Eva Fernández of Queens College recently shared this interesting article with us on Facebook. I thought it might be of interest to many of you. It’s funny that I am forwarding this as it is almost like the article virtually traveled across the ocean and back!
Perhaps it’s generational, as Eva also wonders. I have an impression that whereas some adults are very tech savvy enjoying playing with iPhone, Facebook, twitter, etc. there are many others who are very resistant and proud to ignore it altogether. On the other hand, for many (or most) students, technology seems to be something that is woven into their lives much more closely. I would love to hear what your thoughts are.
That said, where I work in Japan there isn’t much technology implemented in classroom teaching yet, and I am yet to hear of somebody who uses social-networking tools in their teaching. There are some online education tools that we use over here for students to self-study (outside of classes), about which I am hoping to write soon.
Thanks for sharing this article, and for posting from halfway around the world, Yukiko!
I saw this article earlier this week, and if you follow the link to the study itself, you’ll see that it’s quite underwhelming. First, it looks mostly like a pamphlet for the company that sponsored it (and which requires you to leave your email address before they give you the link to the pdf). Second, the sample size is relatively small: 400 students, 300 faculty, 300 IT staff, with no indication of how many schools were surveyed or what type of support they offered for teaching with technology. So, the numbers in this report I’d really take with a grain of salt.
That doesn’t mean that the conclusions are entirely unreasonable; I just think they don’t tell us much that’s useful. One problem I have is the lack of acknowledgment that the contexts in which educational technology are supported help determine a community’s sense of how well it’s integrated. For instance, Baruch currently has TWO educational technologists supporting 15k+ students (I’m one of them). Columbia has dozens supporting a third as many students. I’m sure that makes a difference in perception. I also am sure that if you sampled a group of students who happened to have one of our more intrepid blogfessors or a positive experience with VOCAT, their answers would be quite different than a student whose only experience with technology at the College was downloading pdfs through BlackBoard. 24% of students sampled attend a University with more than 25k students. That’s fewer than 100 students from that size a campus… if they’re drawn from more than one campus, then you have too small a sample to tell us anything about a specific institution. If they’re only from one campus, then it’s too narrow a sample to tell us much in general about student thoughts re: faculty integration of ed tech.
Thanks again for writing the post, which prompted me to write a post-like comment, which I should have written in the first place!