It’s interesting to do a Technorati tag search for TAFE and see what people are writing about their TAFE experience… of course, it’s not always going to be posititve… One student, ‘unwritten’ wrote recently in a post entitled “bored *sigh*“:
Man, i should really get going on my TAFE work, but tis soo soo soo boring, ive been trying to put it off for as long as i can. I mean seriously, this is what we have to do: we have about an A4 sized, 111 paged text book, yea i know it doesnt seem long but we have to summarise each frikkin paragraph of the whole thing! I mean tell me how were supposed to actually learn from that?
Tell me if im wrong and overreacting, PA-LEASE. Cos I sure as hell am learning nothing from it…
…i confronted him about it and the reason he sets the courses up like this is so we fill up the time requirement which is like 40 horus on each module. I mean COME ON! Thats no excuse, it makes me so frustrateddd!!
GRRRR…
I personally think it’s great that this student is reflecting (validly) on the ridiculousness of the learning activity and has tried to talk to the teacher about it (you’ll have to read the whole post to see this). Why is this teacher not changing the activity??
Imagine how much we could improve our learning and facilitation if students were tagging their reflections on TAFE like this student has, so that we could read raw feedback and improve our methods! I reckon the transparency would be a good thing for us as teachers/facilitators…
Great notion and one likely to promote FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Denial) among those that Wish To Control And Keep Things Neat and Tidy.
For a similar experience (and different reaction) read Brian Lamb’s discovery of students creating their own wiki and blog environment outside the university’s control:
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/013728.html
This a great reflective tool for students.
I agree that as teachers we need to be more transparent and allow feedback from our students. We need to be aware of their difficulties so we can try to make changes to suit their learning needs.
http://teachandlearnonline.blogspot.com/2006/01/why-arent-we-listening-to-kids-these.html