New media in education

One of the problems we have with the use of new media in education is the problem of teachers. It is often said that the students know more about the new media than the teachers. What is the situation in the United States, and what do you think can be done to encourage teachers to use the new media in education?

David Kolb - It is a difficult problem in the States too. I think it is true that many of the younger students do know much more than the teachers, particularly students about 12 to 13 years old, not yet in university, who seem to have grown up with computers in a way that even people three or four years earlier did not. My experience is - and I think this is pretty general - that many teachers use word processing and perhaps e-mail and perhaps they surf the Web for various purposes and they are comfortable with these things, but it is not clear to them how they would use them in the classroom because they are mostly receptive activities or versions of things that were done before in other ways. What we’ve found is that the best way to encourage the teachers to experiment is to provide examples and to show what other people perhaps in the same school or nearby or in another university are doing, so that teachers can imagine. They won’t necessarily duplicate the examples, but they’ll begin to think: Oh! Maybe I could find a way to do something like that. The difficulty of course on the university level is that teachers have different subjects and there aren’t always examples to be found in some subjects. They are more in the sciences, for instance, and fewer in literature, and very few in philosophy. So teachers can shrug and say" Well, it works over there but it won’t work here. We need to work on that by providing examples and better communication of examples from other locations. As for motivation, I think you have to deal with the question of what the teacher gets out of it. There is someone who has done a great deal of work on hypertext in the classroom and he said: Using new media in the classroom does not make the teacher’s task easier but it makes it much more fun, more spirited, and much more satisfying. I think that is the kind of motivation we have to work with. Not that you’re going to ease the burden of the teacher but rather that you’re going to inspire and encourage and give the teachers more fun and spirit in what they are doing.

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Philosophy with e-mails

As a university professor, how do you use the new media and hypertext with your students?

David Kolb - I’ve used several kinds of media in my classroom. I am teaching a philosophy course after all so I am trying to encourage discussion and interaction and I do not have huge amounts of information to present. I do not have to talk about the whole civilisation of Greece; I want them to concentrate on certain texts of Plato. I will send them to the WWW to get information. I have used e-mail, many of the teachers in my college do, we set up e-mail discussion groups and demand that the students send e-mail to everyone else in the class once or twice a week, commenting on each other’s work. You can also use newsgroups, Usenet newsgroups, which provide ways for students to comment on other students in a rather structured, hierarchical manner. I have experimented further with actual hypertext.

I’ve done it in two ways. One is to use the program Storyspace because it allows you to make comments in many directions and to have a map of what is going on, what is linked to what. It works very well, if the students can use the program. But the program is not terribly easy to learn, especially for students who are not familiar with hypertext structures. I’ve used that in Greek philosophy mostly to have students comment on some texts and on other students’ comments on the texts. I think I’ve thought of a way to do that on the Web using forms but I am still working on that. I’ve also simply offered students the chance to write hypertexts instead of writing normal terms papers in the classes.

And finally I’ve taught courses specifically about hypertext where that is what the students do, write hypertexts of various kinds. My experience at the moment is that if the student is offered a chance to write a hypertext term paper in a course which is about something else, Greek philosophy or philosophy of art, mostly they will not take the opportunity. They already know how to write term papers; they are very busy; they do not want to take on the extra burden of learning how to do the hypertext. They will do e-mail because they are quite used to that and they’ll do things with the Web, but Web authorship is a little more difficult.

But in the class which is specifically about hypertext the students get very excited and they are quite willing to devote themselves to it, usually in a fairly literary fashion. There we get a lot of participation and considerable invention, and since we’re all learning together and there are no fixed rules, I am not quite the teacher in the same way, and that is very refreshing.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor