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[zuniflow]

Being a young student of "today's generation" it is interesting for me to see how those of yesteryears rebel against the technology era and the participatory culture that exists today. Todd Gitlin believes that "somebody who can string together sound bites, is unhelpful to the educational process over all," but the reality of American culture today is that we are digital. With this understanding comes two choices. We can embrace the changes that are happening and educators can use them to their advantage to interest students in education or they can ignore that it exist or reject it and in result the gap between educator and student will only widen. When your students already spend hours on the computer in sites like Myspace and Facebook why not create learning opportunities around an environment they are already interested in? 

I urge anyone who is rebelling against this technology era to really delve into it for a bit. See what the possibilities really are for sites like Facebook, Mysapce, and Youtube and if you are having trouble navigating them ask one of your students. Being of a participatory culture, the largest ever group project, there is a want to pass information from the "expert" to the "novice." The networking and educational opportunities are endless. You just have to think a bit outside of the box.

[kedves]

I read the article, but it falls to you as the OP to provide the link if you would like others to discuss it with you.

[zuniflow]

Thanks, for the suggestion. I did not think about it. Good use of passing information from expert to novice.

Here is the link
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i48/48a01001.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

[didotwite]

"Rebelling"?  Nonsense.  One does not have to embrace every cultural change.  Certainly the technology that allows social software and video streaming to be such a part of student culture is also being used for teaching and research.  Our foreign languages department is especially good at this.  But that doesn't obviate the need for quiet, unlinked time to think or require faculty to use facebook for their classes. 

My students, by the way, tell me that MySpace is on the way out; too many parents lurking.

[trentsands]

We can embrace the changes that are happening and educators can use them to their advantage to interest students in education...

I tend to dislike pleas for technology that involve getting students interested.  Measures to bring students' culture into the classroom simply to get them interested tends to fall well short of the goal.

I agree with the OP that digital technology needs to be embraced on the college classroom, but not for the sake of interest.  Rather, digital technology indicates a shift in communication, an utter change in how we organize our ideas and communicate them to others.  Whether we are talking about change in mindset involved in splicing together sound or video bytes or in connecting information with links, this is a drastically different way to communicate traditional top-down, chronological communication of yesteryear.  Our students are becoming versed in these new forms of communication, and becoming less versed in the out-going traditional forms of communication, whereas we have generally stuck to those old forms. Thus we risk our ability to communicate to our students because we are unable to use the forms of communication they use. 

At the same, our students utterly lack the skills to critically evaluate their communication, whether they are using old forms or new ones.  They need us to know how these new forms work so that we can show them how to be critical users of these forms, as well as evaluators of the conditions in which these new forms will, and will not, work well.

[kedves]

Thanks for the link.  This is a brief article that I wish had been longer.

Gitlin and you seem to be talking about somewhat different things.  He is a sociologist of American culture; you may know his work on the culture of the 1960s.  He's talking about a sort of entertainmentization of the culture, not all aspects of internet technology.  I don't think he objects to new technologies that allow us to find and read scholarly articles quickly and at a reasonable cost to our universities, for example.  He isn't saying we should return to card catalogs and paper copies of journals in every library. 

Regarding the classroom, I have not read much to support the ideology that more technology necessarily enhances teaching or learning.  Power Point is not always better than a lecture with board work or overheads, and is often worse.  Teachers already show films and clips in class; Youtube and streaming technologies make it easier, but it is still difficult to find and buy/rent the documentaries I want to use.  There have been some other threads on this site on the In the Classroom forum in which people have discussed their use of internet sites for teaching, and there is a forum dedicated to discussion of online teaching.  There might be less resistance to the technologies than you believe. 

What Gitlin is talking about, though, is the growing pressure on professors to entertain.  He sees this as an effect of internet culture, but it could also derive from the growing tendency for students and administrators to think of students as customers. ?Obligatory Youtube link:  "Here we are now, entertain us."?

Myspace and Facebook are more controversial.  Some faculty really like them.  I would never use them, but that's partly because I have had bad experiences in the past with students who didn't understand academic vs. personal boundaries; for my own reasons, I don't want to encourage students to think of my as their friend.  I don't think that it is possible, or should necessarily be a goal, to significantly decrease the social distance between professors and students.  The selection and self-selection processes that affect someone's ability and choice to get a Ph.D. and enter the career set them apart in many ways from their students.  Of course, to teach sucessfully, we need to communicate in a way that students can understand.  But I don't think student interests should be the key force driving educational content and style.  If I wanted to go to extremes, I could discuss some of the many activities other than social networking on which my students spend hours every week--activities that wouldn't be remotely appropriate to bring into the classroom.

