Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

hink back to your time as a student. How did you experience feedback from your own instructors? Did reading their comments on your work bring moments of elation? Pride? Disappointment? Bewilderment? Do you still have a visceral reaction to a lot of red ink? 

Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger. That’s especially important as students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late.

Last fall, professors told us about their plans to experiment this year with technology-enabled teaching. Now they reflect on the successes and shortcomings.

In 2017, archaeologists discovered the ruins of the oldest public library in Cologne, Germany. The building may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, and dates back to the Roman era in the second century. When literacy was restricted to a tiny elite, this library was open to the public. Located in the centre of the city in the marketplace, it sat at the heart of public life.

When Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn published Disrupting Class in 2008, the current wave of education technology was still finding its footing. The book posited two predictions. First, online learning would grow rapidly in K-12 schools. But scale was not the endgame. Second, and arguably more crucial, was the opportunity ahead: with the right incentives in place, technology could scale with an eye toward optimizing for individual learners’ academic outcomes.

Using technology for learning makes sense. Technology creates access, transparency, and opportunity. Any smartphone or tablet is media incarnate–video, animation, eBooks, essays, blog posts, messages, music, games. The modalities of light, color, and sound all arranged just so to communicate a message or create an experience.

With the use of technology on the rise, online learning continues to develop into an accessible, practical education option. Students of all ages and education levels are learning through internet-based courses instead of face-to-face in a physical classroom. The many applications used in online learning programs — from learning management systems to videos — provide educational information to students at a distance. The chance for students with geographical barriers, jobs, personal commitments, and/or financial limitations to learn remotely is gaining footing in the realm of education.

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences. Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome. Writers who venture beyond the most pedestrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely ‘antitechnology’ or ‘blaming technology.’ All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it. If any readers want to see the the present work as ‘antitechnology,’ make the most of it. That is their topic, not mine.”

Technology for Teachers is a series of easy-to-use guides exploring a variety of tools, applications and resources to help you integrate digital elements into your practice.

We understand how daunting technology can be for teachers. Not only is there an infinite amount of information available online, but it’s also hard to keep up with constant new developments. Not to mention, of course, that our learners are very often more advanced than we are when it comes to digital skills!

To help you navigate this exciting world, we’ve created Technology for Teachers. From finding classroom resources online to using social media for professional development, this series guides you into becoming more digitally proficient.

Understanding the role of digital technologies in supporting effective teaching and learning.

People use technology, not the other way around, and yet when selecting learning technology tools and platforms, very few organisations put the user first.
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The challenge is that it’s not realistically possible to understand each individual user and their specific needs, so there has been a tendency to categorise people and label them – professionals, millennials, evangelists, retirees, teenagers, etc.

A guide to the SAMR model: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition for integrating education technology easily into your classroom