Feeling at Home @ NMC

I love fate…my posting about that faculty member banning laptops is so timely as I attend this conference. In all the sessions I’ve attended, I’ve found myself surrounded by people with their laptops flipped open working away on…whatever. Personally, I’ve been emailing, grading the online courses I’m currently teaching, googling information being presented, adding authors and their texts to my amazon wish list based on who people are talking about in their presentations, blogging, etc. I’m sitting in a session about educational gaming as I type this blog.

Are some of the things that I’m working on not related to the session content? Obviously! Am I enriching my sessions by being able to search, read, and reflect on the material as presented? Absolutely!

During a presentation today about how new multi-modal methods of communication have our students communicating, participating in discourse, in a variety of ways. One speaker discussed how we are not doing our job if we adapt to their “social” methods of discourse and not prepare them for their future “professional” modes of discourse. However, I feel like this laptop enriched environment is a perfect example of how our social impacts our professional…this group has brought the change in, why won’t are students do that in the future? Of course we have to balance…but…really…we also have to keep them engaged.

But back to my current rant, this instructor who has banned laptops from the classroom. Losing eye contact…whatever…engage them more! However, I’m sitting here thinking about how can I be sure that they “look up” when they need to. At this conference, I know what is important to me; therefore, I look up when I feel I need to pay closer attention. But since our students (esp. in community college, introductory level courses) do not necessarily know how to distinguish between what is the important information to pay closer attention to (ie, stop IMing their friend sitting in another class).

Now we could learn from TV. TV is designed for a distracted viewer. I have a very easy time knowing when to look up and pay attention because the sound track is generally designed with “hey, look now” moves (music, dialogue, silence, etc.). Therefore, it would be easy as an instructor to have code words, like “folks, this is really important and you need to pay attention to me now,” worked into our teaching tricks (or even tagged in our lectures).

However, this TV watching example also provides something else for me to think about. My analysis of film and television tends to be very visual. Clearly, by working on the computer I’m not always looking at the screen to see what I want to see. Now, again, it helps that I know what I’m looking for and I have ideas of when and how (based on narrative, sound cues, etc.) it will show up. But our students don’t have this again.

Basically, this makes me think it is just extremely critical to explicitly provide the learning objectives and outcomes to students at the beginning of each class. If they have those up front, they can take responsibility in knowing when to pay attention.

All this again to say…embrace the chaos baby. Don’t you think your students were doodling, writing letters, doing homework for other classes, day dreaming, etc. before they had laptops in the classroom? Instead, think about pedagogical strategies that help them know when to pay attention. Build in support mechanisms, which might also dual purpose as alternative learning styles, that provide the materials in multiple modes, manner, and methods. I would never repeat everything I said because a student wasn’t paying attention; however, if their questions are engaged enough that they are branching out from the information presented…I know they were at least engaging the material on some level and we can continue the discussion from there.

nmc2006

June 08 2006 | Posted in nmc