Missing the Obvious
The Guardian has an interesting article on social networking in higher education under the title Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace! which comes to the apparently shocking conclusion that students don’t want academics integrated into their social lives. I’m not sure why this determination should be surprising. The way it’s structured the only difference between ‘work’ and ‘school’ is that you get paid to go to work, while the only compensation you get for going to school is the ability to one day get a ‘better’ job. So school=work, and not-school=fun.
What we need to understand is that Technology, in all its forms, is now part of not separate from, Life.
Based on qualitative research – one-to-one interviews with students conducted over two years – Jisc has built up a picture of how students are using IT to manage their social lives. Most are confident and competent IT users, but they are too often unaware of how they could apply their skills to enhance their studies. Phipps recalls interviewing a first-year female arts undergraduate who professed absolute ignorance of e-learning or web applications. “She was updating her blog at an internet café and then started integrating photos from her Flickr site on to the blog. At the end of it she said, ‘That’s not technology. That’s what I do.’ “
The question can’t be reduced to do students want Blackboard in FaceBook any more that it can be, “Do they want to go to class, read the assignment, or do the project.” You can bribe them, threaten them, or entertain them, but what you’re trying to do is help/make them learn. Learning isn’t always fun, but it can be fun; it’s a matter of attitude. Technology can help but it’s going to take some serious work to figure out how. The later parts of the Guardian article deserve close attention:
“We’re seeing a set of new online literacies emerging but we need to understand how students use those literacies,” says Phipps. “The challenge for higher education is to learn how to integrate the social networking sites with traditional academic practice and traditional ICT systems.”
