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

[paul jones]

I taught a course in the J-school at UNC with no reading and no writing. Now
that I have your attention, here's how:

readings were replaced by viewings of talks by the same authors I would have
assigned to read. the talks were from TED, Berkman or other public
presentations.

students responded the evening before class with 2 minute videos, animations
or screen captures.

in class, it was f2f based on the responses and the questions raised in the
talks.

visiting speakers to the class came to us via Skype.

The course itself was about Vernacular Video and Virtual Communities and so
was multi-disciplinary and broad in approach.

syllabus (done in wordpress) http://ibiblio.org/pjones/jomc449/wordpress

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Janna Anderson <andersj at elon.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>
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 "And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better
civilization." Dennis Lee