What do old fogies bring to new technologies?

I just watched another TeacherTube video about the "digital generation," (Digital Students @ Analog Schools)and as I watched I had two recurring thoughts: that my colleagues who are already nervous about the new fangled WWW are going to be even more put off by Web 2.0; and that this is too bad, because the younger students who have now gone digital could still benefit greatly from our professional accompanyment on their trip! (Not to mention that we teaching professionals still might be able to learn a thing or two from our students!)

The video I watched most recenlty was basically a sequence of interview clips, of students telling the viewer, "We are visually oriented. Don't keep teaching to us in the old lecture format. You're going to lose us." The fear among longtime teaching professionals, who may remember long hours of reading actual books and writing endless papers in grad school, and listening to at least one important lecture in their college career (!!!), is that something important may be in danger of being lost in all this flashy, fast-paced Digiversity.

My response--and challenge--to my colleagues: So let's have some fun learning the technology, and let's take a serious look at what we might be afraid of losing from past models and approaches to teaching, and then let's bring the two together. (Could be fun, besides!)

Tags: faculty, learning, mashup, teachertube, technology, web2.0

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on May 1, 2007 at 5:56am

Hello Brian,

What we stand to gain is phenomenol: instant access to high-quality and current information (given some good hunting and discernment skills), engaging high-level activities that make learning specific skills fun and efficient, connection for interactive studies with learners/teachers/professors/scientists/do-ers all over the world, and networks.

What we stand to lose? It's hard to say. I think we have to be careful to watch over the quality of our on-line relationships. It's the human side of things. In this new territory, we have to do a lot of thinking about what our expectations should be for civil and respectful behavior, and for how we want our patterns of communications to go. We need to develop and nurture good, meaningful learning partnerships, and in this sense, bring along the best of the "old" teaching. We have to find a way to allow this human side to take another form.

Here's a quote from Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner: "Ideally the responsibility of engendering respect among different groups, and displaying that respect publicly, should be distributed across the society."

Is that something we can demonstrate on Classroom 2.0? Can we bring oldsters and youngsters together with this framework in mind?

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on May 1, 2007 at 12:44pm

I think the old fogies can teach the kids how to sift through the vast amounts of information available to them. In the past few minutes my grade nines have asked how to do an assignment. The answer was in the very first line of the webpage I created for the assignment.

While there is vast amounts of material available for the younger generation, they frequently lack skill in sifting through it and determining what is useful and what is not. They're often used to having the information appear right in front of them after a quick Google search. If it doesn't show up quickly, or even if it's a bit further down the page, the students often give up in frustration.

The older folks know how to dig. When books and magazines were the only way to get information, you had to spend a lot of hours finding a small amount of information. That developed search skills that students today don't have, and aren't likely to learn without guidance.