Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.20.10 | Active Facebook Users More Likely to Stick With College: That’s according to a study led by Abilene Christian University and published in the Journal of College Student Retention.

Wired reports the study “followed the Facebook profiles of 375 first-semester freshman students for nine months to examine how Facebook activity can be used as a predictor for a student’s likelihood to stay in school. The research found that students who returned to school after freshman year had significantly more Facebook friends and wall posts than those who didn’t return.”

Abilene Christian University is also mentioned in this Network World story on how college campus IT departments are addressing changing technology shifts.

In addition to bandwith upgrades and increased reliance on cloud-based services, John Cox writes that more campuses are “trialing” personal mobile devices, “either as complements or even replacements for the decade-long focus on student laptop computing.”

At Abilene, for example, incoming freshmen will receive a choice of the latest iPhone or iPod touch. Freshmen at George Fox University in Newberg, Ore., will receive their choice of either an iPad or a MacBook notebook. At Seton Hall University in Greensburg, Penn., freshmen get both an iPad and a 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Plus: Scott Lloyd DeWitt, an associate professor of English, reminds readers that digital media has long been embraced at his school: “We still catch people by surprise when we talk about the nearly twenty-five years we’ve been working with technology in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. If you consider how much has changed with digital media technology during that time, not to mention how our vision of literary/writing/cultural/textual studies has expanded, our story covers a lot of ground.”

Tweeting During and After Class Encouraged: U.S. News & World Report looks at several examples of how students and professors are using Twitter to communicate in and outside of class. Zach Miners talks with Howard Rheingold, who teaches in the school of information and the sociology department at the University of California-Berkeley and in the communication department at Stanford University, and who doesn’t hesitate to use Twitter to crowdsource teaching questions.

Here’s how Rheingold encourages his students to use Twitter:

He explains to his digital journalism students how to establish their own network and how to entice those sources to follow the students’ tweets. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for a kind of group contact that he describes as “student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours,” during which he shares information not on the syllabus, such as videos or reading notes.

Bringing a service like Twitter into an academic environment is a teaching approach that has garnered a fair share of criticism. Some educators say that restricting users to 140-character blurbs plays havoc with students’ writing skills and destroys their attention spans. William Kist, who teaches in the college of education at Kent State University in Ohio, uses Twitter solely as a “digital faculty lounge” where he can network with other professors. But Rheingold maintains that Twitter’s usefulness depends on the individual. “If you want to share information in small bites with a group of people who share your interest,” he says, “that’s what it’s for.”

Your Brain on Computers: Thinking about getting away before the semester starts? Wondering if you can unplug for a day—or more? New York Times reporter Matt Richtel accompanied five neuroscientists on a week-long rafting and camping trip in a remote area of southern Utah. Technological devices were (mostly) left behind.

“It was,” Richtel writes, “a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.”

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science. “Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

It’s Not the Technology: Writing at DML Central, David Theo Goldberg, director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, discusses what critics are missing when they claim that computers and the internet are detrimental to education.

Goldberg is not so concerned with debunking the studies they cite (for that argument, see Nichole Pinkard’s refutation of a famed Duke University study). Instead, he takes issue with the way technology skeptics see the research through their own tunnel vision—through the limited lens of “old-fashioned,” canonical middle-class expectations. If students are reading less Shakespeare, for example, that doesn’t mean they are reading less or engaging their minds less.

By a similar token, Goldberg argues, if students who receive computers and broadband access end up doing less homework and having somewhat lower reading and math skills, the fault might not be in the technology itself but in the learning environment’s inability to access “the productive and creative capacities” inherent in the new tools.

Plus: As a follow-up to our previous look at the growth and impact of e-books, we present two posts from ReadWriteWeb: “5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books,” and the inevitable response, “5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks.”

Whichever side you come down on, the top image on the response piece sure makes paper books look uncomfortable.