Beyond the College Walls

| May 2, 2010 | Education Week | 6 comments

Hey you.

Yes, you.

Where are you right now? Your literal location, not the “where are you in your life?” question.

Awesome. I really want to visit there someday. I hear great things.

I’m typing this in Columbia, MO while chatting with Patrick Johnson, who is somewhere in NYC.

I read blogs by people from Chicago to Saskatoon. I talk with people from Washington, the state, to Washington, the capitol.

This is an Education Week piece, so I bet you saw this coming – I learn from all of those people.

Why can’t our education system start taking advantage of this? There are some amazing professors at Mizzou, but surely we don’t have an expert in everything. Instead, we have good professors teaching things that they might have read about, or learned about when they were in school, but things they don’t really know.

But I bet there’s an expert in New York, or Greenville, SC, or Reno, NV that knows. Hell, even the people that wrote the textbook for the class. Can they Skype into a class? Think of the understanding students would gain from having a conversation with the writer of a textbook, as opposed to the current one-way flow of information.

Remember having a pen pal in third grade? That was a group project that wasn’t limited to location – you were working together on your conversation writing skills.

Now, we have Skype, Google Talk, Twitter and more to converse and come up with ideas. There is Google Docs and various dropbox platforms to help with content management. Flow.io is a great tool for project management. The best part is that many of these tools are free.

You don’t have to be a researcher with a budget to work with people across the globe. You can be a 10th grader with access to a computer and a good idea.

Education no longer has to be limited to the walls of a classroom. This is education without walls, and we need to embrace it.

Photo Credit: DC John

Colby Gergen I despise writing about myself in the first person. That reaches off the keyboard to when I'm speaking, as a senior studying awesomeness at Mizzou, about myself. I just don't like talking about myself, whether I'm talking about my adoration of adventures or my belief in the Gospel of the Fresh Prince. Doesn't it seem like talking about yourself in the first person is just patting yourself on the back for kicking ass at life every single day? Yeah, I would never do a thing like that. Twitter: @colbywg

View all posts by Colby Gergen

6 Responses to “Beyond the College Walls”

  2. Julia Drewniak

    Good article. But the use of technology doesn't have to be limited to the use of chatting technologies. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University (http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/) does a great job talking about the need to incorporate technologies into the classroom, such as the use of Twitter as a way to gauge class participation. He basically said the same thing; we need to have education without the restrictions of “walls”.

    Reply
  3. Andreana Drencheva

    Great post, Colby!

    I think some professors take a advantage of social media and technology. Unfortunately not many realize how beneficial it can be.

    One of the projects I am working on this semester is a campaign for Shedd Aquarium. We've never met with the client face-to-face. All of the communication has been through Skype. If we didn't have Skype, I don't think I would have had the opportunity to work on this amazing project. Another one of my professors uses Skype for guest speakers in lectures. We've had people from Europe and Asia Skype in.

    I also agree with Julia. Twitter and even Facebook can increase class participation. I know a professor who requires her students to tweet questions prior to each lecture and during the lecture. She gets much more questions and comments now then when she used the traditional lecture format.

    Reply
  6. GoKTGo

    I really love the idea of education without borders – a collaborative effort to gain as much knowledge as we can! (I may be a nerd, but I just *loooove* learning!)

    And you're right – we have all of these great resources, why not take advantage of them? I think one of my favorite things about you, Colby, is your ambition to learn as much as you can from as many people as you can! If everyone approached education that way, I can't even imagine how much more we would all know!

    I love this idea! Let's make it happen!

    Reply

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