on media engagement

The reluctant embrace of digital learning

Yep, you heard it here first: educators are scared that digital teaching supports are going to innovate them right out of a job.  I’m printing the entire statement below, because it’s too interesting not to:

The board of the National Education Association, which represents college faculty members in addition to elementary and secondary school teachers, on Friday approved a new statement on digital learning that is likely to be adopted as official policy for the union by its Representative Assembly in July. The policy, which applies to both K-12 and higher education:

• Endorses “hybrid” teaching — involving both technology and teachers — as the best approach. “Optimal learning environments should neither be totally technology free, nor should they be totally online and devoid of educator interaction,” the statement says.
• Calls for teachers to be centrally involved in decisions about how to use technology in classrooms.
• Says that “education employees should own the copyright to materials that they create in the course of their employment. There should be an appropriate ‘teacher’s exception’ to the ‘works made for hire’ doctrine, pursuant to which works created by education employees in the course of their employment are owned by the employee. This exception should reflect the unique practices and traditions of academia.”
• Urges policy makers to consider the extent to which increased reliance on technology for learning may exacerbate inequities in the education system.

Or, HELP US, for the LOVE of GOD, HELP US!!!

Not that their points aren’t valid, reasonable claims. It’s actually heartening to see educators stand up against the corporate educational behemoth that digital learning can be. It does surprise me that they need to put these statements into writing. Some of it seems to be laying the ground work for labor-based protections and IP ownership issues moving forward. Some of it is caution about inequalities.

Here’s the thing: there are always going to be inequities in the US system as long as decisions are made according to local budgets and local districts. Here’s another thing: for those who could get their tushes to a local library, learning has always been free and available for the self-motivated. Many students are not. I see the role of the teacher in the future needing to more actively entice students to eat their cognitive peas, a challenge in a world of endless fun online.

(All) content is king

I happened across this chapter, “The Changing Nature of E-Learning Content,” in a book called New Frontiers of Educational Research published by Springer earlier this year.  It is so refreshing to take a step back from the delivery systems of digitized educational content — MOOCs, of course, but also apps, blended/hybrid learning instruction, and enhanced textbooks, to name a few — and dig into how what we even consider educational content is, in fact, changing:

Fifteen years later, in 2011, digital world is brimming with content, including increasing quantities user-generated content, mobile content, and dynamically changing content such as social media, news sites, and online games. Studies show that E-learning is to somewhat behind the curve in adopting new forms of content but it is nonetheless clear that the next generation of E-learning content will be more dynamic, context aware, immersive and mobile. A new set of standards and formats will be relevant and, at least in the short run, different and more technical skills will be required to produce it. More importantly, perhaps, E-learning content is experiencing a shift in underlying pedagogical theories from cognitive, instructive, and behaviorist to social, constructivist and connectivist. In these theories, it is context that is king.

We do not want our students to go the way of the print journalist.  They need to be flexible, nimble, adaptable and able to react quickly to environmental changes.  It is nice that the nature of our world –  where truth is often a matter of cobbling together evolving information, narratives, data, etc. — is finally being duly acknowledged.

Idle thought: perhaps newspapers aren’t going out of business because journalism is dead or because the business model isn’t there, but because to print something on paper is to commit to it, and print just can’t keep up with a world brimming over with a constant barrage of information to process (or ignore). Newspapers would have to publish multiple times a day to approach any semblance of relevance today.