On Friday I listened to a local teacher on the radio talking about using technology to teach innovatively, spur the kids’ imagination, and just generally make learning more interesting. While that show was running on CJOB I tried to follow a chatroom the radio station had set up so that listeners could talk about the show. There were several simultaneous conversation threads going on here. While doing that, I tried to record grades.
It didn’t work so well.
This surprised me a bit because I’ve seen my students, and my niece and nephews do similar things routinely as they chat on one instant message program, listen to music, e-mail a friend, and work on their homework all the while watching T.V. They seem to absorb everything when you ask them about it. I, by contrast, just ended up with a headache. Depressingly, even my younger brother can watch 3 T.V. channels at once while I, five years older, can handle only one at a time.
And that led me to think. One reason we teachers have trouble with technology is that we think differently than our students. They’ve grown up used to segmented messages on T.V. and instant access to information on the Internet. They’ve grown used to sorting through the overload of possible information that didn’t exist when we were kids.
That puts teachers in a weird position. At an intuitive level we don’t understand what the kids do (at least I often don’t). We have to trust the kids to lead us in doing an activity we created for them. We have to do this because this new technology can organize and present information to the students in a better, more organized way that catches their imagination.
I’m not sure that teachers have ever had quite this problem before in the history of humanity but it is an exciting one. We have to teach the kids to learn how to use tools that are advanced enough we don’t quite grasp them ourselves. That’s a cool problem to have.
Isn’t it amazing how much better our kids seem at multi-tasking? I’ve often thought about the role that the ‘quick-hits’ on TV (whether found in programs, commercials, music videos, etc…) play in contributing to this phenomenon.
I, too, took part in the Chatterous chat during @dkuropatwa’s appearance on CJOB and was overwhelmed at times by the sheer quantity of messages that were posted. Especially because of all the different discussion threads. Attending to my Twitter feed during the extended commercial breaks didn’t help matters
IMHO, I think that one of our biggest challenges, as educators, is to strive to ensure that our conversations are just as relevent and interesting as all of the backchannel discussions that could be taking place at the same time.