Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.10.11 | Ron Tanner, a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland, has an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week about why colleges need to do a better job of teaching students to understand and produce texts online—“an essential skill” for their future.

Tanner says that the movement in the digital humanities toward open access and integrating digital tools into academic publishing remains on the margins. He’s critical of colleagues who complain that students can’t craft a coherent email but still fail to integrate online communication skills into their classroom pedagogy.

While some Spotlight readers might take issue with Tanner’s opinion on video games, they might agree that faculty members from the baby boom generation who didn’t need to communicate online for their own professional success are slow to adapt. (All you tech-savvy boomer academics can tell me in the comments if you think he’s being ageist). Tanner says some of his colleagues still see computers as “fancy typewriters” and assume that because students own them and bring them to class, they are already digitally literate:

Apparently many professors believe that students’ ownership of laptops and notebook computers guarantees that they will learn all they need to know about computers. But who is teaching students how to write, say, a marketing report or a historical overview for an online readership? I am surprised at the number of my colleagues who prohibit the use of computers in their classrooms because they fear that students will surf the Web during a lecture. An absence of computers in the classroom sends the message that computers are ancillary to learning.

It’s disturbing to hear that not much has changed since I was in journalism school way back in the mid-90s, when my writing professors made their edits in red pen and only a few rogues brought laptops into the classroom.

Tanner argues for “discipline-specific computer teaching,” in which online communication is integrated into all areas of the curriculum,  from how to use databases to how to store, share and communicate information,  along with the related ethical considerations. He also argues for learning how to write for and edit online journals in specific fields and how to augment text with video, digital images and hyperlinks.

Undergraduate writing majors at my university end up in a variety of fields, but they share at least one thing: Much of their work finds and defines itself on the Internet. That’s where readers go and where markets reside. If using the computer to write, read, and produce texts is not yet central to their identity as professionals, it will be soon. It should also be central to their education.

Tanner’s piece is part of a special issue on online learning. You can browse some of the stories here.

Plus, Social Media’s Slow Slog: In another story about the slow pace of the academe in adapting to new technologies, The Atlantic looked at how professors are and are not using social media for teaching and learning. 

“If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they’d be dead,” Howard Rheingold, who teaches at Stanford and Berkeley, told Josh Sternberg earlier this year. “If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do.”

Though many professors still see tools like Facebook as primarily a distraction from academic pursuits, Sternberg does interview some professors who are using social media in the classroom –in business classes, for example, so students can hone their online social marketing skills.

But those on the cutting edge, like Rheingold, see the potential for the technology to change pedagogical models and revolutionize learning.

“The students teach each other much more than they used to,” he said. “They need some guidance on how to do that, and they need a little bit of an awakening because they’ve been in a kind of test-trance for so many years.”

You can check out Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom, a site that provides teachers and learners integrated social media tools they can adapt for their own use.