[Air-L] How best to teach hyperconnected students?

[Janna Anderson]

I will be speaking at a teaching and learning conference later in the month,
and I would like to hear your take on teaching effectively in the near
future when university students will be even more hyperconnected than they
are today. The lack of long-lasting battery power in laptops has been
stopping many from being online all the time in most classes, but that's
changing with the new wave of Internet appliances like iPad, netbooks, etc.

Our students will enter classrooms armed with their complete gaming systems,
collections of graphic novels and music, television and film entertainment,
social networks...and - oh, yeah - also access to most of the cumulative
knowledge of humankind at their fingertips. They'll be multitasking -
working on this stuff or on assignments due for other courses the same day -
while we're trying to command attention for the ideas we're trying to get
across. People say you get their attention by having them implement their
devices for class, rather than their other tasks, but I have found that they
prefer to continue to multitask during class and they even actually prefer
that I lecture instead of making them actively involved because that way
they CAN multitask instead of having to give their full attention to one
thing. Some are even hypercritical on course evaluations because they lost
out on multitasking time because I mostly implemented an "engaged learning"
setting where they were required to be present in one plane instead of
multiples.

Are the approaches and goals of teaching that have been emphasized in higher
education in the 20th century still relevant in the 21st? How do we optimize
on the opportunities we are experiencing today? How do we address the
challenges we will find in students in our near future?

Thanks for any comments you would like to share. All will be credited during
my talk at the Elon University Teaching and Learning Conference.

Janna

-- 
Janna Quitney Anderson
Director of Imagining the Internet
www.imaginingtheinternet.org
Associate Professor
School of Communications
Elon University