The Digital Swiss Army Knife (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

I think the fundamental challenge of mobility to education, especially higher education, is the always-present ability of students to get to the world of information in just a moment, both in and out of the classroom. That is changing the way we've thought about classes and lecturing for literally hundreds of years. The faculty member as a lecturer on the stage, dispensing information that's going to be the core basis of an exam to see if students can memorize that information, is a model that just doesn't work anymore. When I talk about the criteria for diagnosing a mental health disorder in my psychopathology class, and the students say "But wait a minute" and question me with information from Wikipedia, I've got to think about what I'm doing. My assessments within the course were driven by students regurgitating those diagnostic criteria that they're now going to access, along with all the drug interaction and differential diagnosis decision trees, from a device carried in their pocket. It's a different world. There's not such a need for them to have that stuff memorized anymore.

So we need to think about how to reengineer the classroom to really engage students. Mastery of content has always been, I think, our criteria, and mastery of content still matters at some level. But in many cases, we were doing that fairly well already. I don't know that mobile devices help us do that any better. In fact, I think mobility makes it a little less important for us to work on mastery of content during those class minutes. Now, class time can be used to engage students with interactive, collaborative, and active-learning teaching strategies. And these can be organized around this idea that the information can be found anywhere and anytime. But how do students weed through the thousands of hits from Google to find the good information for a decision or problem? Teaching and training students with skills to evaluate information is probably our biggest challenge now.

Teaching students how to make efficient use of the technologies around them and in their workplace future is a different world for faculty. And that is something that we consistently try to lay out as a challenge for faculty members. In a sense, the old role of the faculty lecturer is facing extinction. Even if faculty would like to turn off all the WiFi on our campus, the students are bringing their own WiFi with them—3G or 4G now comes with them—and we can't turn it off.

Casdorph: I think that's right. Our students were already going out and looking at YouTube and other resources and finding procedure videos and medical content. But the way a procedure is done at Georgia Health Sciences University may be different from how the procedure is done elsewhere. Even though there's a wealth of information out there, it may not be what or how we want our students to learn. So by providing them with our content in a mobile device, which is really their digital Swiss Army knife that they carry with them everywhere, we're facilitating their style of learning. And that's what we're trying to embrace—their way of thinking, their way of learning.