Applied Technology Online

Dr. Wesch just posted some thoughts about Participatory Media, a.k.a. Social Media, a subset of Web 2.0. Most interesting is his point about barriers to participatory media in the classroom by faculty and students, yes students.

The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise).

In the video I posted yesterday, Dr. Wesch makes a point about students that reminded me of a conversation that I had with Carole a few weeks ago about students as digital natives. Her point was that students don’t automatically know how to use Web 2.0 just because they are natives. What sets digital natives apart from digital immigrants is FEAR. The students as natives don’t fear this new stuff, they will try anything. However, Dr. Wesch noted that this media is so new that we adults (read immigrants) can catch up, we can learn about social media before the kids do, get a step ahead.

Of course, I know a little about this having taught my middle school students how to use MOODLE. I discover that I need to do a little hand-holding the first few times the kids access the system. There are misconceptions about how the system works. Needing to press a save or post button, and that act serves to turn in the assignment. That is more or less why I feel compelled to do this work with the students at middle school. They should be exposed to online learning at this level, the assignments are not supper challenging. The hard part seems to be learning how to use the system. If my students learn MOODLE now, when they get to high school and their teachers want them to use MOODLE for class, they will remember how it works. Their teachers won’t have to do the hand-holding because I did it for them already.

I have to cope with my share of resistance from the students when it comes to online learning. You might imagine the excuses that I get when it comes to doing this at home, which is why I make time available to get the work done in class. However, some of the students don’t seem to have a clue or flat out don’t do the work online. If Dr. Wesch is right about students desire to sit back and have the sage on the stage poor knowledge into their eyes and ears, it’s because we trained them that way in elementary school. I hope that my efforts with the kids at my level will begin to break them of that paradigm.

Anyway, Dr. Wesch links to an essay from Howard Rheingold that might be worth a read too.