The Digitial Divide between Students and Faculty

Another “food for thought” video from Digital Ethnography.
“A Vision of Students Today”

My Questions … and my responses.

1. Are the majority of faculty ready to teach (no… manage learning) in a way that engages this generation? I doubt it.

2. Is this generation of students interested in learning anything that isn’t based in entertainment? Also doubtful.

3. Why are we still assigning homework like writing papers, when our students naturally gravitate to websites, blogs, and social networking sites? So it’s not an MLA-formatted 8-page paper? A working website with properly documented sources and good writing would be a better way to share information anyways.

4. Are our learning spaces (aka classrooms) designed for 21st century learning? Well, most of them have one of those “state-of-the-art” whiteboards…

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1 Comment

Robert Talbert on December 8, 2007 at 5:49 pm

Videos like this always come off as being really relevant-looking and thought-provoking, but I think in reality there’s just not much being said.

Take the idea that students read 8 books in a year and 2300 web pages (or whatever the data were). This means nothing. Reading a book — at least a substantive one — is a serious undertaking that takes time. Reading a book every 6-7 weeks, for a busy college student, is actually a pretty active reading schedule for anybody, much less a busy college students. On the other hand, “reading” web pages and Facebook profiles is simply not comparable to reading books. The “reading” process is completely different, first of all, and typically amounts to no more than a scan. Second, the content is often much faster to read.

Same thing goes for why we assign papers when students do so much online. These are two different things. Writing a paper is a lengthy exercise in the still-relevant activity of analytic writing, and students who can’t do this sort of thing simply aren’t intellectually ready for the world that awaits them after college. Blogging and the like is simply no substitute, and it’s not entirely right to think of it as an either-or dichotomy.

All this to say, even if the numbers being held up on the pieces of paper by those students is anywhere near true or statistically consistent across the entire 18-22 year old age group, there’s simply no way we can conclude that these guys learn any differently than people 10 or 20 years ago. I’m not saying that they *don’t* learn differently, but it’s going to take DATA to prove it, not anecdotes.

Robert Talbert on December 8, 2007 at 5:49 pm

Videos like this always come off as being really relevant-looking and thought-provoking, but I think in reality there’s just not much being said.

Take the idea that students read 8 books in a year and 2300 web pages (or whatever the data were). This means nothing. Reading a book — at least a substantive one — is a serious undertaking that takes time. Reading a book every 6-7 weeks, for a busy college student, is actually a pretty active reading schedule for anybody, much less a busy college students. On the other hand, “reading” web pages and Facebook profiles is simply not comparable to reading books. The “reading” process is completely different, first of all, and typically amounts to no more than a scan. Second, the content is often much faster to read.

Same thing goes for why we assign papers when students do so much online. These are two different things. Writing a paper is a lengthy exercise in the still-relevant activity of analytic writing, and students who can’t do this sort of thing simply aren’t intellectually ready for the world that awaits them after college. Blogging and the like is simply no substitute, and it’s not entirely right to think of it as an either-or dichotomy.

All this to say, even if the numbers being held up on the pieces of paper by those students is anywhere near true or statistically consistent across the entire 18-22 year old age group, there’s simply no way we can conclude that these guys learn any differently than people 10 or 20 years ago. I’m not saying that they *don’t* learn differently, but it’s going to take DATA to prove it, not anecdotes.