Not too long I was downloading a movie from the growingly monopolistic iTunes and becoming increasingly annoyed with how long the process was taking. What was this nonsense, 20 minutes, are you kidding me? A quick inspection of my connection and the download speed revealed a massive HD movie file in the range of several gigs; the pace of my download—100+megabytes per second. A chuckle, and a reframing as I recalled having to use I dial-up modem. A time when I thought 14.4kilobytes per second was awesome and it was good day if I only had to restart my download twice due to someone calling the house or a lost connection. Just connecting to the net was a much bigger deal when I was younger and involved a lot more work in DOS. Hell, I remember first learning to program in BASIC on a monochromatic screen and using floppy disks.
Why is this relevant to teaching and learning today you may ask? Don’t get me wrong, I am particularly happy not to have to use DOS and instead have a nice GUI to maneuver through my mac. However, those initial experiences at least built up some foundations for how computers work, where files and information go, and computers were essentially tools for producing a product. If a problem arises or I “lose” something I am not afraid to sift through directories.
Todays learners are often considered to be digital natives, however, this is a spectrum and most students I have taught fall on the lower end of the spectrum. They kickass at face-book and other social media (lots of learning potential here to tap), but are essentially useless when it comes to using technology to produce a product, save a file, or troubleshoot. On top of that, most (like I have now have) are accustomed to things being fast and faster; coupled with little though to the quality of information that can be accessed. Having to lug home ten giant books to do a school research project definitely inspired one to first make sure the information was pertinent.
My essential take away from this little jaunt down memory lane was this; even though technology is ubiquitous and miles beyond what many of us initially began using, the learners still need guidance in how to effectively use the media to develop concept mastery, find information, and create an end “product”, which demonstrate that learning has occurred. The salient question then is how do I effectively help my students and teachers (often even lower skills) build technological competence, while staying relevant to them and the course content, and near the pace of information flow to which they are familiar?
Image acquired from tees4kids.spreadshirt.co.uk via a google images search