Les cours sont-ils trop pré-construits ?

Despite the perceived tech-savvy nature of these Millennials, this context challenges my students. My students are so trained by classrooms where all the connections are pre-made and the only risk is boredom that they are often frustrated when I don’t tell them exactly how to connect the things we are learning, as if the world were just a larger version of the screw-together furniture in their apartments. Of course they know the world is more complex than that; they just don’t expect their classes to reflect that complexity. Not surprisingly, the walled garden CMS is much like screw-together furniture: carefully designed to manage student actions and pre-formatted with powerful assumptions about how knowledge is organized, how learning happens, and what relationship pertains between students and teachers. It is important to recognize that CMS’s are designed as they are for a reason. They reflect dominant ideologies about teaching, though certainly other marketplace imperatives are at work here as well. [source via George SIEMENS]