Following are more insights gleaned from the November 16 Chronicle of Higher Education chat with Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The topic was focused on teaching with high-tech and participants writing into the chat had many questions about adopting and using technologies for teaching and learning.
One question focused on the the choice between being an early-faculty-adopter of new technologies in the classroom or waiting until the 'new' technology has become widely accepted and used among students.
Some of the points Jenkins made to this:
*Early adopters need to structure in more classtime to introduce students to the technology, its functions and uses.
*Look at new technologies that are being used in the professional field as students should be exposed to them and their use.
*"Weigh the value of the technology vs. the expenditure of time ramping up for its use"
Another question focused on how to ensure that students are at an appropriate level of technology fluency. Jenkins commented that there isa "digital divide" in terms of access to technologies and a "participation gap" in terms of access to experiences, skills, and knowledge that surrounds those technologies."
He also warned that simply offering workshops on the use of technology is not enough for today's definition of literacy: "To be literate, they need to develop the whole sets of social skills and cultural competencies which surround the technology."
To the question "Is there any research that proves students learn better, not are more entertained, via all this technology?", Jenkins pointed readers to a white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century he recently published through the MacArthur Foundation which " identify a range of core social skills and cultural competencies that kids are acquiring through their engagement with new media. These skills reflect the best research in the learning sciences and in media studies."
More information about the MacArthur Foundation's Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning can be found at http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/
