Contech

Welcome Freshmen. Have an iPod.
NYT, August 20, 2008.
Jonathan Glater

I groaned when I saw this one. Colleges resorting to iPod giveaways! What a dumb marketing stunt! What are they giving away? The greatest distraction in the classroom of all time!

Then I realized the question is really: how do teachers treat mobile technology in the classroom?

Since I know what they’re really doing when they’re clacking away on their laptop in class (writing email) or fiddling with their phone (sending a text message) I warn them at the start of the semester that if I don’t think they’re paying attention, they might not get credit for attendance.

Interestingly, this has the effect of drastically reducing the number of laptops in class, and eliminates cell phones, in no small part because THEY’RE relieved that I have taken the toys away from those who would distract them.

If you want someone to look something up on the Internet for the class, you can always ask.

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.

Beloit College’s Mindset List for the class of 2012

This year’s cohort was born in 1990. They never knew Ronald Reagan as President (which is why they spell the name “Regan”). None of them remembers George W. Bush or the Gulf War. They were only 8 when Bill and Monica made headlines, and just 10 when George H.W Bush emerged victorious from the debacle in Florida.

So if it seems as if they “haven’t got a clue” it’s because all they’ve learned of their immediate past was what they heard from adults or saw on TV or cobbled together in a hurry for a paper in High School.

And adults are still trying to make sense of the past! Some of my colleagues are still trying to come to terms with the fact that BOTH Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were elected President of the United States TWICE. All that heat and so little light makes their immediate past (or what we would call “the present”) an off-putting topic, something adults haven’t finished carrying on about, something that’s their problem, as in ‘that was when you were living your life, now I’m living mine’. So little wonder today’s teens think ‘Watergate’ was a movie, have never heard of Iran-Contra, and think ‘Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution’ were a grunge band!

It’s not that they’re so young, it’s that we’re so old! So have patience when you speak about that present. For your students, by definition, the decade before last is ancient history!