Technology Worth Including in Classroom Education

The following video gives a brief discussion on New Media Literacies and what skills students will need in order to be competitive in modern society. The video encourages us to be users and creators of media and to think critically about the media we encounter in our everyday lives. These are all very good teaching points for any instructor to consider.

But what specific tools do students need to know how to use? The video describes a lot of skills that consumers of New Media need to have (judgement when deciding what online resources are trustworthy, understanding of the different social skills needed when communicating in different contexts, etc), and they are all important abilities that students need to develop. So what specific tools are useful for helping students share their creativity, interact with other social groups, conduct research, and perform other tasks that are relevant for education (collection, creation, and distribution of knowledge)? Well let’s see what technology can be used to push the ideas of RCPCI (Research, Collaboration, Publication, Communication, and Innovation). *Please note that this discussion is just a starting point. There are so many other resources available out there.

Research

Figure 1: The Computer Lab
Original image found here

Developing library search skills is a great place to start if you need to conduct research while working on a project in any field of study. If you’re a Georgia State University student, you can go to the library website and access articles through Galileo.

You can find many other databases online for scholarly articles. JSTOR is one great place for finding articles from academic publications.

Students can even begin to conduct their own research online by setting up polls and surveys. Polldaddy is one site that allows anyone to conduct research easily online.

Collaboration

Technology can be used for collaboration when people use a program that allows multiple users to set up individual accounts but still share the same workspace simultaneously or make edits one at a time. A wiki would be one example of this. There is also PBWorks, which is similar to a blog and file storage system, but it’s meant for group activities.

Collaboration can also just occur when individuals just have somewhere to post their ideas even without sharing a workspace. A forum or email system, like Hotmail, is somewhere that brainstorming can occur, but each participant will just have to read through and keep track of what is said in every post. It’s probably not as effective as a wiki, but it’s still possible.

People can have video conferences online if they use Skype.

Publication

A blog is a very easy way to present text and graphic based information online. Blogs can also embed or link to audio and video files. Blogs.com is one place where anyone can set up a free blog.

For sharing videos, YouTube is the leader and most heavily used resource available. An educational variant of YouTube would be TeacherTube, which is more appropriate for finding and posting educational videos.

Communication

New media technology is all about sharing ideas and encouraging a dialogue, so satisfying a need to communicate is at the heart of all the technology that is being discussed in this post.

Innovation

Being innovative can mean that someone is creating something that has not been around before (in which case the creator would be either building a piece of technology from scratch or using some form of New Media to simply publish information about their innovation) or it can mean that someone is using an established technology in a way that is unique. If someone is going to post something new to the World Wide Web that hasn’t been seen before, then that person would simply need some web space to host their product. Anyone can sign up for free web space through a site like AwardSpace.

Disclaimer: I’ve never used AwardsSpace, Skype, or Polldaddy, so you’ll have to let me know if they’re not up to par.

 

The Future of Technology in the Classroom

Figure 2: Student Machines
Original images found here and here

So where do you see technology taking education in the future? This is a long topic in itself, so maybe there will be a post on this in the future. For now, I will say that it seems likely that we will see more and more integration of media types into one source. For instance, we will not have to go to one site for video conferencing and another for collaboratively composing music. It seems like we will see more sites consolidating different capabilities or just trying to make their existing functionality easier to control.

Introduction to New Media

New Media Technology for Education

After reading that heading, the first question you may ask is…just what is New Media? No, it’s not just media that was published this morning. It goes a little deeper than that.

Figure 1: PDA for accessing new media
Original Image found here

New Media is a term used to distinguish media types that have different levels of functionality to promote interactive communication. Old media would constitute an archetype where information is published in some form (like a newspaper, film reel, etc) that only really allows for ideas to go from the publisher to the audience. New Media, on the other hand, tends to be more interactive since it allows for the audience to have a voice in the communication process. For instance, viewers of a video can leave comments and have discussions on the page hosting the video. New media tends to create a more active and social environment with opportunities to be hands-on if you so choose.

The following video gives a good explanation of what New Media is and how it’s useful. I would tweak Dan Brown’s initial definition to say that New Media does not have to be online. Cell phones, for instance, give consumers the chance to communicate via text messages and voice/video mail. They also have a lot of functionality through the Internet, but they are not exclusively online. You can even watch some TV shows live and vote using text messages or Twitter…so we are even seeing New Media capabilities influence and enhance older media formats.

Brown does make a good point about New Media enabling anyone to present their ideas to the public and potentially gain a very large audience. So what tools are available that can allow people to interact online?

Technology for Gathering and Sharing Ideas

This blog is meant for educational matters, so lets start to make some connections between New Media and academia.

At the heart of all media is the transfer of information from a source to an audience. Education is not just the transfer of knowledge from a teacher to the student, but also the creation and distribution of knowledge by students. New Media can help enhance the educational process by giving students tools that they can use to conduct research and find information, collaborate to create projects, publish their work online for others to see, communicate back and forth with others, and potentially create an innovative product. I guess we can sum this up with an acronym...RCPCI (Research, Collaboration, Publication, Communication, and Innovation).

This doesn’t all happen magically or automatically though. It takes students with know how and creativity to effectively use new media products to the best of their ability. We can get students to this stage by 1.) introducing students to New Media technology and 2.) encouraging them to exhibit advanced communication and research skills.

Simply handing new media technology to students will not replace the need for traditional education. Technology is just a tool to enhance what educators are already teaching, after all. New Media is also a topic for discussion and technology often needs to be taught to students since they will need training on how to use it at some point. Teachers can integrate instruction in the use of a particular technology while showing students how it’s helpful for accomplishing a task that’s relevant to the subject matter of the course. For example, a composition instructor could introduce students to blogs as a tool for writing journals and getting feedback (in the form of comments) from outsiders that happen to read the blog. The feedback could then lead to a dialogue and the further construction of knowledge.

Well that's a start to an ongoing debate on including technology in traditional education. I don’t want to burn out the subject matter on my first post. The next entry will give ideas on what kinds of New Media technology can be useful for education and the concepts of RCPCI.

See you next time! Oh, there isn’t a rule saying that blogs have to be too formal. :-)

Resources worth checking out that add to this discussion

-What’s New, New Media? This is a wiki about topics related to New Media. The information here is compiled by anyone with an interest in the subject matter. http://newmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

-What’s New Media? This is a blog that collects articles related to New Media http://whatsnewmedia.org/

Figure 2: Sources with no ID
Original Image found here

-“Embracing the new media landscape.” The Hill. This is an article about how technology is allowing US citizens to interact with politicians. It highlights a positive impact of New Media in its ability to open lines of communication. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/166063-embracing-the-new-media-landscape

-“ Hackers Gain Force From New Media.” CNBC. This article gives some insight into the downside of New Media…cyber crime. It’s about Hackers that use technology to pool their own resources and cause a great deal of pain for Sony, the CIA, and other organizations. This would be one downside of New Media. http://www.cnbc.com/id/43504896