Born in the wrong decade?

At university, and even before for that matter, I always believed that I was a 'bad student'. I now realise that this was not necessarily the case but that my particular learning style was not suited to the way my subjects were delivered. As I read now about new ways educators challenge their students, I find myself almost wishing that I could turn back the clock.

I always needed to 'internalise' a concept internally for longer than others before understanding set in and I felt able to contribute to a meaningful discussion. My current asynchronous online study environment allows me to do just that without feeling 'slow' to catch on.

The lectures that stick in my memory are ones that made use of multimedia (albeit rudimentary) such as the Modern Linguistic class that had us listen to tapes of accents from Alsace and compare to accents from Provence. We also had to study the written phonetics of the accents but this multichannel approach was a success.

Although the balance has perhaps not yet been reached between correct use of multimedia and cognitive overlad creation, I wonder whether we would all have done better with a more interactive approach to our education.

The 'O' Level generation was always very proud to have attained lofty levels of parrot like fact repetition but I wonder whether a school leaver today is in fact equiped with a better approach to learning (both academic and social) than we were.