There is an increasing gap between the way that education happens in traditional settings such as university courses and the ways in which people learn information in their daily lives. While these have never been parallel processes, they have probably crosses paths in the recent past and now are diverging in ways that educators must carefully consider.
Most of us were trained in classrooms wherein the teacher (or someone else) examined the range of possible materials to be discussed/learned, determined which should and should not be presented to the students, and then prepared a plan for presenting them in an orderly fashion. This is a form of "push" learning. The student takes whatever is brought to them and has little say in what is learned beyond the gross decision of which course is taken.
In the modern world, most people (including students) are constantly examining a barrage of information and making decisions about what they will learn more about and what they will ignore. If you will, each of us is constantly examining the world of possible curriculum to be learned, determining what should and should not be learned and then choosing to learn that material. Because of the massive information that is available almost universally, we have this choice that was not really available a generation ago. This is a form of "pull" learning. The student takes whatever they decide is important, bring it to themselves, and learn it as best they can, and in this sense has complete say over what is learned.
Strengths of Push approaches are that they are:
Weaknesses of Push approaches are that they are:
Strengths of Pull approaches are that they are:
Weaknesses of Pull approaches are that they are:
Within this course we will employ a mixed strategy intended to build upon the best of both options. Instructors who are versed in the large scale concepts of the subject will provide the overall course structure and outline while being open to possible changes in that structure if important areas of inquiry emerge from within the student group. Instructors will help to keep the students from wandering off down non-productive pathways and will encourage exploration in areas known from past and other experiences to be fertile, but will not prohibit exploration in any area of inquiry.
On each day of the first 2/3 of the course students and instructors will be selecting articles of their own choice from peer-reviewed journals about daily topics that the instructors have announced in advance. Students and instructors will come to class prepared to briefly discuss their own article and how it fits within the topic of the day. Instructors will also periodically assign some key terms, phrases or ideas for the students to find definitions for and/or write short paragraph essays about. All materials that are assembled by the students and instructors will be compiled together on a course web site to comprise the curriculum of the course. All students will have access to the complete set of information so that examinations may be prepared by the instructors from the complete set.
The first 2/3 of this course is intended to provide a learning framework for the final 1/3. During the first 2/3 the students will focus on learning a subject, beginning with broad background knowledge and homing in on specific, derived, or emergent properties and subjects. It is expected that after the first 2/3 is learned, that students will be able to formulate meaningful conversations, questions, hypotheses, and ideas about the subject and be able to understand and communicate effectively with an expert discussing the subject. Therefore, in the final 1/3 of this course, the students will have the opportunity to engage a series of experts in the range of subjects that have been being discussed as the focus of the course. Each expert will make a formal presentation about their work and the students will be expected to interact with each of them in formal and informal ways in order to learn more about their work and experiences.
The simple fact is this: After leaving school, few people will be sitting in courses where people will prepare information for them, telling them what they need to know. IF YOU want to be a true lifelong learner rather than stop learning after walking out of the classroom, then it is critical to learn how to teach yourself. This is done by mastering "pull" information evaluation and learning strategies.