Death of the classroom

Things have got a little morbid around here of late, what with talk of dead words on dead paper, dead authors and now unsubstantiated news of the death of the classroom!

The message that stood out for me when reading this "news" was that:

Faculty need to switch among learning modes within the same instructional period. That means switching from lecture, to team interaction, to individual reflection and study, to hands-on building or experiment, and back again, in the same or adjacent spaces.

This was an affirmation of what Mark McCrindle has said about engaging Generation Y. McCrindle talked about the importance of structuring the learning process to take advantage of multiple modalities; especially the kinesthetic mode, given its predominance among Gen Y.

What might these lessons look like? Well the team at California State University, Hayward have had a good think about Teaching Information Literacy to Generation Y.

For more on the traits of Gen Y take a look at Julie Coates' presentation from last year's LERN convention: Generation X vs Generation Y: What makes the younger generations tick.