Digital Learners: The Morphing of Education
Today's students are far more experienced with advanced learning
technologies than those who arrived just five years ago. They're
accustomed to learning in ways that morph or even break molds, and some
LMU faculty members are adapting to them.
By Christelyn D. Karazin '99
These days, students do more than learn. They download.
Their fingers text on cell phones at lightning speed. They download
music and chat with friends through live video. Instead of the
encyclopedia, they use Wikipedia, an online, virtual encyclopedia. And
they do this, most of the time, all at once. They are multitasking
“Digital Learners” — a breed of students who “speak” a language
universities around the world are scrambling to decode.
Adapting to Change
Enter LMU’s Instructional Technology Analysts (ITAs), who make up a
living, breathing Rosetta Stone of digital technology. The
Instructional Technology Support department began in 2002 after the
implementation of Blackboard, a Web-based course management system that
organizes digitized syllabi, assignments, tests and quizzes. Led by
Joseph Cevetello, director of academic technology, and Mindy Colin,
acting director and manager of Instructional Technology Support, LMU
established the seven-member department to help faculty members
integrate new technologies and enhance learning.
The
alliance between the faculty and IT offers new ways to present
information through multimedia channels — stimulating enough to rise
above the din of MP3 players and video games — to reach the most
technologically sophisticated generation the world has ever seen. With
individualized help from ITAs, faculty members learn to present
information through educational video games, poll students’ opinions on
Web-based discussion boards and teach class from locales as banal as
the airport and as remote as Tahiti
“The educational
curriculum and technology are integrated together. More importantly,
our students expect it,” says Colin. Those expectations are high. In
November 2007, the ITAs informally surveyed students, and a clear theme
emerged: “We want technology!” Students want podcasts so they can
listen to lectures at any time. They long for access to professors 24
hours a day via cell phone, e-mailed homework assignments and
Web-posted grades. Laptops have become as essential as textbooks, and
students want professors to use them just as much; or better, throw
away the books and teach online.
And so, the walls of the classroom vaporize into a million, tiny pixels.
Teaching Digital Natives
“Technology makes me feel like anything is possible,” says Robin R.
Wang, associate professor of philosophy and director of Asian and
Pacific Studies in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. In August
2008, Wang will partner with Wuhan University in China’s Hubei Province
to co-instruct a class via live videoconferencing and Blackboard. The
sun will rise and set simultaneously on this course, as students are
introduced to the ancient Yin-yang philosophy in morning class in the
East and an evening class in the West. “Students will learn what it
really means to be global citizens,” Wang says.
Such an
endeavor was unheard of even a decade ago. Today, the idea of remote
group discussions is as common to tech-savvy students as lined paper
and lead pencils were to their predecessors up until the early 1990s.
That’s when the Internet became part of daily life — and when the
“Digital Native” was born.
A term coined by futurist Marc
Prensky, Digital Natives have been exposed from infancy to cell phones,
video cameras, the Internet and computers. They are unafraid of this
brave new world of technology because, in a sense, they’re programmed
for it. According to Prensky and a handful of neuroscientists, the mind
of a Digital Native is different, with wired neuron pathways paved to
an on-ramp to the Information Super Highway. “It is very likely that
our students’ brains have physically changed and are different from
ours as a result of how they grew up,” Prensky wrote.
Dey
txt incessantly on cell fons n instant msgs, playN fst n loose W sp n
gramA. Translation: They text incessantly on cell phones and instant
messages, playing fast and loose with spelling and grammar. Here’s news
— if you needed the translation to this shorthand, you are not a
Digital Native, but a “Digital Immigrant.” Digital Immigrants learn how
to use the plethora of digital resources as a second language, so to
speak. They may become proficient, but they’ll never be native
speakers.
Remember group projects? Gone are the noisy
meetings in the coffee shop. Now with programs like iChat, students in
small groups can collaborate through Web-based videoconferencing. Four
users can view four mini-screens on their computer at once, so they can
see who is talking to them, and files and documents can be
simultaneously viewed.
