Grappling with the digital divide
Times Higher Education, August 14, 2008
Hannah Fearn
This article grapples with the difficulties of getting faculty to teach with the communication tools their students are now used to using. It suggests students are ‘transliterate’ across a range of technologies and laments that most faculty are not.
Now I’m all for faculty experimenting with email and forums, but I wonder sometimes if making dichotomies between those who do and those who don’t is the most helpful way to think about the problem.
I like to suggest to students that technologies at work progress vertically, and one system drives out another. Whereas technologies at home progress horizontally, and we just get more and more ways to do the same thing.
Thus, what we have today are different ranges of competence – perhaps we’re more up the analog end, and they’re more up the digital end. But at the same time, we occasionally send text messages, and they know how to get a stamp and mail a card. And both parties are struggling with how to construct an identity on the ever shifting sands of privacy. May be we have more in common than we like to think.
Comments 1
Jessie — August 25, 2008
I like to suggest to students that technologies at work progress vertically, and one system drives out another.
Well said, Chris. I agree with this bit a lot. Take for example, the "web grade" system at the institution I'm just now leaving. Every faculty member is *required* by the university to submit their final grades for the semester through a web interface, or else! (The consequences range from having to submit tedious - carbon! - paper forms for each student to having your paycheck withheld.) And, you know what? There's nearly 100% compliance and very little grousing. So, of course, faculty are perfectly capable of "crossing" this supposed digital divide when it suits them. It just mainly doesn't.
Not sure I follow this bit, though:
Whereas technologies at home progress horizontally, and we just get more and more ways to do the same thing.
Care to say more about that?