The Riddle of Engagement
Over the course of the readings, I came upon Michael Wesch’s video regarding a vision of students today. The challenges that his examination of the issue of engagement is felt in any endeavor to communicate detailed concepts and information to a group of learners. Although my personal target audience is retailers not grade students, I could readily appreciate the challenge that is presented regarding engagement. Wesch describes students in a learning environment focusing on information and material that was not connected to the content he was attempting to convey. Although he does not use the word, it would be be easy to identify the problem as one of engagement. Simply put: his students were not engaged with the content that was presented by him. Instead they turned towards other sources of information or entertainment that they WERE engaged with. In his analysis of the problem, Wesch concludes that the challenge of engagement can be resolved for the time being by allowing and harnessing the power of the objects and services that he observed the students focused upon. Social media, mobile devices, and similar devices can be harnessed to provide a more familiar means of content delivery to the student. I believe there is a danger of oversimplification with this argument; the challenge of engagement is one of content being made to the audience by the instructor rather than the medium being the principle focus.
If you’ve had the pleasure of using the iTunesU app you’ll find it absolutely full of course content on a plethora of subjects. The courses tend to be recordings of lectures either purely audio or voiced over PowerPoint presentations. Some video lectures do exist which are either straightforward recordings of classes or more PowerPoint exports. What’s intriguing about these classes is that despite being made to run off mobile devices, frequently the content was not specifically designed for the medium it was deployed on. Many of the courses available on iTunesU are simply recorded class lectures. As such there is often information not relevant to the course but to class administration which is recorded. However, this does not make these lectures not engagement. Far from it, some of the lectures are presented with a deep and meaningful understanding of the subjects they discussed. That being said, not all the lectures had this level of quality about them. In fact the technology made it extremely easy to disengage from content that you did not like by simply stopping the presentation and then selecting a new topic . If any important content occurred later in the lecture it was missed by the easy of departure. It was not technology that made the presentation of information relevant to the student, but rather the quality of the presentation itself. In cases where the presenter was passionate and evidently knowledgeable about the subject the engagement was higher. A dispirited presentation would illicit the same reaction from the audience regardless of the presentation format selected. Although the technology has changed how content can be accessed, the technology or delivery method is almost secondary to how the content is delivered by the instructor. If a lecture was designed specifically to be used on an iPad, if the content itself is not engaging, it will disregarded in the same manner as Wesch describes his sample was. One gets the impression that Wesch was overawed by the technology and drew the conclusion that only be accepting its use and restructuring the learner/educator relationship can engagement be maintained. But technology or social media is not an adequate replacement for a well presented lecture. The challenge laid out before educators is that the temptation to treat technology as a panacea for disengagement when its only one part of the puzzle of engagement.
These are my thoughts for now.
Best Wishes
Maxim
References
Wesch, M. (2007), A Vision of Students Today (Video)