Many Americans today believe that technology in the schools has become the greatest thing ever for the learning system in the 21st contrary. Student’s today struggle to keep up with the ever changing technology and multimedia. In the video “A Vision of Students Today,” producer Professor Michael Wesch and his students of anthropology at KSU. They introduce the idea of technology, combined with the school system and what it is like for a student today. To be $20,000 in debt by the time they graduate, with only reading 8 books but more then 2300 web pages and 500 pages of emails. However the distraction of technology has helped create this problem. Students in the video admitted to using computers for face book, chatting and other forms of media in the classroom. The students also state that “only complete 49% of class work” and how such a low percentage of what learned is relevant to life.
In the article “What would Socrates Say?” by Peter W. Cookson he makes some of the same claims as well. “Some advocates believe we can Google, blog, Skype, and Twitter our way to enlightenment. They assume that disorganized, radically democratized data lead to useful information and thus to real knowledge through some process of collective, randomized constant connectivity.” Cookson is saying that some believe that we learn best through this new wave of data and multimedia entertainment, but most evidence that he provides says otherwise. He advocates for a radical revision of the education system. Stating that “A child born today could live into the 22nd century. It’s difficult to imagine all that could transpire between now and then. One thing does seem apparent: Technical fixes to our outdated educational system are likely to be inadequate. We need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.” This is not to say that Cookson believes that there should be no technology, just updated with the students.
From both of these articles I believe that it shows that it’s not technology that needs to be disappearing, just the outdated way of learning with it. When students obviously need the technology for learning, we then need to find the new approach to learning hand in hand with it.
Welcome to Our Blog Conversations Beyond the Classroom!
Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study? As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…). Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
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