Help! My kids outsmarted me!

The reading "Emerging Technologies for Learning" spoke to me in an intriguing way. A large part of the work I do for Columbia involves podcasting lectures for the Health Sciences campus. When I joined the university, podcasting was still the cool thing to do. Everyone, students first, was jumping on to the podcasting bandwagon. Faculty were obviously a little late to catch on and required some serious coaxing to join the party.

Today, podcasting is still a large part of my job, but the students have come to take it for granted and it is no longer the cool kid on the block. While I can only speculate about what kids are using as study aides (i.e. what else they may have moved on to), we know that not everybody is using the class audio.

For our part at CCNMTL, we are now trying to get faculty to move towards video and tablet PC based podcasting....with complete conversion by......perhaps the end of the decade! :)

I jest, but I must empathize with the faculty here. The idea suggested at the beginning of the article, of letting the teachers do their teaching thing the old fashioned way, while students do the tech part to improve their own learning seems a little "out there" for me....even though I brandish the title "Educational Technologist".

In recent months and years, the largest fear (I've noticed) that faculty have is that of becoming irrelevant in the educational process because of the fear of technology taking over completely. So yes, as the article later suggests, faculty need to include as much technology as possible (while being educationally justifiable).

With regards to working with students on implementing it, it sounds utopian, but a little unrealistic because of the issue of expectation on behalf of the students. They expect teachers to provide the content and teaching/learning aides and part of the classroom/education process, while primarily seeing themselves exclusively as learners.


While I am inclined to believe that technology alone cannot be a teacher to EVERYONE (for both learning-ability and economic reasons), I believe that as computers get more powerful and software simulators become more inclusive and pervasive, the role of the faculty member in the classroom as we know it today will progressively dwindle.

Pretty picture, ain't it?!

But bleak as I tend to paint it, I don't advocate less student face-time as being a bad thing. As a faculty member I know (aka, my supervisor) is currently testing (successfully), traditional seminar-based learning has given way to new team-based learning where class content is disseminated only outside the class in the form of PDFs and podcasts and in-class time is devoted to discussion and testing.

This article and my supervisor's class have put a fascinating spin on my subject of focus, which is "always on" learning and who drives it because of the combined use of cell phones, Wikis, podcasting, , etc.

If you finished reading this, award yourself $200 and move three places down the board.

What to do and what not to do??!!

Since I came to work for the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, I have been enamored by the idea of "always on" learning. In many of the articles I have examined before, during and since the article presentations, as well as, in my experience as an educational technologist, I noticed a trend that this approach to learning is best adapted by the younger college-going population rather than the older, "continuing education" population.

The college-going population is used to being bombarded with different messages from different devices. For example, I specialize in providing content to students commonly via course management systems and podcasting. However, some technologies lend themselves to learning than others. Podcasting and wikis have been clear winners in this domain, while the jury still seems to be out on how effective Facebook can be.

I am considering the following:
- Exploring the value of Wikis in social learning
- Exploring how podcasts and RSS in general assist in social learning
- Exploring how Facebook has been used as a social learning tool to date
- Exploring suggestions you may have

My "epiphany in the shower" is due any day now!

Are you my public?

I enjoyed the discussion about what is public and the different types of publics in the article "Why Youth (Hear) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life".

If we talk about A public, it is possible to recognize that there are different collections of people depending on the particular situation. Talking about A public also implies that there must be multiple PUBLICS separated by social contexts.

Putting things in the context of Facebook, it would seem to me that everyone is part of the same public. It is surreal and mildly horrifying to me that my personal and professional lives would come together in ways I would not have thought of. I find myself being public to things that I wish I didn't.

A few days ago, I had to give a training session to new TAs on the CUMC campus, aka, a client. As it turns out, I also friends in that department. I was browsing through the profile page of one of these friends, and as I continued being click-happy through that and other pages, I suddenly stumbled on the page of one such TA. Now suddenly, I know her sun sign, her favorite flower and her favorite movie (which, it turns out, I can't stand).

I don't know what she might think if she's discovers that I visited her page, but I feel a little violated for having found her page to begin with.

The reason I bring up this incident is because of the line "Talking about a public also implies that there must be multiple publics separated by social contexts.", which is immediately followed by...

What then constitutes the boundaries of a given public?

In my opinion, the question should be rephrased to "What boundaries??!!" It would seem that Facebook and Orkut, my social-networking poisons of choice appear to have LARGELY done away with any differentiation between friends and acquaintances and "total stranger in the same network".

So what is the solution? I don't think there is one if you decide to stick to just one social-networking site. Since their inception, they appear to have show a bigger interest in setting everyone on the same playing field than categorizing them in any way. So I will continue sticking to what I have been doing all along...different networking sites for different types of people. Clean and effective.

I haven't quite figured out a place for this in my final, mostly because I still think that the notion of public in the context of education does not really leave room for differentiation, since such a site would assume that everyone affiliated with it has the same exact interest.