Here’s where to talk about the chapter from RAW by Richard Holeton, “How Much is Too Much New Media for the Netgen?”
I think Holeton raises a lot of good points in his chapter, and I of course always enjoy it when people quote my scholarship in their writing! (Though I will say that I had not seen this when I had originally skimmed this before assigning it.) I think Holeton makes a lot of good points, especially toward the end of the piece, and I think he makes some good connections with this concept of “digital natives,” even though you may have already seen my reservations about this whole “digital natives” thing.
I like a lot of what he has to say about comparing his 1990s experience versus his 2003 class, but in my experience, I think the biggest factor that Holeton doesn’t talk about much is “novelty:” basically, all this stuff in the 90s was new (and thus exciting and interesting), while in 03 it was old hat for these students (e.g., busy-work). This might seem kind of simplistic, but I actually think that the value of novelty is actually quite high.
I guess my other criticism/question that plays in here is the role of the kind of students. I don’t have a huge amount of evidence on this, but I’m going to climb out on a limb here and suggest that the kind of experience and comfort that incoming students at Stanford have with new technologies is a wee-bit higher than it is at Eastern Michigan University. I still think those access statistics we discussed before are accurate– I do think that 93% of my students really do have easy access to the ‘net, and I will bet that the number of incoming students at EMU who have computers is probably about 80%. But I know that my students– particularly my first year students– do not have the kind of access Holeton describes on page 222. Besides that, Stanford and EMU students generally have very different life constraints. If you’re a full-time student who lives in the dorms and receives most of their support from parents, you have a whole different kind of access (and time!) to play around with emerging technology. In contrast, if you are a part-time student who lives at home with the parents or off-campus in your own apartment, maybe with kids and a significant other, and you’re working full-time to both pay for tuition and to survive, well, there’s a good chance that you haven’t had the time/experience to get to the point where you find this technology “busy-work.”
But even as I type that, I realize that the answer really is “your mileage will vary.” I’ve had plenty of students in this stereotypical “underprivileged” space who were amazingly tapped in/wired in with all of these medias, and I’ve had plenty of students who sure seemed like they should have known more about this stuff….
Anyway, comment away.
Professor Krause, Your point that “the value of novelty is actually quite high” is well taken. That’s exactly what I thought when I began reading this piece. I would probably fall into the first generation of students that Holeton is talking about since I began college back in 1998. Things were still pretty limited when it came to my exposure to technology, and I think that impacted how I interested I was in assignments involving technology.
One perk though of having this tech-savy generation of students is that we can spend less time familiarizing them with the technology and more time diving in and utilizing it. The class I’m teaching this semester seems super comfortable figuring out new technology, which makes my job much easier. I feel like we can just jump into new media activities, which is something that wouldn’t have been possible with the 1994 generation.
So I guess there are pros and cons to having our technology natives in the classroom. They might not be thrown into a tizzy of excitement over doing an Online activity, but, if we make the activities clearly purposeful, we can at least utilize the new mediums for learning without too much anxiety on the part of the students.
I completely agree with you here, Andrea. I like the fact that (most) students know so much about computers and internet applications. I, too, like the fact that if I say, “Create a blog and use it to post responses for class,” they know exactly what a blog is, where to go, how to create one, and what it means to post. Granted, it may be new for some, but their proficiency with the internet in general will safe-guard them from completely giving up. They will know how to find answers or be able to navigate a program to finally get what/where they want. And, isn’t it exciting involving different forms of media and such in your teaching than just the old paper and book?
And, yes, I, like you, began college before there were online components to class and such. It had just become acceptable to require students to type their papers! (And this is just in 2000 that I am talking about.) My how far we have come… Of course, this means that I am playing catch-up as fast as I can in order to learn about/incorporate new media in my classroom. But, I am happily doing it.
I agree Ashlee, the WEB 2.0 tools really make it practical for teachers of writing to explore news ways of learning about writing. Previously, teaching writing with some online tools would have perhaps required more investment than it was worth. So, in that sense, it’s actually much easier now for “digital immigrants” to make the adjustment to using new media in the classroom.
But what about the learning gap between those who are “natives” and have all this access and those who don’t? Maybe this isn’t all that valid, but it reminds me of when I taught in Vegas and my 1st period had everyone from freshman to seniors, some had AP the year before, and many were special ed. How do you teach them all? It seems like there would be some differentiated instruction that had to go on. You wouldn’t want to “bore” the advanced kids, but you can’t leave behind those who aren’t as privileged.
