Giving Students Time and Space: Asynchronous Conversations

Warnock’s points about how effective asynchronous posting can be, as a tool for enabling student conversations, match up very closely with my experiences of using iLearn forums for classes I’ve taught here at SFSU.  For privacy reasons I can’t quote those fourms, but I will try to describe one such thread in an effort to illustrate what Warnock was talking about.

For one of the discussion threads, my students were reading about genetic screening for various traits (things like sports aptitude and propensity for disease) and had just finished watching the movie Gattaca.  So in this thread, I wanted them to continue and expand upon the discussion we’d been having in class, and I hoped that the forum would allow some of the students who didn’t normally talk much in class to participate more fully.

New Technologies Make Bad Teaching Slightly Worse

Okay, I know Al already linked to this piece in the Chronicle about “online learning,” but I thought I’d follow up on it. In case you missed it, there’s an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, titled “Video Lectures May Slightly Hurt Student Performance,” which reports on a published study that apparently compares learning outcomes between students who attended live lectures against those who watched the same lectures online. That study was titled “Is it Live or is it Internet? Experimental Estimate of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning,” which may explain why the Chronicle originally titled its write-up “Online Learning May Slightly Hurt Student Performance.”

Why did they change the title? Perhaps it has to do with all the subsequent reader comments to the Chronicle article pointing out the rather obvious fact that comparing outcomes associated with live lectures and video lectures has almost nothing whatsoever to do with “online learning” (I highly recommend reading the comments, which are quite entertaining). What the original study’s authors have “proven” (too generous a term without the scare quotes) is that students who watch lectures online don’t seem to get as much out of them as those who come to face-to-face lectures. Forgive me if, at this point, I can only say “well, duh.”

Beyond ‘new’ literacies

Hi all!

I just found out about this through a listserv I subscribe to, and it looks like there are some interesting articles in this special themed issue: Beyond ‘new’ literacies, edited by Dana J. Wilber, and published by Digital Culture & Education, an interdisciplinary, web-published, open-access journal, which looks really cool and worth checking out. Some of the articles talk about constructivist pedagogies, visual literacies, definitions of literacies, etc….

99-Year-Old Woman Uses iPad

99-Year-Old Woman Uses iPad

In other news:

• Asian Drives to Destination without Mishap
• Black Teen Graduates High School
• Woman Changes Light Bulb and Car Tires

To be clear, I don’t mean to belittle people’s disadvantages and social hardships–just commenting on how the rhetorical intent or move to liberate, because of the spectacle, can actually become socially counterproductive.  This whole thing does get me thinking about the assumptions we have about technology/new media and demographics–kind of in the same patronising vein as talk… ing… ve… ry… slow… ly… for… E… S… L… stu… dents… (because we all know that they have to watch Hollywood movies in slow motion to understand the dialogue).

The obvious pedagogical lesson here might be: Thinking older students to be technologically illiterate could be a big oops.  But, more recently, I worked with a younger student on writing up sections of his e-folio for a class, moved on at my own pace, using new media jargon because I thought not only were we probably on the same wavelength, but he would probably teach me a thing or two, so I was just trying to “speak his language.”  Wrong.  And it pains me to think that I could have been making him feel stupid for not keeping up or understanding me.  And this is on top of what messages he might already be exposed to, through peers and mass media, that normalise a certain standard of new media literacy, which are definitely a huge pressure.  I apologised, offered him a Hello Panda chocolate snack, and the session moved on smoothly.  So, conversely, assuming our fresh-out-of-high-school students to all be multimodal multitaskers might also prove detrimental.  To reaffirm Nate’s reminder last Tuesday, the digital divide is alive and well.