The technology challenge to
universities is serious, says Patrick Frontiera, vice president for
Information Technology. Because new technology — such as LMU on iTunes
U, Blackboard and wikis (software that allows users to create, edit and
link Web pages) — enables collaboration and multimedia filesharing, the
university has focused on providing bandwidth and processing speed,
along with a campus-wide wireless infrastructure.
“That’s
probably the biggest difference between now and even five years ago:
Data packets being transported are enormous,” Frontiera says. “And
technology continues to advance at breakneck speed. That raises the
question: How to be smart about providing the essential services to the
students without chasing your tail? Our technology infrastructure is
quite good now, and it will need to get better.”
The (Digital) Immigrant Experience
Technology in the classroom, no longer a novelty, is looking
increasingly like a necessary convergence of the Socratic and the
technocratic. But digital bells and whistles also make it more
challenging for professors to compete for students’ attention. Forget
about passing paper notes that the instructor can sometimes intercept.
A joke, comments about the teacher, and declarations of love are now
communicated via cell phone texts or Yahoo! Messenger.
“I
can tell exactly when students are tuning me out and instant-messaging
their friends, because they have a smile on their faces or are laughing
and giggling after they’ve gotten a message on their laptop,” says
Linda Leon, associate professor of finance in the College of Business
Administration. She uses general learning strategies, but never
lectures more than 5-10 minutes without engaging students in active,
critical-thinking exercises to keep them focused.
“If I
don’t hold their attention up front, I’m going to lose them,” Leon
says. Outside of the classroom, she creates interactive Web-based
tutorials to reinforce her class presentations. Inside the classroom,
her students all have laptops. She uses an interactive questionnaire in
which students respond via their laptop, with answers appearing in real
time directly on screen. The answers serve as a barometer for learning.
But students sometimes learn that information at the touch of a button
can be like a mirage.
“As Digital Learners, students are
much more technology savvy than we are. The professor’s new role is to
teach them what to do with it,” Leon says.
Old Ways Still Apply
It turns out that today’s students still learn, but they increasingly
are being taught differently. As before, educators still must discover
new ways of captivating the imagination. Digital accoutrements make
information gathering faster and easier, but critical thinking skills
still must be massaged into the psyche. True learning takes place when
facts, figures and statistics are analyzed and integrated into unique
and genuine thoughts. Nonetheless, some faculty members see exciting
opportunities ahead when they look into the future.
“It’s
easy now to get the information, so we can really be building up on
those critical skills. If we as teachers can modify our style to work
with them, we can develop those skills, I think, at a level we were
never able to do before,” says Leon.
Christelyn D. Karazin '99 is a freelance writer in Temecula, Calif. Her work has appeared in Better Homes & Gardens, the Reuters News Service and elsewhere.
Library Services 24/7
Although today’s technology has expanded the range of information
sources, it has not eliminated the established features of libraries,
including the reference librarian. But even that job has evolved.
Alexander Justice, reference librarian and reference collection
coordinator at LMU, participates in the Association of Jesuit Colleges
and Universities Virtual Reference Service, which uses the Internet to
provide library reference services 24 hours a day, essentially creating
a space in which students can access library resources even when the
library’s doors are closed.
LMU partners with 19 Jesuit
universities nationwide to provide reference services via an Internet
chat software program. Justice logs on for an assigned hour-long shift
and takes questions that may come from students at Boston College or
Seattle University who “burn the midnight oil.” LMU students benefit in
a reciprocal way.
Most questions, Justice says, are not
institution-specific, and his help may come as a godsend in someone’s
wee hours. But occasionally he gets a request he just can’t fulfill.
“Every now and then we get a question like, ‘Hey, it’s too noisy up
here on the third floor.’ And we really can’t help out in those
situations because we’re not literally in their library,” Justice says.