I’m a dinosaur. It’s time to hang up my laptop, abandon my 20th-century assumptions, and call it quits.
Mabrito & Medley (2008) perplex me with their assertions about where learning should go. They assert that MySpace and, presumably, Facebook are learning spaces for young people regardless of whether their teachers utilize them as such. This strikes me as relativism — by implication, everywhere is a learning space, so Facebook must be particularly a learning space simply by virtue of the fact that teenagers and young adults spend so much time there.
The old, linear, sequential order — where people worked alone on texts, and people read texts for sustained periods of time — is crumbling, Mabrito & Medley seem to say. As work has become more social, so writing itself has become social. The old educational and scholarly disciplines are giving way to multidisciplinary approaches. Technology has been of course complicit in some or all of these trends. And technology, the authors assert, must be used in response.
I’m all for increasing learning’s relevance and appeal, but not if it means pandering — and, in the proccess, short-changing the students (and, by extension, society). Work, which these students must be equipped to do, necessarily entails sustained, and often solitary, effort. It also demands accountability. Does group-text foster the same level of care and commitment? I cringe when recalling assignments over the years where some group-members didn’t pull their weight yet reaped the same reward. How do the authors propose that socially authored documents should be assessed?
As well, I wonder if moving learning into what is, for students, their social space would send the wrong signal. On the class wiki I’ve noticed many of my fellow students — teachers — complain that their students routinely blur the boundary between social life and school when they text or access Facebook during class time.
But these work/personal boundaries are tremendously important — for the individual’s quality of life; and for society’s productivity. Facebook is already eating up too much office time, and our society has too many individuals who spend too long at work.
Mabrito, M., Medley, R. (2008) Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts. Innovate. Volume 4, Issue 6, August/September. Accessed online 31 March 2009. http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol4_issue6/Why_Professor_Johnny_Can’t_Read-__Understanding_the_Net_Generation’s_Texts.pdf
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