Another school year looms, I mean beckons, and I regard it with my usual mingled dread, fascination, awe, and excitement. (That list is in no particular order.) I look forward to being pushed harder by native-born citizens of cyberspace, by which I mean incoming students. These folks were around eight years of age when the World Wide Web appeared, so they’ve spent some of their childhood and all of their adolescence in an increasingly robust and ubiquitous online environment. That heritage represents a huge challenge for higher education. I don’t think we should adopt all the aspects of the culture students live in–there’s a strong countercultural obligation in higher education, I believe–but at the same time, college shouldn’t be the place where information technologies don’t really matter. We need to create a robust network of our own that connects the work of teaching and learning to the world beyond the classroom. Or to put it another way, we should encourage students to view the world as a learning space that asks for reflection, persuasive argument, and committed interaction. I think information technologies have a crucial role to play in that encouragement.
Gardner Writes
Aut Inveniam, Aut Faciam
Today’s students are more technologically advanced than ever before; they are impressed by “tech-toys”
and the ability to use them in the classroom. Today’s faculty, however, are not all in the same digital
boat. There are a growing number of digital immigrants who embrace technology but there is still a small
number who run from it. We need to make sure our faculty are not “out-teched” by our students.
It’s getting so everyone is sorta “out-teched” by everyone else depending on the topic. There is so much “tech” that we can be masters of it all no matter how hard we try. For instance, in a convo with some college age students the other day, they’ve got the Final Fantasy and Doom 3 thing down, but they don’t have blogging and wiki-ing in their pocket skillset. I’ve got profs with the wireless thing down, but they can’t update their virus defs or know what a jumpdrive is. What is the ratio everyone touts? 10% are the techno-philes, 10% are the techno-phobes, and the rest are just hanging on for dear life. We are truly digital immigrants in that scenerio, alone in a boat that we wonder if we should vote someone out and maybe it could be a few. It’s that “reflection” aspect that I wonder about. While we fascinate ourselves with “learning” the new tech toy, are we really “learning” anything from it? Are we reflecting, arguing, interacting with others or with the personality-devoid technical toy? When can we stop long enough to achieve balance?