Kathy Fernandes's List: EDUCAUSE goodies

• I recently came across some interesting information: the average teenager sends more than 3,000 text messages each month. Not counting the time he or she spends asleep or in school, that's one text every three to four minutes of each day. I wasn't quite sure I believed this, so I checked my most recent mobile phone bill—and discovered that my fourteen-year-old daughter had sent 3,100 texts last month!
• Today's students interact socially in astoundingly different ways than did my generation. They also acquire information differently. Consider that there are approximately 500 television and 10,500 radio stations, over 350,000 iPhone applications, and more than one trillion web pages today. Over the past sixty days, more information has been uploaded to YouTube than if ABC, NBC, and CBS had been broadcasting around the clock since 1948.
• Today's students interact, build community, acquire information, and experience the world differently.  So, why would we think the best way to educate them is via the same old method that has been used for decades: the lecture/textbook model, in which the teacher imparts wisdom and understanding via a lecture, paralleling the textbook, and then at some point asks students to recite what they have heard?
• Nearly one-third of high school students in the United States fail to graduate. Among African American,
• high school dropouts reported classes that "were not interesting" and being "bored and disengaged" as two of the primary reasons for failing to finish.⁴ This is true in our colleges and universities as well as our high schools. The 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) found that college students "whose classes used course management technologies . . . or interactive technologies . . . scored higher on NSSE benchmarks, participated more in deep approaches to learning, and reported higher academic and personal gains during college."⁵ Student engagement is linked positively to desirable learning outcomes such as critical thinking and grades.
• I do, however, think all of us—as educators—can take immediate aim at making our classrooms more relevant. The archaic nature of many of our classrooms does not resemble anything students recognize, much less gravitate toward
• many schools still treat students as mere consumers of information rather than creators
• students are provided with opportunities to connect and dialogue through social media
• access content from anywhere
• many schools still treat classrooms as the only access point for information
• Today, global data networks and mobile communication tools enable students to engage and to learn from any location, at any time. Mobile-learning strategies can reconnect students to their peers, challenge them with real-world data, and involve them in real-world conversations—all providing the relevance that students need for academic, social, and professional success
• Technology has changed the way we live; it also must change the way we learn
• Following a path of innovation requires strong leadership that is willing to forge up the hill even when the summit is not visible—and to be fully prepared for the likelihood that once the fog dissipates, it may be clear that the hill just taken was the wrong one. Fueling innovation also requires shifting resources toward emerging areas of opportunity and away from programs and practices representing the status quo. Such decisions typically incite internal grumbling and turmoil.
• True innovation is a messy enterprise. Rarely do things work out as planned in an innovative culture. Instead of defining success by a preconceived destination, we should see real success in innovation as the ability to create value from insights discovered along the journey. This requires creativity and agility, two characteristics rarely used to describe U.S. educational systems.
• Enormous untapped, game-changing opportunities exist for students and faculty to take learning in the digital age even further, building new tools and testing new strategies to shape the future of elementary, secondary, and postsecondary learning. Moving forward, we must be serious about expanding the boundaries of digital media, refining best practices, and sharing new pedagogies with colleagues in K-12 and higher education.
• What role will you play? Will you cling to the safety and comfort of the traditional educational models that have defined U.S. schools for more than a century? Or will you help drive the innovation to ensure that our young people are prepared not only to compete but to lead in an increasingly digital world?

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• Most students entering our classrooms were born between 1978 and 1995. Commonly referred to as Millennials, Boomlets, or the Net Generation, they have been characterized as born consumers, digital natives, tech-savvy, highly social, always connected, collaborative, multi-tasking, impatient, lifestyle-focused, craving of diverse media, desiring open access to everything, and leading 24/7 lives. No matter their economic status, they know the World Wide Web, social media, and entertainment technologies such as film, music, and games as consistent and constant components of their everyday experience. They share their thoughts, feelings, and ideas with family and friends electronically, and they are accustomed to instantaneous information retrieval and communication. These students interact with the world in radically different ways than did the generations before them.
• Key to the success of the Griffin Technology Advantage program is visionary and nimble senior leadership. Having a president who understands current students' learning styles and is willing to match university resources to meet these needs with the full use of technology is essential. Also indispensable are academic leaders who are keenly interested in learning theory, research on how technology may be rewiring our brains, the nature of teaching in an age of declining interest in the liberal arts, and the characteristics of students on (or off) campus today—along with faculty who are committed to teaching excellence and who are open to becoming active learners in emerging technologies. Equally important is an innovative technology leader. Predicting what technology will be like three to five years in the future, and which investments made now will pay off then, requires leadership willing to take risks.
• Of almost equal importance is a strong collaboration among technology and academic leadership, faculty, and students so that as many technology resources as possible can be directed to support the learning agenda at the university.
• With the infrastructure in place and the IT staff ready to go, the question remained: how should faculty be assisted in using the tools? Without comprehensive and continuingly refreshed faculty development, the Griffin Technology Advantage would have struggled to reach its goal of educational innovation.

