Moments of clarity do not occur often, but I
believe I’ve had one. For my entire time in the EDTECH program, I’ve been
pondering why teachers have such difficulty fully utilizing technology within
their classrooms. Let me preface this by saying that I am not a teacher. I am
an instructor at a nuclear power plant. Therefore I approach the problem from a
slightly different direction. Having said that, I find the nuclear power
industry encountering the same issues with technology as their academic peers
in that the industry wants to put technology into classrooms, but is at a loss
when attempting to utilize that technology to its full capability.
Initially,
I thought the issue was due to a lack of training. My reasoning lead me to
believe that if teachers and instructors could only be educated on the
capabilities of the technology, they would join in a giant Huzzah and then go
off and do great things. During my second semester in the program, I found it
was more than that. Educators, I found, were less computer savvy than I had
first thought. True, there are some exceptions, but quite often my peers in the
program admitted that their students knew more about the tech in the classroom
than they did. Therefore, it wasn’t just a lack of knowledge of the tech’s
capabilities, it was a user issue.
Then,
during the past summer, I encountered a new term, Digital Native. Digital
natives are those individuals who have never known life without widespread
technology and the internet. I admit to having not previously considered
changing generations and how being born into a world where every bit of
information known to human kind was at the tips of your fingers would change
perceptions, but what fascinated me the most about these individuals is that
they actually learn differently than those who were born in earlier times.
At
first I thought the author ought to have his head examined. “Learning is
learning,” I thought, but recently, during my moment of clarity, I’ve
discovered this to be exactly true and that it’s me who also learns like a
digital native. Classical learning and learning theory is a linear process.
When a teacher assigns Chapter 6 of a text, the student opens their text, reads
Chapter 6 front to back, and then presumably answers test questions based on
the reading; start at the beginning, end at the end, nice and neat, very
linear. I, in my second go round in education have not done that. It’s
partially due to time constraints and partially due to the fact that I wish to
avoid the spinach of articles and prepositions and go right to the dessert of
cold hard facts. I study by scanning the chapter and then searching for
specific terms to focus my attention. This type of learning is known as
hypertext learning. It is how digital natives learn best.
In my opinion, this is where the breakdown in the classroom occurs. Most
teachers in the classroom are not digital natives. Moreover, they may or may
not have been required to have computer courses in their pursuit of an education
degree. Thus most educators are rudimentary computer users, but more
importantly, they are linear thinkers still trapped in a “Read Chapter 6”
world. The learning theories they’ve learned and adopted were created
early on, and their application of those theories has always been of a linear
nature. To be sure, the tenets of these classical learning theories still
apply. A digital native will seek the praise of mentor as much as a student of
the 1970’s. However, to fully utilize technology, the classroom needs to be set
free and students need to be trusted to find their own information. Considering
the evolution of distance learning and the increasing cost of sending students
off to a brick and mortar university, learning by Google may become the norm and
not the exception. Educators need to be shown and understand how their students
learn best and then trust those students to do the right thing.
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