Students seem to believe that using social media and forms of popular modern technology would help in their learning processes. “I would encourage more use of social media in classrooms. We are already so plugged in to everything that there is no point in trying to fight it,” added Pataki.
Although I’m only 48, I have been working in educational computing for thirty years. When I started, we taught children to program. We also taught tens of thousands of teachers to teach computer science to learners of all ages. In many cases, this experience represented the most complex thinking about thinking that teachers ever experienced and their students gained benefit from observing teachers learning to think symbolically, solve problems and debug. There was once a time in the not so distant path when educators were on the frontiers of scientific reasoning and technological progress. Curriculum was transformed by computing. School computers were used less often to “do school” and more often to do the impossible.
A really excellent read. Right in the middle of a lot of the conversations I am trying to have right now about how we treat our audiences. I would really like to know what those of you in the academy thinks of this crazy idea — let it go.
It might just be time to stop spoon feeding faculty and students dumbed down technology solutions. Why not give each and every faculty member a toolkit, access to good training materials, and staff willing to help them dream? Why spend six figures each year to license one trick pony software to do something that just about anyone could do with $150.00 iPod Touch?
So that’s the question I have … have we tried to hard? Over engineered the whole thing and taken away our audiences’ will to think creatively with the use of technology? I’m starting to feel that way, but would really like to know what others think.
Internet adoption among U.S. adults increased rapidly from the mid-’90s to about 2005. Since then, though, the number of adult Internet users has remained almost stable at around 75 to 80%.
Tired of staring at a computer all day? Well, go back a 100 years and you’d have been working in a grueling factory all day. Go back another century and you’d have been tending a field all day. Go back 500 years and more than half of your children would have died before the age of five. And yet you’d *still* be using all kinds of human-made objects and systems. As we read yesterday, humans may have been deploying fire for 1 MILLION YEARS. No matter how far back you go, you’ll find us shaping our environment. It is technology all the way down.
There you have it.
As instructional designers, what can we do? We can start by talking about instructional strategies in terms of thresholds. There are lots of different tools, approaches, applications and strategies that one can apply in online learning contexts and they all work well within certain parameters. It is my opinion that many of these will break down and become untenable as enrollment numbers increase. This breakdown will occur, not because the strategy or application is not a good idea or doesn’t work, the breakdown will most likely occur administratively in that it will simply be too much work for the instructor. Hence, we need be begin speaking in terms of thresholds, i.e., with how many students will this work before it burns out the instructor.