An interesting essay in the Journal of Management Education highlights “mounting evidence in the cognitive neuroscience literature that digital technology is restructuring the way our students read and think” (p. 374). It proceeds to explore the implications of this premise for higher education generally and
Laptops and tablet devices of various sorts are everywhere in college classrooms at this point. Students use them to take notes. Keying is quicker than writing notes longhand, and typed notes are subsequently easier to read. Faculty have two legitimate worries; students are using their
Interview by John OrlandoCurt Bonk is one of the foremost authorities on open resources in higher education. A professor of education at Indiana University, he is known for his many hundreds of talks, books, articles, and videos on open education. For a good
With globalization impacting almost every field, internationalization of the curriculum has become a goal shared by many colleges and universities. Many institutions look to study abroad programs to increase students’ awareness of and sensitivity to international issues and their understanding of different cultures and points
Elvis (the other one . . . Costello) was right: “Radio, it’s a sound salvation. Radio, it’s cleaning up the nation.” Radio didn’t die; it was just sleeping. Podcasting and ubiquitous audio tools have brought radio back to life and into the classroom in a
Technology makes it easy to record and distribute lecture material presented in class. What concerns many faculty is whether having the recorded lectures available gives students the excuse they need to skip class. Moreover, recorded lectures don’t give students the opportunity to ask questions. True,
Videos are the ideal way to deliver content in an online course because the web is a fundamentally audiovisual medium. But while many faculty assume that videos require high-level technical skills to produce, they are actually not beyond the means of the ordinary instructor. They
If the term “social media” conjures up images of Facebook, then you’re two or three years behind the millennial curve. Facebook has been called “your mother’s social media site”; kids post to Facebook to throw their parents off the scent. Today’s students have moved to
Online discussion has become another strategy faculty use to engage students with each other and with course content. This method offers a safer way for students to participate, as they are able to prepare responses ahead of time and deliver them in writing. But online
Student portfolios have become popular in higher education due to their variety of uses. They can document a student process, such as how an engineering class built a robot (Gallagher and Poklop, 2014). They can document a student’s work across a program, such as an
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An interesting essay in the Journal of Management Education highlights “mounting evidence in the cognitive neuroscience literature that digital technology is restructuring the way our students read and think” (p. 374). It proceeds to explore the implications of this premise for higher education generally and for teachers more specifically.
It's a fascinating article—great for faculty reading groups—that reaffirms higher education's special role in developing students' deep thinking and analytical skills, mostly through reading. “No matter what label you affix, that is, reflexivity, critical thinking, learning, creativity, expert knowing, mastering depth remains the university's sweet spot. Depth is the generative midwife of knowledge and human ingenuity. But like reading, it is not stamped into our genes. It is by no means a sure thing. And powerful cultural imperatives make it clear that the university's brand of depth is not shared by everyone” (p. 389).
But it may be that what the article does best is to raise questions. Here are some examples:
Two key points are made at the end of the article. First, this does not need to become a zero-sum game of book literacy versus digital literacy; students can learn to be literate in both. However, we should not kid ourselves as to the challenges involved. “Perhaps you can lead a millennial to the library, but you cannot force her or him to read—deeply, anyway” (p. 390).
Second, our understanding of technology needs to be nuanced. It is not a neutral phenomenon. The devices we use have been designed by us, but now their design plays an important role in shaping us. As we think about digital classrooms, we must ask if and how they serve our students' interests and learning needs.
“As we have seen, a new generation of scanning techniques afford us a more sophisticated picture of how people learn, but questions far outnumber answers at this stage” (p. 388).
Reference: Cavanaugh, J.M., Giapponi, C.C., and Golden, T.D. (2016). Digital technology and student cognitive development: The neuroscience of the university classroom. Journal of Management Education, 40 (4), 374–397.
