posted August 7, 2008
) Dr. Ronald Paige |
The textbook, “The Teacher for the Knowledge Society” is published by Elizbieta Perzycka and Harald Nilsen and is currently being used at universities in Poland and Norway.
“A friend of mine speaks and writes five languages and translates books for people,” said Dr. Paige. “He got a request from a professor in Poland needing him to do the translations for a book and asked him if he knew of anyone in the U.S. who would be interested in submitting a chapter for juried review. So that is what started this whole process.”
According to Dr. Paige, the jury committee looks through the names of the people who submit manuscripts and the names of their topics. They then determine how well the work meets their needs and look at the quality of the research and the writing. If they like it, they select it for the textbook. Dr. Paige actually submitted two chapters; one of which is featured in “The Teacher for the Knowledge Society” and one, which is going to be printed in another textbook to be published in December.
“My chapter in this book is from the research from my dissertation and is about how people direct their own learning once they get out of a formal educational environment,” said Dr. Paige. “Both of the universities that use the book (in Norway and Poland) have major departments in education. What they recognize is for a teacher to be truly functional in the 21st century, he or she has to really understand how to deliver content to their students. They have to understand how content interfaces with the flow of technology in a modern society.”
Dr. Paige’s chapter is based upon observations contained within, what he calls, the Entrepreneurial Learning Matrix. He feels the successful instructor must continually and overtly model for his/her students those attributes that will aid them in becoming life-long learners, such as playing with concepts, discovering anomalies, verbalizing strategies applied to tasks, and embracing failure as an important part of learning.
Dr. Paige said all of the chapters in the book are written by people in similar positions as his and they all understand the impact technology has on education. “It was a lot of fun interacting with these people prior to the publication,” said Dr. Paige. “The author from Argentina is known all over the world for his views and his theories on this topic and others.”
“These two universities have a phenomenal concept. Textbooks cost a lot of money for students and these are two major universities that create textbooks with research that is current. They publish these books and sell them to their students at cost so their students only pay what it costs to put it on the paper,” said Dr. Paige. “There is really no reason more schools can’t do this if they have their own printing press; or, even now, with online technology, they could put it online.”
Prior to working at Cleveland State, Dr. Paige owned his own business and worked for two major industries. “I came back to the field of education simply because I really felt it was time to bring back to education what I had learned from 15 years in the workplace.”
“As far as I’m concerned, this is ideal because this is going to students. This is going to students who are going to be educators. These are people that are going out in the workplace and if they understand what they are doing with content and they understand how to deliver it and they understand how to engage students, then I’ve done my job.”
Dr. Paige received his Bachelor of Arts from Hartwick College in English Education, his Master of Science in Educational Media and Communications from the State University of New York at Albany, and his Ph.D. from Walden University in Education.
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