Fears and concerns over changes in higher education persist.

Whether it is our disdain for lecturing to a bunch of disconnected, texting and Facebooking students, or their boredom at being put to sleep by a droning professor reading from his powerpoint, something’s got to give…

In today’s episode, Dr. Cathy Davidson joins us to talk about finding the right practice, and the right tools, and being able to see what we’ve been missing in higher ed.

Guest: Dr. Cathy Davidson

Cathy on Twitter 

The gorilla experiment

Selective attention test video by Simons and Chabris (1999)

We have a capacity for learning constantly. -Cathy Davidson

Patients as co-learners with their physicians in the healing process

Students write a class constitution

What happens if you take responsibility for your own learning? – Cathy Davidson

Alvin Toffler’s term: unlearning

Alvin Toffler has said that, “…in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in ones tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach.”

…Sadly, we all find gorillas in our lives. They usually come through tragedy… We have all had those moments when there’s a before and an after in your life when the world looks different. The world was not different. What changed was your ability to see a world that you didn’t have to see when you were priviledged not to… when you thought the world only had basketball tosses in it. It wasn’t that the gorilla didn’t exist; it was that you didn’t see it. -Cathy Davidson