Andrea and Ashlee and Brian, I think you are all making good points. I can tell you that when I started teaching in college 20 years ago, you did have to spend some time in a freshman composition class teaching students about how to create word processed files and save them and such. When I came to EMU in ’98, I had to spend a fair amount of time getting students on-board with this whole “email thing” that they had heard about. Indeed, web 2.0 technologies and an increase awareness/ability with technologies like what y’all are talking about have made me make some big changes to this class in the last couple years. It used to be that I made everyone learn HTML and make their own web pages; now that seems like overkill in a class like this.
(Though to do a little advertising: knowing it is still really important, and I teach a class that teaches that and so much more called “Writing for the World Wide Web.” Available online this summer term!)
Having said that, I think there is still a “pushing of the envelope” both in the sense of teaching/adding new and emerging technologies, and in trying to show students how to view tools they know in different ways (like using facebook for teaching). When it comes to teaching technologies, there’s always something new around the corner.
And I also have to say that I kind of miss that lack of familiarity and the coding and stuff sometimes. Sure, it takes time to teach students how to use the tools, but it shows a dimension to the writing they didn’t know before (especially with HTML and CSS), and it is the kind of thing that builds excitement and novelty.
Going back to what I said about students knowing more now and are more comfortable with technology, I think I somewhat disagree with myself (I’m allowed to do that, right?). I guess it’s not so much that students know how to use all the new forms of technology that I have them work with (as Prof. Krause says, new technology is always developing); it’s more that the understand how to “learn” new technology. Does that make sense?
For example, most of my class last year didn’t know much about video editing, but they were willing to give it a shot for a class project because they were all somewhat comfortable with other forms of technology. Seems like maybe that might be one major difference between this generation and the last – the comfort level with technology and willingness to experiment with something new. Professor Krause would know better than I though!
I don’t know if “the kids today” (so to speak) are on the whole more or less willing to experiment with something new. I saw resistance and excitement in students with this stuff 15 years ago, and I see it now.
What I do see is two things that are a little different. When I have students creating video projects, I always have at least a handful of students who have done this stuff before, so they can take some leadership roles. That wasn’t always the case when I first started teaching students how to make web sites, for example.
Second, they all are basically familiar with the bone-basics of internet stuff. I mean, they all have email, they all have a facebook account (or, if they don’t, they don’t have a facebook account on purpose), etc. And as part of this, all I need to tell students to do for setting up something like a wordpress.com site or a flickr site or a youtube account (etc., etc.) is “go sign up for an account.” Back in the day, I had to walk people through that.
I think for some of them it is a “novelty” to think of and use these technologies in a classroom. More of the younger students, in my teaching experience, are shocked when I suggest that a social network site like Facebook is a genre of writing and that they need to explore the conventions of FB. I tried to use a ning last semester in my 101 classes at Schoolcraft. I thought I would post readings and assingments, have discussions, blog, post pics and vides and the like. This way if students were absent they could communicate with me and others as well as get the assignments they missed. It was not a complete failuer but lets just say it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. I wanted to give them the freedom to post and they just didnt. I am using one again in my Journalsim class and have required them to post as respond. Well within the first few days they were posting pics, video, links to sites and articles, chatting, making friends, commenting on many other things and doing other blogs. I asked myself what the difference was and I just dont know. I even have some of them commenting that the format is a nice change from the “traditional” way that many of their teachers are still using.
I agree that Facebook might still be a novelty in the classroom, since it’s something students use so very often for non-academic purposes, but I wonder if blogs and wikis and such are as much of a novelty these days–in college courses, I mean. I started college in the Fall of 2003–the same year that Holeton taught his res hall pilot at Stanford–and my experience was quite different. I was also in a living-learning program (art- and writing-based), and while we had a really nice computing site where we could work on papers and attend occasional workshops, technology wasn’t integrated into any of our coursework. Wi-fi wasn’t installed in the building until after I moved out in 2005. I remember my intro comp teacher brought in an old school slide reel project thing to show us pictures of art, and she wasn’t even 30 yet! I know it sounds like I’m describing a course for the dark ages, but this was only seven years ago! The course Holeton taught back then sounds amazing, like something I would love to teach right now. While I was definitely IM-ing and such a lot in 2003, I wonder if I would’ve been tech savvy enough to survive a pilot like his.
