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Should we use technology in the first place?
Technology is dismissed by some instructors as a fad, or a means of teaching that lacks substance. However, you must deal with the problem that while you may learn a lot from 'boring' teachers, that is only if you as a student are receptive and willing to adjust to your professor. Many students today are not receptive nor willing. If we continue to teach using the old methods, a smaller and smaller percentage of students will tune in. Is it worth losing one-third of your students today to preserve your teaching as it is?
Read the article to which I'm responding: "College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back"
How will technology change the teaching environment?As I've mentioned, technology is just a tool. However, if you restructure your classroom to fit the modern learner, you may begin to question some of your pedagogy. If we wish to reach the plugged-in students of this modern age, our pedagogy must change. Given that technology may be foreign to you, it will be a slow process to incorporate technology and new methods of teaching into your instruction. However, it is worth the work to reach full implementation and transformation of your teaching environment.
Ian Gibson indicates, "Teachers need to consider the impact of technology use on their own confirmed beliefs about how best to teach... For the majority of teachers who use a variation of the traditional, didactic pedagogy, using the full potential of technology in their classroom will bring many of these beliefs into question." (Gibson 2001: 39-40)
"Instructor evolution" comes in stages. First, you adopt the technology within your instructional practices. Next, you adapt it to suit your courses, and use it in new ways that best suit your courses and students. Lastly, you complete the transformation of your learning environment into a student-centered setting where students build their own knowledge, using technology as a tool.
In order to be successful, you must be familiar with various technologies, confident in the ones you will employ, and flexible in their application. You will come to experiment with technologies and their application, be open to multiple perspectives and solutions, and focus more on your students. You will expect more from your students, presenting more complex material and more difficult concepts, while feeling that you are aiding student learning rather than dispensing information. (Gibson 2001: 39-40)Currently, we teach the same way generations of teachers have taught. In this age, the method isn't working.
"Few would argue that the world is well into the shift of being knowledge based and globally oriented. The way people access, work with, and communicate information is fundamentally different than a decade ago. Yet, for the most part, the way we structure learning today is much as it was 5 or more decades ago!" (Gibson 2001: 40)
We've invented terms like "guide on the side" instead of "sage on the stage", but we have not implemented significant changes in the way we teach. The world around has changed, but we are still operating in a decades - perhaps centuries - old method of teaching. Change has come to the academic world, despite our resistance, because students today demand and need a different method of instruction.
The focus in the classroom has been on the instructor who presents course material and teaches skills students are expected to learn. The new model of student-centered learning has been championed, and is frequently discussed. However, for the most part, instructors have not made the fundamental changes to teaching that are required to shift to a student-centered classroom.
"In [the current] environment, and often regardless of topic, subject, or discipline, common teaching methods include lecture, whole class or small group instruction, drill-and-practice exercises from workbooks or sheets with a dependence upon facts, route learning and structured, clearly defined activities." (Gibson 2001: 41)
We don't necessarily need to throw out all of the teaching practices we have established. But we do need to introduce new methods of learning, and begin scaling back the traditional elements that are no longer successful. For example, lectures could be cut down to 20-30 minutes instead of 50, allowing time for active learning activities and group work. Focus needs to be placed not on dispensing knowledge, but facilitating students in constructing knowledge.
Gibson, I. 2001. "At the intersection of Technology and Pedagogy: considering styles of learning and teaching" Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education 10 (1-2): 37-50. Download: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14759390100200102
Beyond the Hype: Some Principles for Implementing Technology in the Classroom
- Put the assessment online - You can allow your students the freedom to take quizzes at various times. To speed up grading, you automate the grading of multiple choice questions and then just have to read and assign point values to short answers. Blackboard also permits you to provide comments on questions and quizzes if you wish to give individual feedback on short answers. I tend to offer objective questions online quizzes, and save analytical work for class.
- Follow up with a community of practice - You can establish a collaborative learning environment among your students using online discussions. Create "Help" threads, threads where students can share resources, in addition to your weekly prompts. You might offer follow-up discussions after students have submitted a written assignment.
- Make reference materials available - I provide links in the class' Blackboard, resources to download on my website, and provide specific criteria and rubrics for assignments.
- Deliver pre-work online - You can maximize your students' preparation for discussion by requiring they complete an exercise before participating in discussion. You can also develop assignments out of one another to provide continuity of learning and development.
- Provide online office hours - You need to be available via email and in discussion forums. I set the policy that students may expect an email or discussion board response within 24 hours weekdays.
- Use mentoring/coaching as a tool - Students today appreciate copious comments on the assignments they've submitted to aid them for future assignments. Feedback must be timely - within 1 week maximum.
- Provide job-aids - I provide resources for writing and how to analyze a subject at the beginning of the course, and have guides in the course materials on my teaching website.
- Access experts and create a 'lifeline' - I've found it helpful to provide my students reliable sites, organizations, and publications where they can seek information. A good example would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which provides brief introductions to topics and works, and citations of articles for further reading.
Principles taken from: Driscoll, M. “Blended Learning: Let’s Get Beyond the Hype” IBM Global Services. Download: http://www-07.ibm.com/services/pdf/blended_learning.pdf
Is Google making us stupid?
- We now have full access to a variety of media online. We are constantly bombarded by it, and the way we think has changed.
- The media surrounding us has promoted short attention and diffused concentration.
- We pick up nuggets of information rather than taking part in deep consideration of topics.
- Our students have changed in the same way, even more than we have.
Nicholas Carr indicates, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think... Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy... Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do." (See his article)
Google prioritizes results primarily by how many links pages provide. As you are surely aware, Wikipedia is often the first and only page students read. Consider then the implications of how the search engine operates. Google provides you a site with quick information that links to a host of other sites. The search engine itself structures how you consume information. You are encouraged to pursue a hop-skip approach that discourages the deeper reading that leads to the construction of understanding.
Returning to Wikipedia, the page is structured for quick presentation of the essential information about a topic. Each Wikipedia article has a two-sentence to a paragraph explanation of the topic, followed by a table of contents and sectional article below.
How often do you and your students read beyond the first paragraph?
Carr goes on later to state, "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds." (Carr 2008, ibid.)
In order to draw students back into deep reading, you could create an assignment that requires them to read at least one scholarly article of 10-15 pages. I have given my students a "review of scholarship assignment" where they read and analyze an article they have chosen from the bibliographies on my website. I have also integrated a review of scholarship into the Group Project Instructions linked in the Teaching Resources page.
Please feel free to email with any additional sources you feel should be addressed on this page. Email: drose14@msudenver.edu
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