Who is John Dewey and why should we care?

John Dewey was a 19th century writer, famous for his 1916 book "Democracy and Education."  

Condensing complex philosophical works into a few paragraphs is always dangerous but it is striking how his insights into education still ring true today.  He warned of the dangers of teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption.  He said that education should be engaged, that it be an active and constructive process, that it happen socially.   

According to Dewey the criterion of value for school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies the means for making this desire effective.  

I teach Marketing and Communications at a Toronto University and Community College (yes, I'm a lowly sessional instructor, grovel, scrape dirt etc.) and believe that today -- even with Blackboard, PowerPoint, clickers and various other paraphernalia -- we often still fail to engage many of our students.  

Are we like the religious organization that has lost its way and has substituted formality and process for faith?  Have we replaced credentialism with education, have we have taken the easy route and replaced thoughtfulness, creativity, and the passion to engage in the classroom with rigid content  and self-righteous student evaluation schemes (where these schemes are all telling)?  Where it's all about the teacher, (sorry, Professor) 

Thus are we perhaps left with too many zombie students --  experts in gaming the system we have created, students who view the classroom as distinct from the world, who view education as a rite of passage, a mindless march down the corridors of higher learning toward cap and gown?  A weight on their shoulders?

But what to do?  Through this blog and the discussion and comments I hope to gather  I am certainly not seeking to add to the existing lamentations of academia.    So -- if not that -- what!

This blog is intended to get feedback to help us move forward on the creation of an application / constructivist learning tool that will take place outside of the classroom.  It is about using technology (hence the reference to the iPhone) in the context of a Marketing course 

(Marketing should be all about creation and discovery, it is scarcely a discipline but more a set of applied best practices simply based on observing and meeting the economic desires of the human creature).  

So we then are still chasing John Dewey but with an iPhone. Let's begin.