Jim Slotta is thinking ahead — way ahead.
“The teachers I’m hoping to affect are in grade 8 right now,says the associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) who is researching how technology can transform K-12 classrooms.
“In 10 years when they’re young teachers coming through OISE,they’re going to think we’re crazy if we’re still offering them the same old classroom paradigm.”
The “same old paradigm,” he says,is the 19th-century model of the classroom,where a teacher stands in front of a class and lectures to the students. “Students come to class expecting to be audience members and teachers come expecting to be on stage.” With a background in computer programming, physics and cognitive science, Slotta hopes to create technology that helps teachers and students break out of old classroom patterns.
In the classroom of tomorrow,says Slotta, technology plays a mediating role, allowing students to interact with each other,with their teachers and with the outside world. It also means that curriculum can be interactive and “smart”— that is, it can learn from patterns of use by students.The result is a nuanced and sophisticated classroom that responds better to students’ needs.
From 1995-2005,Slotta worked at the University of California at Berkeley where he
developed the Web-Based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE),an online repository of
science projects for middle and high school science teachers.Slotta is now developing a
new generation of technologies and is focused on the promise of open source and open
content development for educational research.He and his students have developed a
new wiki environment (a web application where content is user-generated and edited
and that allows for exchange — think Wikipedia) called ENCORE to support the
exchange of open source materials related to learning science.
He has also turned his attention to “smart room”technology.
“As a student entering a smart classroom,”he explains,“you might log in using a
handheld device,which is connected to the smart room server.The room assigns you to
a group,say, to the Banana group.You look around the room and see an image of a
banana projected on a wall near a bank of computers that are connected in a cluster,
including a central coordinating computer.Eventually the other members of your group
show up.You all work on a project,with materials and tasks coordinated by the central
computer.You might be given one set of duties on your computer screen and fellow
group members might have their own tasks,but you all observe the synthesis of your
work projected on the wall by the central computer.At a certain point in time,your
group’s work might get beamed across the room to one of the other groups — say, the
Apple group — if they need your product for their continued work.”
Slotta points out that social technologies like wikis, Facebook, MySpace and
del.icious.us are rapidly taking off,and that students are deeply engaged with these systems
outside school.
“Technology has transformed every other dimension of the world — business, science,
travel,the way we shop,the way we watch TV.Why shouldn’t it be transforming
schools? Researchers must make better progress in understanding the effective uses of
technology in order to deliver on its promise.”
Tomorrow’s teachers — today’s eighth-graders — are counting on it.
Thou shalt not kill.Honour thy father and mother.
The list of imperatives known as the Ten Commandments is familiar to people who live in Judeo-Christian society, regardless of whether they’re religious.Proclaimed by God and given to Moses on stone tablets, the Commandments are cornerstones of both Christianity and Judaism.
But might they also appear in the Qur’an?
Sebastian Günther, an associate professor in the
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations,
says yes, and he wants to find out what this means.
“Some Muslims say that the Ten Commandments
relate to the Bible and have nothing to do with Islam.
But others say they are found in the Qur’an — they
identify them in two passages. If you read these passages
and read the Commandments in the Bible, it’s
very striking.There is a great similarity.”
Günther is investigating what medieval Muslim
scholars knew about the Commandments and how
they perceived them. He says that for Muslims,who
believe in a continuity of divine revelation culminating
in God’s final revelation to Muhammad, the presence of
the Ten Commandments in the Qur’an would make “discussion and debate among the three big monotheistic
religions not only possible but even necessary.This
is a chance for interfaith dialogue.”
Günther’s work excavating classical Muslim thought
has taken him around the world, including a stint as
one of the few non-Muslims invited to teach at Al-
Azhar, a leading Islamic university.He makes regular
trips to the Middle East for source material.“Much of
my work is based on manuscripts.But many classical
Arabic texts have not been published, so one has to go
to archives and special collections in Damascus and
Cairo and dig up the information.”
Much of his work focuses on educational philosophies
in classical Islam.He has traced the development
of philosophies of learning and probed the relationship
between Muslim educational philosophies and ancient
Greek philosophy (much of which was translated into
Arabic and later found its way to Europe via medieval
Muslim scholars).Many ideas we think of as central to
Western education have Islamic counterparts.
While he’s as likely to be focused on what ninthcentury
Muslim scholars had to say about curriculum,
he sees his work having direct relevance for the
world today.
“It’s important to understand why we exist the way
we do. If you understand how people think you can
learn a lot about who they are.”
At home in Toronto, he points out that more than
half of the city’s population was born outside Canada. “In a globalized world, one cannot even speak any
more of ‘the West.’What does that mean? We have to
live together.For people who come here, of course they
need to learn about what Canada is.But we also have a
responsibility — and we should have the curiosity — to
learn about where they come from and what they offer
culturally and intellectually.”