The students at the University of Michigan are known as the leaders and the best. Our school boasts top ranking programs and is one of the best universities in the country.
However, if you stood at the back of any given lecture hall, you would observe an interesting trend. NOt only would you see students typing notes but you would also see a great deal of the familiar blue border of the Facebook home page.
Facebook is ridiculously appealing and contagious. You can see what everyone is doing at all times as well as let them know what you are doing as well. It is mindless and frighteningly addicting.
Although facebook can be considered a detriment to the education process, we can harness some of its appeal to create a more connected and open learning environment at the University of Michigan.
How, you ask?
The answer is thorough blogs.
Blogging is a relatively new media form but it is revolutionizing articles and online writing and establishing itself as its own medium. They are often personal and make lighter reading than articles or more formal writing. It is more accessible and often enjoyable. Ultimately, blogs are information fused with personality.
The key is to utilize a campus wide blog engine that every student and professor will be a part of. The professors would be required to keep a blog that they update somewhat regularly that explains what they are interested in as well as their research projects and goals. The writing should not be formal but reveal a little more about who they are and their passion for what they do. This would allow students to be able to connect with and understand their professors on a different level as well as being a useful tool when choosing classes instead of relying on rate my professor. Students would also keep blogs that would be a window into their coursework and passions. This would allow students to connect with each other and understand what people in other departments actually study. The boundaries between departments are often very finite and after you choose a major, the other fields seem like mysteries. I would like to know what goes down in West Hall or North Campus, for example. This would make a big university smaller and allow a whole new perspective.
The other dimension of this concept is using blogs as a teaching tool. Blogs could be integrated into every class as a small portion of participation. Students would be given open ended blog posts that encourage them to relate coursework to applications in careers, etc or think about the way they think about or learn the material. These would be graded on participation and quality of thought. The expanse of the blogs would make cheating easy. However, the students should work to make their blogs their voice and an honor code may deter cheaters. Reading these blogs would allow students different perspectives and allow them to make connections that they may not have thought of. Some classes, especially humanities, could encourage comments and interactions to stimulate conversation.
This would provide not only practice in writing and thinking, but communicating to a wider audience. Forms of communication are changing but employers want people who can not only analyze and do tasks but think, apply, and COMMUNICATE! This is one of the number one things employers look for, even over math and science skills.
So I am encouraging the University of Michigan to use a new medium to connect campus and make connections between content, learning, and applications. In order to be the leaders and the best, we should prepare our students with skills and knowledge but also the ability to communicate and a voice to face the world with.
Ultimately an epic expansion of what already exists in mBlog.
Now I just need to figure out how to present all this...
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