A: I don't believe so.
While young students may evince distracted behavior (sending text messages!) during traditional lectures, they certainly have the capacity to download music or chat on-line for hours on end. These are young adults that grew-up in culture where they could access information in an astonishing variety of ways. Furthermore, much of this information is shared democratically (wikipedia, youtube, podcasting), giving young people opportunities to have their voices heard in the kinds of open dialogues that are antithetical to the old-style lecture.
Certainly, we can create a learning environment more interesting than a text message. Since the typical text message consists of such compelling thoughts as what up u?, our task is not that daunting. The challenge is to identify the ways in which students access information and either integrate those processes into the classroom or meet them out there on the world wide web.
Best of all, much of this technology is becoming easier to use and FREE. We love that word in education. Freedom from cost, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, free your mind.
Wikis, blogs, social networking sites, podcasts:
free, free, free, free.
Let us think about how we can capture these new tools to more effectively reach our students!
3 comments:
I agree that young students can display amazing degrees of focus when it comes to certain types of technology (gaming being the best example perhaps), and they are able to multitask incredibly well, but it also seems to me that many of the technologies that they are most attracted to require very little intellectual effort or rigor. There are so many ways to entertain oneself that there may be a disinclination to engage in any activity (like a traditional lecture) that isn’t as equally entertaining. A kind of intellectual/technological laziness perhaps. The challenge, it seems to me is to find ways to use technology in a way that will truly “free” the mind rather than just fill it.
One downside of this availability is a sense of entitlement not only to all the aforementioned tools or toys but to everything in general. This does not foster achivement through hard work but rather a notion that one can cut and paste the good life onto their life story. Bill Weiss-
Yeah Bill Weiss. Great words -- I await your first novel with anticipation. It is, in fact, that very sense of entitlement that we need to channel and appropriate. Not sure how we do that -- but that is the grail. Students always buzz towards the blue light, and they will work hard when they become engaged in things that matter most to them. for many of our students, they have yet to find the thing that matters to them. It is our task to help them find it. Since they are so heavily invested in their electronic gadgets, it would be wise for us to play along. My son does not care for my collection of sea novels. However, I admit, I am quite the hand at Pokemon. Brian Kaufman
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