Learning in a Digital Age

This posting is a response to Task 4 of the Teaching in a Digital Age course.

The video by Michael Wesch offers a vision of students in the Google generation. Although the video was uploaded almost a decade ago (back in 2007), some of the contents are still relevant today. The main theme of the video, in my view, is the irrelevance and increasing isolation of higher education in the modern world, due to the impact of digital technologies on cultures. Students are now very different compared to the time when I was a student and there is a need to address this changing cultural landscape for universities to stay relevant.

In this posting I will reflect on some of the comments made by students in the video, seeing things from the perspective of someone living and working in Southeast Asia. Moreover, looking at how technology has advanced in the last five years, it is also pertinent to highlight how other student expectations have evolved with the emergence of smartphones and tablet computers – technologies that did not exist in 2007 in where I live.

Comments by participants in video

(1) Claim: Class size is large, few teachers know their students by name; Comment – This is not a real problem in HELP Academy since there aren’t that many University of London students. Classes rarely exceed 60, even in lectures. Importantly, the teachers do interact well with their students. Usually by the third week of the semester, I would have remembered the names of all students in class. This is the current approach to teaching that I am adopting.

(2) Claim: Students hardly read; recommended readings aren’t relevant to real life; Comment – This seems like a recurrent problem irrespective of cultures. Students lack engagement with the content provided by universities. The bigger problem is that the pool of deep learning students is shrinking fast. Even the good students merely engage in strategic learning to game the system and obtain maximum marks. Digital technologies foster a form of pragmatism and dependence (more of that in the next point below). I disagree with the irrelevance of education – knowledge on its own is dead, but knowledge can be alive in the hands of a very creative individual.

(3)  Claim: Education cannot solve real world problems; Comment – Nothing can. It takes many things put together to solve the most complex problems. Education cannot provide a quick fix to everything. This expectation of students reflects a culture of pragmatism and dependence, brought about by the convenience of digital technologies, particularly the smartphones and tablet computers. Everything can be conveniently downloaded with a click of a button. Problems can be solved by running some apps. Useful apps are downloaded; apps without any functional value are discarded. This is pragmatism! Unfortunately the world does not work that way.

(4) Claim: Students find it difficult to secure employment with what they learn in university; Comment – This is not really a problem here.

(5) Claim: Addiction to social networking, cell phone and online media and not paying attention in class; Comment – Another commonly observed problem. And it gets worse with the availability of smartphones and tablet computers.

(6) Claim: Education is expensive, students have to pay study loans; Comment – For the University of London programmes, the fees are relatively cheap. I don’t think that this is a serious issue here.

(7) Claim: Students need to multitask to fit everything into their lives (study, work, play etc.); Comment – Students here have a difficulty in juggling their priorities. Studying is usually a last-minute activity just before exams.

Views not covered in the video

Here are other typical behavioral traits (list not exhaustive) by the digitally-inclined students which are not covered in the video.

(1) Claim: We do not like to copy materials written on the board. We’d rather snap some pictures of the writings using the camera in the smartphone. Usually we never view the pictures again after storing them in the phone memory/card memory. Comment: This is one reason why many students seldom draw correct diagrams in economics. Also a reason why many students struggle to write proper and complete essays/sentences – too much exposure to online chatting (e.g. WhatsApp) using emoticons and incomplete sentences.

(2) Claim: We complain a lot, not directly to the university, but in Facebook and blogs. Comment: This is an extension of ‘flaming’ the other entity/person. The internet generation are familiar with this term.

(3) Claim: We’d like all our classes to be timed in such a way that we do not need to wait too long for the next class to start. If the waiting time is too long, we’d rather go home. Comment: This is a common problem. Not sure if other teachers face a similar problem.

The academic response

I don’t presume to know how everything about engaging this digitally-absorbed generation of students. There are some excellent resources here and here on how to do this. I suppose that it is insufficient to bring digital technologies into the classroom without also revamping the content that we deliver. In fact, I tend to get a bit skeptical about the usefulness of digital technologies in teaching (which can be exaggerated). There is good reason to believe that alternative, ‘non-digital’ methods of teaching (e.g. brainstorming, buzz groups, simulation, chunk reading etc.) can be just as effective. This is because some of the problems (from the comments in the video) partly stem from the psychological, particularly the issue of people-management. New ways of managing people, perhaps, can offer a partial solution on how to engage the Google generation.

 

The importance of knowing who you teach

This is just a casual observation.

In the past decade, my approach to teaching had always been to distance myself from students. I was remembered as a rather cold, aloof but professional academic who knew his stuff. ‘Engaging’ students had never crossed my mind. This paradigm of sorts survived countless years and was left unchallenged by the usually passive students from various East Asian backgrounds. In fact, the feeling was that the students kind of liked my cold approach towards teaching – me, showing that “I was the boss, and that I knew best so just keep your mouths shut and listen to me”

After I moved to another university, I experienced a change in the teaching environment, with a greater exposure to international students who were assertive and outspoken (particularly South Asian students). Using the only tried and tested formula for teaching that I had honed for many years in the past, I barely survived the teaching evaluations. It was until I changed my approach by being more engaging with students that teaching evaluations improved. I learned the hard way that letting the students know that you are attempting to learn their names and who they really were, can enhance their perceptions of you as their teacher. Add a  little extra human touch and you can be saved from the brink of war and annihilation. Simple lesson. Sounds corny. But it is effective!

So what does engaging students mean in the Google generation? Here are some tried-and-tested suggestions (list not exhaustive of course):

1. Make them feel that they are important and let them have a voice. Expectations are rising and students are no longer impressed by a walking and talking encyclopedia that seems infallible. But it is rather ironic that IT-savvy and IT-obsessed persons who are perpetually glued to their gadgets would welcome and reward a teacher who gives them some human touch.

2.  Add students to your social networking accounts and be a real exhibitionist. It may be narcissistic to bare all the details of your private life to a bunch of innocuous post-teens but they definitely love your ‘openness’. There is plenty of empirical evidence really. Some of my ex-colleagues are quintessential examples – after viewing their Facebook pages you get the feeling that you know them better than you know your own parents. It is a pity that the paparazzi did not give them the attention.

3.  Use IT-gadgets to communicate with students. It is probably easier to WhatsApp a person than to communicate the conventional way. Even better – keep up with what is trendy in the world of information technology. This is the new rat race.

4. Be a willing participant in student selfies (gasp).