As the saying goes, “your mileage will vary.” I used a wiki for teaching first year writing last spring and this fall, and it was still pretty novel to those students. Of course, the novelty also included some of my nutty assignments, too….
I will say to students, you know a wiki and they look at me like I’m crazy.
That’s been my experience too. Of course, as soon as you say “you know, like wikipedia,” they go “ohhh….”
Right!! But then I have to explain the difference because they say, well wikipedia is “bad”
I wonder, Cristin, if the fact that you required them to post was responsible for the dramatic change (you didn’t mention if you required it the first time). Maybe the thing to learn here is that while students are savvy w/ these things and more than willing to use them for personal/social communications, they may still need a little push to get them to integrate it into academic purposes. Interesting experience, though…. glad you shared it.
That is an interesting experience Cristin. Maybe you just framed it differently as well, since you knew what went wrong the first time you probably learned a lot from that and knew what it would take to make them more excited to post and chat. Most students hate to be required to post, but it sounds like its working.
I think both Dave and Angie are right here– and this is something (if I make you read my “Blogging Goes Bad” article) that we’ll return to. The short version is I don’t think new technologies and the potential of them is in and of itself enough for things to happen in a classroom setting. Students don’t “just write,” or “just do” about anything if there isn’t some sort of classroom requirement associated with it, which makes a certain amount of sense. But it also raises some kind of interesting questions/issues about the nature of education.
Like in the Pigg article, I liked how he brought up the idea that teachers had to be flexible and make students choose which media would be most appropriate for the task at hand. It would open up the lines of communication for so many different things! But the best part was that he mentioned that students would have to defend their choices, so they have to make their choices conscious and gain agency over their work. That could be a very powerful thing. My other thought is at the high school level, what about parent complaints? Blogs, wikis, social networking, and even something as simple as google docs might be an access issue and/or spark parent debate over the legitimacy of such things in class. It might be like the censoring of books, we’ll have a censoring of new media!
I also liked the analogy of students “getting caught in the net”, again connecting this to reading it’s like the debate about “reluctant readers”. Students aren’t really reluctant to read, they just don’t want to read what we force them to read in school. They enjoy the freedom of picking their own texts, like Holeton was saying about technology as well. It was a little doom and gloom to think that “the payoff no longer exists” though as he suggests on page 224. Is it really? I know he says that’s where teachers need to be flexible, but it’s hard to know if we’re using media technology in the most effective ways. Somehow, I doubt I am!
Angie, I think you’re 100% right about emphasizing intentionality when it comes to new media. The meta-work that Holeton had his students doing in each course seems super important–that is, considering the “issues raised by new technologies at the same time they are using those new technologies…” (210).
It’s interesting that the students in the later course resisted this kind of work more than the previous students. Perhaps the “cool factor” had something to do with this, but I also wonder if the 1994 students felt more like pioneers, resulting in a “we’re-all-in-this-together” sort-of mentality that elevated the spirit of the course. I also wonder if feelings of entitlement had something to do with it. (Stanford students would never feel any sense of entitlement — of course not.) Technology became more of a given in the almost 10 years between the two courses, so perhaps those students felt like, “of course the technology should be here,” so they didn’t feel the need to reflect critically on their use of it, causing them to see said reflection as busy work.
I liked this piece and especially liked the “swimming fish” analogy. I think it really gets to the heart of the matter. And, although I appreciate his directive of “let them use the technologies they have,” I think this also connects to Angie’s concern. The secondary classrooms may be a bit more homogeneous than college classes – in so much as exposure to tech – but I think that there are certain difficulites associated w/ giving students free reign over choosing the techs they’re going to use, especially in a post-secondary setting where we have both “natives” and “immigrants” in the same room. I know that if given the choice, many “digital immigrants” would choose the methods that are most comfortable for them, rather than challenging themselves to get out of their comfort zones. I know that before last semester, when I used a class wiki for the first time, if the instructor gave me the choice to post, blog, or email… I would most likely have chosen email because I’m used to it. And, that’s probably not a good thing. Now that I have some exposure to wikis and blogs, I would be much more likely to use them. For me, choice would not be a good thing… but maybe that’s my fault.
