When the need to bring paper and pencil to the classroom is tossed out the window, chances are you’ve created a class students will line up to wait- list. Not that we’re lazy or anything, but the chance to jump into a class with the least school supplies requirement is appealing.
Because we’ve grown accustomed to practical learning through hands-on experience, we lean toward classes where we get to put our hands on as frequently as they’re offered.
In 2003, the U.S. Department of Education released “A Retrospective on Twenty Years of Education Technology Policy,” which is basically a wordy list of the pros and cons on adding computer education to American school curriculums, and how we still have a long way to go.
In other words, whatever we now see as the “norm” (i.e. laptops, iPods, Internet) will be educationally restructured and changed in a couple of years. Out with the old and in with the new, every few minutes it seems.
Does anyone remember the old Apple Macintosh G4s? How we marveled at their nifty design and new gizmos and whatzdats?
Education has seen many technological advances that make classrooms more interactive in order to stray from the conventional old ways of teaching.
Take, for example Cal State Long Beach’s newly media-oriented “Anthropology 478: Take 1.” Professor Scott Wilson is taking a modern approach to studying anthropology. He’s doing what other professors are seeing as a new educational trend that may give students of the YouTube and Facebook generation a run for their money by testing their determination to incorporate new technologies into their studies.
In Wilson’s anthropology and film class, students are in charge of creating short films (which will be showcased at a film festival on campus Dec. 13) instead of churning out those dreaded research papers.
The films are actually ethnographies, with a range of topics that include “tourism for the mobility-challenged and their caregivers to the socio-cultural context of one girl’s Quinceañera, to dog owners negotiating the space of a neighborhood dog park,” according to CSULB’s website.
Short filmmaking is no easy task. It requires a lot of research and endless nights deciding which angle will work best. The students have different jobs within their groups, consisting of undergrads and grad students. The teams divide responsibilities as producers, directors, cinematographers, researchers or sound technicians, and each group maintains a blog throughout their project.
Ultimately, isn’t the goal of nearly any given subject to have students physically involved in something that will be more useful than spending hours and hours copying and pasting from Wikipedia (not the recommended research tool some teachers prefer)?
Students can visually see the results of their hard work and get to show it off at the end of the semester.
Of course, this may not be possible with every single major, but it’s a start in a positive academic direction.
These are just a few of the emerging strategies that are directly affecting the way education is being taught at elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and universities.
We’ve come a long way since 2003 and there have been immense technological advances that have changed the way we study, communicate and listen to music.
It seems that anything is reachable at the stroke of a keyboard or the click of a mouse.
Some of us cannot fathom how our ancestors lived without Google before 1998 (it’s called actual book research, people!).
But we can’t deny that the new ways professors are utilizing new media in the classrooms are definitely groundbreaking and will keep evolving to keep up with the times.