The human mind and our abilities to communicate and understand are far more complex than human-made technologies.  As Didotwite says, quiet time is necessary for learning.  Our culture evolves, sometimes rapidly, and teaching styles with it--but cognitive processes evolve very slowly.

[goldenapple]

Being a young student of "today's generation" it is interesting for me to see how those of yesteryears rebel against the technology era and the participatory culture that exists today. . .  When your students already spend hours on the computer in sites like Myspace and Facebook why not create learning opportunities around an environment they are already interested in? 

I urge anyone who is rebelling against this technology era to really delve into it for a bit. See what the possibilities really are for sites like Facebook, Mysapce, and Youtube . . .

The technology and internet sites you mention are just resources. There are lots of resources out there, and only some of them are useful for some professors in some classes. I certainly make use of youtube, but frankly, I think that MySpace pages are so badly designed and plagued with extraneous material (ads, scammers and spammers who want to link to you, etc.), that you have to be extremely judicious in using them at all. Creating class MySpace and Facebook pages, for instance, would require that a professor invest a fair amount of time just to create a useful page that wouldn't subject students to a lot of nonsense unrelated to the subject matter. In addition, the commercial basis of these pages and the absence of privacy safeguards really limits their academic usefulness.

Frankly, I view a lot of new tools with the same critical eye. Will this really help me and my students to learn? Is the time I'll spend creating and maintaining it really well spent? This is as true of PowerPoint as it is of these networking sites. In addition, students can use many of these websites to learn on their own. It isn't up to professors to create every kind of content that their students might find useful (hey, if I could, I'd rather write a really good novel to assign them!). That's why most of us don't write our own textbooks or direct our films for use in class.

I look to technology to solve problems or to build something useful. I don't look at it and think "This is such great technology, I have to find a use for it."

[trentsands]

Regarding the classroom, I have not read much to support the ideology that more technology necessarily enhances teaching or learning.  Power Point is not always better than a lecture with board work or overheads, and is often worse.

I agree, but it is not really about "enhanc[ing] teaching or learning."  Rather, it is about using the means of communication (or at least the organizing principles of communication) in which our students are already trained.  They may well understand the content of the course better because it is framed and organized in ways they are used to receiving information.  This, of course, isn't to say that traditional classroom communication (books, lectures, etc.) are dead or that students should not have to learn to understand these forms as well.  But students may need professors to begin with common communicational forms as they learn academic communicational forms.
 

What Gitlin is talking about, though, is the growing pressure on professors to entertain.  He sees this as an effect of internet culture, but it could also derive from the growing tendency for students and administrators to think of students as customers. ?Obligatory Youtube link:  "Here we are now, entertain us."?

[...]

Of course, to teach sucessfully, we need to communicate in a way that students can understand.  But I don't think student interests should be the key force driving educational content and style.  If I wanted to go to extremes, I could discuss some of the many activities other than social networking on which my students spend hours every week--activities that wouldn't be remotely appropriate to bring into the classroom.

I agree that it doesn't meet educational needs to simply meet students' interests.  Meeting those interests can be good, but only in so far as educational goals are being met that way.  Simply entertaining students doesn't help them learn.  Students already seek entertainment on their own, and it can't be said they are learning in the ways they need to, academically speaking, simply by seeking entertainment.

Seeking the use of digital technologies in the classroom, whether to improve communication with students or to build their interest in the subject, does not abrogate our responsibility, and our need, to make sure that the pedagogical and communicational forms and styles we bring into the classroom must align with the teaching and learning of the content.

The human mind and our abilities to communicate and understand are far more complex than human-made technologies.  As Didotwite says, quiet time is necessary for learning.  Our culture evolves, sometimes rapidly, and teaching styles with it--but cognitive processes evolve very slowly.

I don't know that cognitive processes are all that slow, especially when one is bombarded with communicational forms based on constantly evolving technology that calls one to regularly modify how one receives and sends communication.  Young people are often better suited to adapt cognitively and communicationally than are older people.  I just read an article today featuring a pre-teen boy adopted from Asia who happened to functionally learn English in just a few months.  Necessity and flexibility generate tremendous cognitive feats.