• Faculty are primary to the success of the Griffin Technology Advantage program. They have devoted the time needed to redesign instruction. With their students, they have become co-learners and pioneers in the classroom as they test out the power of this new technology. With no models to work from, they had to explore, practice, and discover—on their own—the iPad's potential for expanding learning. Although a few faculty use the technology rarely, and then only in response to student demand, the most enthusiastic faculty report deep satisfaction from the critical reexamination of their course syllabi ("the first time I'd done so in a long time," one said) and excitement about the discovery of new resources available wherever they or their students happened to be.

  Early assessment data show that faculty use the iPads in several areas:

  • Immediate and Authentic Information Gathering: Google Earth in history class; pulling up information about a piece of art on display while in the art gallery; researching information presented in class
  • Instruction and Reinforcement: using apps for building resource directories for small group discussions; creating excitement about writing; illustrating concepts taught in class; back-channeling to allow the active participation of students of all abilities
  • Instructional and Student Presentations: using interactive games to illustrate concepts; pulling statistical information to support or refute an argument; having students in laboratories view podcasts on instructions for the experiment

  In addition, the faculty and students happily endorse the decreased use of paper for handouts, readings, and syllabi and benefit from formative assessment opportunities such as in-class quizzes that can be discussed immediately, clicker responses for understanding attitudes and knowledge, and short essays as examples of developmental writing. Some Seton Hill faculty also benefited from being in an e-textbook pilot program. iBooks and other e-book sources provided easy access to free primary sources and allowed students and faculty to use these resources in class, including text search and dictionary functions.

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• "The future our students will inherit is one that will be mediated and stitched together by the mobile web, and I think that ethically, we are called on as teachers to teach them how to use these technologies effectively."
• In the book Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold argues: "The mobile internet . . . will not be just a way to do old things while moving. It will be a way to do things that couldn't be done before." In part because of this, he then suggests: "A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don't."¹
• we can safely say that this transformation is already here; we are already at the moment in which the ability to use social media, and particularly social media as amplified through the power of the mobile web, has become a key literacy.
• What makes this moment ever more complicated is that just as we have introduced computers into the classroom—just as we have started to come to terms with the idea of wired learning spaces, mediated laptops, and occasionally the now-dinosaur-like desktops—the mobile web is about to make all this technological adaptation rather outdated. The unwired learning space is about to substantially alter the landscape of teaching with and through technology. 
• we are in the "Late Desktop Era."² Some educators have responded by banning this new technology from the learning space, demanding that students turn off their smartphones and keep their tablet computers stowed in their bags. This approach, I would suggest, is precisely the wrong tack to take. The future our students will inherit is one that will be mediated and stitched together by the mobile web, and I think that ethically, we are called on as teachers to teach them how to use these technologies effectively, to ensure that they end up on the right side of the digital divide: the side that knows how to use social media to band together. Teaching mobile web literacy seems to me as crucial as teaching basic literacy.
• To be sure, I am not suggesting that educators encourage students to text each other during class. Instead, I feel that one of our obligations as educators is to consider how the mobile Internet changes not only how we teach, but what it means to be knowledgeable and educated in our culture. And just as important, the mobile web opens up a host of pedagogical possibilities.
• the key piece is recognizing that the mobile computing power in our pockets radically changes not merely our classrooms but, more important, the spaces that students inhabit and the conversations they have outside of our teaching. I want to teach students to take ownership of this type of change so that they can shape the mobile transformation as much as they are shaped by it.

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• 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.
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