like going over to your friend's place late at night and getting shown some random kinda cool thing that makes you curious and entertains you. So says I.
