Insights into my mind as they occur
Personal
Digital Natives vs Immigrants
Jun 9th
In his 2001 article Marc Prensky makes an interesting observation regarding students, that they have changed and the way they learn is no longer the way current systems were designed to teach. He goes on to make the points that the average college student will have played 10000 hours of computer games, watched 20000 hours of television but only spent 5000 hours reading and that because of this, the sheer volume of data they are processing day-to-day, they think about and process information differently to older generations.
This divide between generations leads Prensky to coin the term “digital natives” for those who dwell in this environment daily and/or were raised in it, and the term “digital immigrant” for those that are from an older generation and are trying to come to terms with the new technology and paradigms created by them. The terms are seen as being apt as, just with an immigrant to a new country trying to talk to a native, there is a language barrier causing communication issues and the more of an immigrant one is the greater their digital “accent”.
This “accent” leads to the biggest issue there is for educators, those educators that are digital immigrants are speaking a totally different language to that of their students….students that are used to accessing and absorbing their information in a parallel method, that can multitask and like to find information in a random access method are being taught by instructors that want them to work through a problem sequentially, learn the steps of the problem in an ordered fashion and work on only one step at a time.
The accent of the educators is thus restricting the students because the educators hold the belief that students can’t learn while listening to music, or watching TV, or playing videogames purely because they weren’t able to while ignoring the fact that the students have spent their entire lives processing information in this way. Prensky makes the point that it is no different to the issues seen when an adult tries to learn a new language at the same time a child born into that culture starts to learn to speak…the child will have an easy time of it than the adult because their brain hasn’t already been “wired” for a certain thing.
Prensky makes the final point here that we can’t re-wire the “native” brain so we as educators must adapt ourselves to providing our lessons in a way that is best consumed by our students rather than trying to get them to go backwards by reconsidering our content and methodology of delivery. He then goes on to give a case study of a way edutainment software was used to teach CAD useage to students and the struggles that teachers had with adapting their content to new delivery methods with the final result being the teachers seeing how the changes sped up the learning and understanding of students and how students had an easier time learning the software because it was happening while they were having fun in a non-restrictive way.
Playful learning vs Edutainment
Jun 9th
Mitchel Resnick makes a very interesting point at the start of his article, he doesn’t like edutainment. While an interesting, and self-confessed contrarian, point of view he goes on to make some very valid points about how edutainment is often viewed or marketed and why he prefers to use the term “playful learning” rather than edutainment.
The main complaint that Resnick has regarding “edutainment” is that it gives the impression that learning is a whole unpleasant experience that needs to be sugar-coated to become palatable, that education is such that a student needs to be rewarded in some fashion for being able to suffer through it. He also takes the term itself to task in that the companies try to provide students with education and entertainment in a fashion where the student is a passive recipient rather than engaging them as active participants.
He then goes on to give a case study about a young student that participated in, what Resnick calls, “playful learning” where students play and learn at the same time rather than recieving entertainment and education passively. This student was involved in an after-school center that taught children through allowing them to play and experiment with toys such as marbles, building blocks and small programable sensors. The structure of the program was very simple, for students to build “marble machines”, but these machines were then used in a way that students would come up with thoughts and be encouraged to think critically, plan, experiment, etc to build more and more sophisticated structures.
In the end he explains how schools in Singapore are seeing some benefit to these sorts of activities as well but only outside of school hours, during school hours they are stuck with teaching in the core methods even though new methods of teaching using interactivity are showing success.
Beyond technotainment
Jun 9th
In his 2000 article, Jamie McKenzie looked at how we as teachers can determine is something we are considering using can be classified as edutainment or technotainment and why we want to avoid technotainment ICTs.
The article tries to explain how a lot of educational ICT’s are currently being pitched at educators and administrators using mainly flashy graphics and special effects, the vendors trying to use razzle-dazzle to entrance those watching rather than promoting the message of how these technologies can be used to promote better learning outcomes for students by looking at the experience of a high school principle looking to help close the digital divide facing her school.
McKenzie makes the point that schools have to make sure they don’t introduce a new type of illiteracy, electronic illteracy, into schools by making sure that any educational ICT’s implemented in classes should be focused on helping students to learn how to more deeply think about issues and analyse what they read not to just make them feel happy and have fun. ..the ICT’s should have meat behind the flash.
McKenzie then goes on to explain that for some schools the act of purchasing and installing ICT’s is seen as the ultimate goal, with no clear focus or thought of purpose put into the decision, which leads to schools use and teach technology for its own sake rather than using them as tools to enhance student understanding or skills in specific areas, or even general areas as basic as reading and it is these shallow tools that can be classed as technotainment, technology laced with entertainment but lacking in real teaching value.
Using edutainment to enhance online learning
Jun 9th
When looking at how effective edutainment software can be in delivering positive pedagological outcomes we must first look at why we would consider using edutainment, what forms there are, why it can provide learning outcomes and what potential pitfalls are that we must watch out for as teachers. Mary Nell McNeese looks at all of these issues in her article from 2007 and hopefully this journal entry will help distill her data down into an easily digestible format.
According to McNeese, the main purpose of edutainment software is to promote learning to students in a way that they get lost in the fun and don’t realise they are learning. I think this is a good basic explanation but it doesn’t really explain what edutainment software actually is or how it can get students lost in fun so for this we need to explore further along these lines to make sure we, as teachers, know what to look for and how to integrate these ICT’s into our lessons.
Digital games have been found to promote the following skills in students:
- strategising
- problem solving
- reflexes
- co-ordination
- tactical reasoning
- logical thinking
- analytical skills
and so we can see that using these as edutainment tools can bring out a lot of tools that the student may not realise they have and teach them to use them instinctively in appropriate situations.
There are various positive and negatives to edutainment software that need to be recognised and accounted for by teachers using them in the class, such as:
- They can be culturally biased
- They are driven by those looking to make a profit rather than educate
- Technology can be used just because it can be, rather than being the best way to present the material
- It can teach students that learning doesn’t require perserverance or critical thinking, rather being able to connect new information with what they currently know
- It causes students to have fun and provides motivation to persist for longer periods at the activity and the learning becomes incidental to them compared to the fun but they are still learning
- Teachers need to make more effort to monitor what the students are doing as there is more opportunity for discipline issues to arise such as swearing or harrassment.
- The software has to be stored on the computers and could be used by students rather than doing their currently assigned work.
Over all, research and studies have shown that edutainment software can help promote methods of learning to students and increase their learning skillset but teachers need to still use the appropriate delivery medium for the content they are teaching and not just rely on using technology for it’s own sake.
