Jane’s Blog

A new quote to use on the students and children from Claudia Wallis.

“It’s not so much that the video game is going to rot your brain, it’s what you are not doing that’s going to rot your life”. While the children are sitting at the computer screen or texting and so on, they are not outside, they are not having face-to-face interactions, or family time…

Parents and teachers can learn from Gen M about uses of new technology but they must learn from us “that there is life beyond the screen”. This is obviously written by a digital immigrant perspective but some of it is commonsense. We can’t step back and smell the virtual roses.

Made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Available at: farm3.static.flickr.com/2282/2510128890_d19012d20f.jpg?v=0

The impacts of multi-tasking

This article echoes many of our concerns about the Gen M(ulti-tasking). Can they really do so many things at once? Not according to this article. They will not be successful in the long term as they have only learnt to surface learn. Net Gen/Gen M are very good at finding information but the more “windows open on the hard drive” the more mistakes are made and the longer the task takes. Performing 2 tasks at once can often take more than twice as long as doing them both sequentially.

These are the concerns, but I think the important concept here is that our learners have changed and we have to adapt and engage them with technology and innovative pedagogies. They prefer graphical images to text and collaborative learner-centred work to direct instruction.

We have to teach them when and where to use technology, how to pursue learning deeply, to have mental downtime and get out and experience life as well.

This entry was posted on August 15, 2008 at 7:13 am and is filed under Subject Reading. Tagged: multi-tasking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.