Sure, us academicians often need "quiet time" for learning, but will this be the case for younger generations who are, quite frankly, never unplugged and nevertheless manage to learn?  In the future, can we even expect a quiet space in which to learn?  And what form must that quiet space take?  Cannot a person learn to slice out a quiet space for themselves in that noise?

[kedves]

The human mind and our abilities to communicate and understand are far more complex than human-made technologies.  As Didotwite says, quiet time is necessary for learning.  Our culture evolves, sometimes rapidly, and teaching styles with it--but cognitive processes evolve very slowly.

I don't know that cognitive processes are all that slow, especially when one is bombarded with communicational forms based on constantly evolving technology that calls one to regularly modify how one receives and sends communication.  Young people are often better suited to adapt cognitively and communicationally than are older people. 

Sorry I wasn't clear.  I meant "evolution" literally there.  Biological evolutionary changes, including of the brain, are very slow in our species.  Culture evolves rapidly; biology does not. 

I don't know of research on individuals' ability to focus in quiet vs. loud auditory environments, but if you are arguing that students learn just as well now as they formerly did, you'll find a lot of argument against that view (not by me; I don't have a stake in it one way or the other).

Our students are trained in using Facebook, sure, but they also have significant experience "using" a traditional lecture format from their K-12 years.  My biggest challenge, in fact, isn't meeting their need to use new technologies, it's getting them to take a more active approach to their own education.  This is a cultural, not technological, difference, between the passive student role in high school and a more active one in college.

[larryc]

The cultural rebel of yesterday becomes the grumpy old coot of today.

[trentsands]

Sorry I wasn't clear.  I meant "evolution" literally there.  Biological evolutionary changes, including of the brain, are very slow in our species.  Culture evolves rapidly; biology does not. 

Certainly.  I presume there is virtually no significant biological evolution occuring in humans.  But then, tens of thousands of years of history shows volumes of adaptive cultural change, including changes in how humans think about things (ideologies and worldviews, metaphors for the thinking process, cultural valuations, etc.)

I don't know of research on individuals' ability to focus in quiet vs. loud auditory environments, but if you are arguing that students learn just as well now as they formerly did, you'll find a lot of argument against that view (not by me; I don't have a stake in it one way or the other).

Yes, but the arguments I've seen against how well the young are learning (in other words, the arguments that typically get strewn about in books and academic discussion) are decidedly qualitative and philosophical.  In other words, I've seen little quantitive research that suggests that student learning is getting worse and tons of arguments that complain about how young people are dumber than we were when we were young, rife with revisionist and nostalgic thinking.  This sort of qualitative/philsophical argumentation goes as far back as Plato, at least, when the great Greek philosopher complains that the proliferation of writing is making us all stupider because we no longer rely on and practice the use of our memories.

Now one might argue that young people are becoming less skilled in the sorts of communication and learning we've done all our lives, but on the contrary, I'll bet they are on the cusp of the learning curve when it comes to the sorts of learning they will need to do in their futures, which will be increasingly rife with constant technological change.  There's will be a world of immersion in technology that constantly "evolves," adapts, and changes and they will be much better equipped to change with that world than we will.

Our students are trained in using Facebook, sure, but they also have significant experience "using" a traditional lecture format from their K-12 years.  My biggest challenge, in fact, isn't meeting their need to use new technologies, it's getting them to take a more active approach to their own education.  This is a cultural, not technological, difference, between the passive student role in high school and a more active one in college.

I agree about the problem of "getting them to take a more active approach to their own education." (I suspect that this has always been a problem in an increasingly democratized higher educational system, but there you go).  I would caution against assuming that most, or even a majority, of their K-12 educational experience is lecture-based.  This isn't the sort of training primary or secondary education teachers are getting, and I have noticed over the years a growing acceptance from my students of, for instance, group work.  Meanwhile, having done some advising, I've seen more and more students attempt to avoid traditionally lecture-based college courses, preferring instead courses that promise more interactive work.

In any case, a K-12 lecture is a far cry from a college lecture, so much so that I would not consider students to be versed in the discourse of a college lecture even if their K-12 education was entirely lecture-based.

Regarding students actively embracing education, I see this as something quite separate from the pedogical/techonological discourses used in the classroom.  No matter the pedagogical styles students encounter, I think K-12 encourages a passive approach to education, possibly because all too often those educations lack educational choices that encourage students' active engagement and because they don't generally include working with students to develop a purpose for their education.  During K-12, for too many students it is a matter of showing up each day and doing what they want you do to.  If they haven't been helped to develop their purposes for what they are doing and are not given real educational choices to make based on those purposes, how could they possibly develop an active approach to their education.

