This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Items of Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
Technology and Pedagogy
Alan Kay spoke about why technology based teaching fails back in 1987, as the personal computer revolution began. He explained that pedagogy should be considered before the technology. In other words, what we teach is more important that how we teach it. While technology can amplify the overall learning experience, what you actually learn is most important. As teachers, it’s our bottom line.
That being said…
Technology is essential to the learning environment and we are doing it all wrong.
Blackboard billed itself as the panacea to boring University lectures for the new “Net” generation. Yet, according to a study by the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida, older students are far more likely to be satisfied by online courses than Net Generation students. Online courses are just rubber stamp copies of off-line courses that don’t capitalize on the interactivity and immediacy of the Web.
I rebel against Blackboard. I normally create my own technology-based learning environments specific to what each class needs, sans the boring click-through presentations. I was sure that my approach was the best approach for what each class needed.
But I was still missing something.
I was born before 1984, and therefore my socio-cultural outlook is different than my students. I’ve discovered that for my students:
1) Learning is Social
Net Generation students crave interactivity with their peers and professors, even if they don’t meet in a physical class. Group work is very important to Net Generation students, even in online classes.
2) Learning is Immediate
Net Generation students expect quick responses from professors, something many professors don’t always have the time or interest to give. Net Generation students live in a communication environment where friends and peers are constantly “logged on” and reachable by either phone, e-mail or instant messaging.
3) Learning is Contextual
Used to automatic news updates, RSS feeds, SMS/ instant messaging, and even Facebook groups, Net generation students gather and respond to information unique to their personal data.
4) Learning is Visual and Auditory
No, this does not mean you need to learn Powerpoint. With cameras on their phones and earbuds pumping constant ipod music, it’s no wonder that the silence of the lecture hall lulls students into a deep and peaceful slumber.
5) Learning Still Takes Time
Work, friends, starbucks…with so much vying for their attention, the Net generation has a hard time with time management. In an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, American University linguistics professor Naomi Baron says that Net Generation students writing and thought process lacks depth, since no time is set aside for proper reflection. There’s something to be said, argues professor Baron, for the ability to sit still and think.
I’d love to hear how you deal with the problems and solutions of the learning environment for the “Net generation.” Post your comments!
| 
| 
| 
| 
One Response to “Technology and Pedagogy”
February 5th, 2008 at 5:50 am
I think I actually said that the ideas and processes were the most important parts of a subject. To me, the pedagogy has to be brought out of the best conceptions we can come up with of what it means for a person to have learned an idea (and this is not the same for each idea, nor is it quite the same from learner to learner).
So in music or sports we certainly have an idea of fluency in the ideas and processes, and thresholds that have real meaning, but we also have a variety of styles exhibited by those who have become fluent - they are not quite alike, but have gotten into the same “conversation”.
This brings up a very tricky subject: what are the synergies and clashes for fluency with different personalities, motivations, and expectations? As you point out the students have grown up in an environment of messages and much of their approach to the world is based on the kinds of messages they have learned how to deal with. (When McLuhan said “The medium is the message” he meant that what is important is that getting fluent at a particular way of sending and receiving builds automatic skills that can positively and negatively affect how one thinks.)
He thought that the various kinds of disembodiment and indirect abstractions of writing (and espeically printing) were the key to what we call civilized thinking - and especially opened the doors to mathematics and science. He thought that the portable book made possible by the printing press allowed a person to go off by themselves and start to think thoughts that would simply not occur in the social whirl. That the kinds of arguments supported by printing were qualitatively different than those which could be made orally (”You can argue about a lot of things with stained-glass windows, but democracy is not one of them!”)
Television is a very different kind of media environment than printed books. McLuhan was able to make some almost ridiculous (at the time) predictions about how humans would change and become in the presence of TV, but 50 years later, most of them have happened (and in my opinion not for the better).
The computer can be lots of things (its essence is simulation of any and all things) so it is a choice of desigers what kind of basic medium it appears to be. We put a lot of thought into this when we were inventing personal computing in the 70s. But hardly any thought has been invested in this serious problem since the commercialization started in the 80s. The result is that computers resemble TV, magazines, comic books, and cave-society communication more and more, and this is gradually conditioning what is taken as normal thought.
If ideas were neutral to the kinds of thoughts and internal processes, then this would be no problem at all. But, in fact, most important ideas do not at all fit in any container, but have to be carried carefully in certain kinds of invented discourse. It is next to impossible for them to be learned outside of also learning the discourse that carries them.
Some of this discourse is in the form of structured prose, some poetry, some mathematics (another kind of poetry), and so forth. Science is the toughest to teach and learn because its outlook is more different than any other kind of knowledge and processes we’ve come up with. It is partly a set of processes to counter what is wrong with our brain/minds, and its primary finding is that our best knowledge is in the form of imperfect maps whose imperfections are noted as accurately as possible.
The epistemologies of many of the most important ideas don’t fit into our built-in language, story, social commerce. When I used to teach guitar, some students complained that their left hand little fingers were too weak, and why couldn’ they just use 3 fingers. My answer was to play for them some fantastic pieces that could only be played by using all four fingers. On a much larger scale, many of our more important ideas require deep learning of new ways to think as part of learning new knowledge. Much of the new knowledge will simply not be representable in some of the older more comfortable forms.
This is part of the reason why math and science (and even reading and writing) are failing so badly. Neil Postman pointed out that classrooms and modern content cannot compete with television, etc., in “entertainment value”. If TV could hold the content as well or better, this would not be a problem. But since it can’t it is at best sugar and fat with little nutrition, and actually more like a legal but dangerous drug.
Developed ideas are also entertaining, but they require learning to enjoy them (sometimes a lot of learning). A good plan would be to limit or omit the distracting mind-candy until some skills for the more difficult but ultimately more rewarding idea-holders have been acquired. Since most parents (and quite a few teachers) don’t seem to understand this, the distractions will likely dominate. And trying to teach many of the most important ideas in forms that can’t hold them simply won’t work, even though they seem initially more appealing to the students.