This morning (Thursday, May 4th) Paul Hagner, Associate Program Director EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, delivered the keynote address at the Learning Technology Showcase. The title of his keynote was "Mobile Learning, Immersive Technology, Emerging Technology and Successful Learning." Dr. Hagner's PhD is in Political Science and he comes from a faculty background.
But before I write about that, I'll tell you that the Showcase is given each year and features faculty who have used technology in innovative ways. Take a look at the page about featured projects. Now, what did Hagner say? He opened by showing how technology is bring change at exponential rates. Up until this time, change happened only incrementally. He pointed out that our current semester structure was fashioned out of living in an agrarian society. And two phrases he used throughout his talk were "digital immigrants" and "digital natives." Digital natives are the young people who have grown up with technology all around them--they were born into it. The issue in academia is that we have digital immigrants teaching digital natives.
Hagner mentioned a book by Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. It was mentioned in terms of how a technology can change our behavior. He gave the cellphone as an example. For instance, in airports he sees people everywhere holding phones to their ears or talking on bluetooth cellphones. And he said that recent research shows an increase in the number of first year students who leave college and return home. He asked the audience why. The answer is that parents are calling children on cellphones and the "umbilical cord cut" that existed for most of us when going away from home to college is not happening due to this constant cellphone contact.
Another theme of the talk related technologies to successful learning. Simply having technology in a course does not make the learning experience a success. In fact, although Netgeners are "highly deviced" they don't necessarily understand how to use Web resources correctly. He gave an example of one instructor who tells his students to bring their laptops to class and to search Google for supporting information on something he said in his lecture. For finding something, he gives them extra credit. If they find something that refutes what he said, they get double extra credit. The point is that students can multi-task during lectures and the instructor who engages them, is the instructor who does not enrage them.
Hagner recommended reading the Oblinger's Educating the Net Generation and in particular mentioned Chris Dede's "Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Investments in Technology and Faculty," and the chapters by the student and the faculty member. He spoke of Dede's mention of the "world to the desktop" which he labeled as the World To Laptop in his slides. The World to Laptop provides access to content delivery, collaboration, mentoring, virtual communities and psychological immersion.
Psychological immersion is important because it allows students to become immersed in learning. We can see this concept in the openness of social networking and games playing. Hagner noted that 65% of students are involved in games and that they are not isolated experiences but very social. He challenged higher education to find ways to bring the kind of social interaction and "immersion" that games provide. He even gave as an example how a young person could get interested in learning how to type on a keyboard until presented with computer game called "Typing of the Dead" which made a game of learning to type. The end result was that this young person developed typing skills on a keyboard at the master level.
Quickly now, here are a couple other sites he mentioned during his talk. The MIT Teacher Education Program reports that its early research "has shown that this mode of learning is successful in engaging university and secondary school students in large scale environmental engineering studies, and providing an authentic mode of scientific investigation." Howard Rheingold, a long-time favorite of mine, was quoted for coining the phrase "smart mobs" in reference to how swarms of people are connected via a wireless device and will move en masse. He gave the protests against the World Bank in Seattle a year ago as an example. In this context "smart" does not connote a higher form of intelligence but smart in the sence of a being connected and directed by a device.
Another site he talked about is Second Life. Second Life is "a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe." He spoke of how academia needs to engage students with this sort of interactive, collaborative, community driven virtual environment.
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