[kedves]

Trentsands, I think we are mostly in agreement, but that the usefulness of various classroom approaches and technologies depends on one's students.  I've taught three or four types of undergrads so far of varying social backgrounds, ages, and SAT score levels.  In my current job, I've learned that my students like group work only in very limited, low-point amounts and that they don't like media in the classroom.  They distrust it and want me to tell them directly what they are supposed to know.  I use it anyway, along with a lot of discussion.  I push back against their passivity as much as I can in order to give them some of the benefits of college, as I see them (independent thinking, etc.).  But there are limits to how much I can challenge them or use new approaches without causing confusion, resentment, hurt feelings--and lower teaching evaluations, of course.  I agree that students' attitudes toward their education--consumers vs. scholars, maybe--is separate from the technology issue, but I see some overlap, too.

It may be difficult for any of us on these boards to generalize about "students" because I get the feeling that we are often talking about very different sorts of students, depending on where we teach.

Yes, Gitlin's a grouch.  I don't see any evidence that people in general are becoming dumber. People have been talking about the decay of American culture since the country began.  If you examine test scores, h.s. graduation rates, and so on, there seems to be a growing gap between well-served and not-well-served K-12 students, but that's congruent with many other aspects of life in the U.S.

[litcrittr82]

Yes, Gitlin's a grouch.  I don't see any evidence that people in general are becoming dumber. People have been talking about the decay of American culture since the country began.  If you examine test scores, h.s. graduation rates, and so on, there seems to be a growing gap between well-served and not-well-served K-12 students, but that's congruent with many other aspects of life in the U.S.

'People getting dumber' always struck me as a crude way of putting things, so I also react incredulously to a lot of that sensationalism.  I think a better way of putting it--or of understanding it--is that people are more distracted because of technology than they were when other forms of entertainment--novels, say--were popular.  It's easier to have access to more drivel than ever before.  And I do think this is a major problem.  I haven't read Bauerlein's book yet, but I plan to.  And I'm a huge fan of the Hofstadter book.     

[daniel_von_flanagan]

The cultural rebel of yesterday becomes the grumpy old coot of today.

The more educational innovations you see both work and not work, the more you view new offerings with a critical eye.  Gitlin is a very smart guy who has been involved firsthand in more educational and social change than any 5 normal faculty, and his judgment should not be dismissed lightly.

Incidentally, what makes you think he wasn't grumpy in 1960?  People I knew in the SDS were some of the dourest lot imaginable. - DvF

[trentsands]

Yes, Gitlin's a grouch.  I don't see any evidence that people in general are becoming dumber. People have been talking about the decay of American culture since the country began.  If you examine test scores, h.s. graduation rates, and so on, there seems to be a growing gap between well-served and not-well-served K-12 students, but that's congruent with many other aspects of life in the U.S.

'People getting dumber' always struck me as a crude way of putting things, so I also react incredulously to a lot of that sensationalism.  I think a better way of putting it--or of understanding it--is that people are more distracted because of technology than they were when other forms of entertainment--novels, say--were popular.  It's easier to have access to more drivel than ever before.       

I find even this argument is problematic.  The Vitorian Age was the height of the novel.  In England, one could actually rent novels like we rent videos, if you can imagine.  But novels were primarily considered filth. They were probably right.  For every novel that came out of the 19th Century that we consider a classic, there were likely countless others that we'd even now consider unworthy, plebeian potboilers. Conservative media of the Victorian Age encouraged fathers to review each and every novel before they let their daughters read them.  Better yet, some suggested they shouldn't let their children read them at all.  This is not unlike the media battle cry that, yes, TV is filth and that parents must monitor their children's viewing for them.  Victorians fretted openly about the fast pace and fractured knowledge of "modern" society that the latest and greatest in technology had brought about and worried that it would corrupt their youth and their culture.  The youth of the Victorians (the Modernists) kept up just fine and set up their own standard upon which they could decry the foibles and stupidity of the next generation.

As likely as not the very same "forms of entertainment" that we currently consider distracting and mind-numbing will be the next generation's works of art.  We are mere decades away from creating a canon of classic television "artwork," and some of the creations posted online may have a quicker track toward a canon.