Not to say that you’re lame or anything, Dave, (;-)) but I agree that letting students keep all of their safe learning habits is not always the best thing. In inter-group dialogues, for example, participants are often encouraged to take risks, or move into the “yellow zone.” Facilitators shouldn’t let them stay in their comfortable little green middle, but they also shouldn’t push them to the red edges where they freak out and shut down and learn nothing. I think this same model can be applied to a lot of different teaching/learning environments, especially those that involve technology. Encouraging students to take just enough risks to learn in a safe, teacher-guided environment seems like an importance balance to strike. Frankly, as cool as Holeton’s courses sound and as much as I would like to teach them, I wonder if all the multimodal stuff and the multitude of tools and platforms going on at once would overwhelm students and push them too far into the red?
Well, I’m rubber and ur glue!
I’m interested in observing a Hoelton discussion on how to develop, define a course on new media. Both new media content and new media authorship should be subject matter for the class. But, I think that because there are so many authors in new media that it will be hard to define what kind of author is important to the education of the class. Are the authors like Mark Zuckerberg, Craig Newmark, and Jeff Bezoz the people we are to study? Or maybe some 8 year old behind a desk top creating a multi-million dollar website? It feels good to be nonlinear and dynamic, but I am no fish. I swear I’ll drown. There are other things to take into consideration other than the students ability to learn quickly. I like Hoelton’s methodology, his ability to hear his students. But I also appreciate his enthusiasm and need to test his students to see how far they can go. But, really I think a teacher has to know their students before they can push them to their limits. Last thought: I don’t think it is just the professors and instructors that will be forever learning. That was kind of isolating.
I was thinking the same thing Renee! I wish I could research how to apply some of these things to my classroom and more methods and lesson plans! That would be really cool.
Angie, this is one of those “moving targets” of the class in some ways. I guess I’ll say two things for now:
* There are a number of excellent resources out there that try to do more of this “lesson plan” sort of thing. Do a search for (for example) “facebook lesson plans” and you’ll find lots of ideas. Also, there are a number of books out there that do this; one I’d recommend is Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. That was on the reading list for this class last year, but I took it off because a lot of my students didn’t think it was that useful for the work they were doing. Which leads me to point #2:
* The nature of the class (a graduate-level course, one where most of the students are interested in teaching in higher ed settings, etc.) doesn’t really lend itself to “this is what you should do on Friday with Facebook” kind of teaching. At least it doesn’t for me anymore. That’s one of those more individual kinds of things, it seems to me, and perhaps it is indeed something you could research and write about for your research project.
Thanks Angie. Who would you have your students study? Seriously. People like us or you and me? People that we don’t know and hardly have a name for themselves but you think that are brilliant in their work? People like Zuckerberg, Newmark, Bezoz? A smart-kid?
I’m just interested to know and do not mean to put you on the spot. So if you do not have an answer, then that is just fine.
I am with Angie and Renee in wanting to apply some of thses things in my compostion classes. I really liked his research and this article encouraged me more than Jenkins and Prensky.
I liked his honesty in saying what worked and what did not. Sometimes we don’t like to admit something was way to much work for the students.
I am with Steve in thinking the media mileage varies among students. Teaching at a 2 year college is definitely different than 4 year college with dorms. Most students that come to my night classes are working full time jobs. Sometimes you have someone pegged thinking they will be your computer guru this semester and they turn out to be just a little more eperimental than the rest.
I asked his office hours using AIM. I once told my students to Skype me if they had questions. One student did but it was exactly like Holeton said a shift of identity and roles.
Oh! Gloria, what was your Skype experience like? Did the student have a lot of questions to ask you? Or did you find yourself directing the discussion more often? Did you both feel tech savvy enough to make the technology feel more invisible (and did the connection, program, etc. behave?), or did the technology ever disrupt your discussion? Why do you think more students don’t take advantage of your offer to Skype with them? That seems so cool!
I’m with you Gloria, I think it’s important to have some kind of online space available for a class. I haven’t been able to do to much with this in my teaching at EMU because the whole thing is new to me and I’m kind of just learning the ropes; I hope next year to really implement some kind of space for students to ask questions and hold discussions online. I’m not sure the switch in roles bothers me that much as I think it depends on how you meet the student’s overtures. However, the way to handle that sort of thing online is definitely something teachers should address and try to work out for themselves.