According to Mary Ann Young, a senior lecturer at the School or Arts and Humanities in UTD, there are several technologies that can used by college students and professors to facilitate learning, but the choice of which depends upon the cost, usability and the length of training required to adopt them.
Below is an interview with Mary Ann Young regarding the use of latest technologies by students and professors in college classrooms.
Your thoughts on the use of latest technologies in college classrooms?
I recall the “Twitter Experiment” by Monica Rankin, a professor of history here in UTD. There is a fantastic YouTube video about it.
She implemented the use of twitter in a large classroom where students could use twitter to comment on class room discussion, which would come up on a big screen and she could direct the discussion based upon students’ comments both verbally and via Twitter.
Other than that internet based communication like use of Google groups and Facebook groups is very popular among students mostly because of conflicting schedules. This allows them to communicate easily outside the class.
In terms of teaching courses using these technologies, I have used Facebook in few of my classes. It is very useful and convenient in terms of how it facilitates communication outside of the classroom. But I found that large number of students are not familiar with Facebook. So, I had to teach students how to use Facebook as part of the class.
Similarly I have seen the use of audio and video supplement outside of the classroom and there are various types of trainings available for that. This includes making video and audio lectures available online so students can view them conveniently and use them as reference outside the classroom. However, there are lot of controversies regarding use of video lectures.
I am doing a research on visual ethnography and the use of hypermedia. Hypermedia meaning the juxtaposition of visual image including still images, moving images, audio and standard text – all incorporated into a large presentation that would allow audience to interact with that presentation in different ways than the standard listen-to-me kind of lectures or read this text or even communicate back and fort. This type of technology is fairly new and involves large amount of training and technological capability to implement.
It is usually seen that students who are in IT related majors or have use of computers in class tend to adopt to new technologies but others stick to traditional medium of classroom learning. How can students from all majors make use of the latest technologies?
It is true that there are lot of students who do not take advantage of new technologies.
Primarily we see, at least in Arts and Humanities, there are two groups of students. One group of students, who do not know much about new technologies like use of Twitter, Google groups and so on, like to stick to traditional forms of communication and there is another group of students who use these technologies on day to day basis.
It is always beneficial to make best use of the latest technologies available. One example of this – in my Music class I try to show how students can make use of computer software to help them learn the music. These software allow them to see how loud a particular pitch is or how to distinguish between rhythms. Basically they allow students to see music visually. But very less students take advantage of it.
Most students like to go for much familiar means of communication like tradition hard-text copies of handout and syllabus and so on instead of learning new technology.
However, I have had some students contact me via Facebook to ask certain question or find out where I am so that they can come see me.
When should students be introduced to new technologies so they can take advantage of them?
Each year many freshmen come who are from different technological backgrounds. The trend in use of technologies in classroom this year can be very different from what it was three years ago.
I am not sure as to how to universalize the use of technologies. For example the use of Google calendar can be very interesting to a certain group of students but next year who knows.
There is also lot difference in technologies available. For instance, Wikipedia seems so 2005 and Youtube seems so 2009 in terms of new contents being added to it all the time.
There was a Youtube video that even professor Johnson circulated around was on “How to lengthen your paper” – that talked about how one can go to Word find a period and change the text size to around 16 point which would drastically lengthen the paper. This is not noticeable to somebody unless they completely reformat the paper.
Large number of lecturers are using YouTube for instructional purpose. In my music class I always try to show students how to find videos on YouTube that are relevant to the course and how to use it for educational purpose versus just purely entertainment.
To conclude, would you say that college students should look for a change in the way they use the latest technology or stick to traditional means of communication?
I have suspicion that students will tend to stick to whatever is familiar to them – whether it is traditional technology or whether it is something that is new. I am not sure how likely are students to learn new things unless it is something easier. So it depends on how easy it is and how much training is required.
Mary Ann Young is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas.
She can be reached at maryann@utdallas.edu.
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