Recently, an instructor asked if I had a list of media assets for the digital version of New Perspectives on Computer Concepts. This instructor wanted a list of videos, software tours, labs, and computer-scored activities in each chapter.
I was curious about this request and on follow-up discovered that the instructor wanted to assign these media elements and expected that students would want to jump directly to them, rather than plough through the text; reading the narrative until they reached the assigned element. This idea got me thinking about context.
Instructors lament their students’ lack of fundamental knowledge about computers and other digital technologies. You too?
Now bear with me for a moment, because on the face of it, the characterization that students are clueless doesn’t jibe with the prevailing notion that today’s kids are technology wizards. “See them texting and tweeting and doing all manner of stuff on Facebook!” say the generation that grew up with TV as the cutting edge technology, “These kids know all about technology because they’ve had those gadgets in their chubby little baby hands since birth.” Or so the rhetoric goes.
Is there any way to reconcile these two notions that seem diametrically opposed? How can students on the one hand be clueless about technology, yet be wizards with their digital gadgets?
My thought is that students have a fairly large collection of unorganized blobs of technology knowledge that they acquire randomly. What students are missing, and what their instructors perceive to be cluelessness, is a framework that gives meaning to the bits and pieces of knowledge they have acquired. That framework is what a concepts course is all about; that’s what a concepts textbook can offer; and that should be the objective of course activities.
When the digital edition of New Perspectives was on the drawing board back in 1995, I insisted that we make the media elements available within the context of the narrative. It was a key part of the pedagogy that students would be able to read about a topic in the text and be able to immediately launch a related video, software tour, or assessment activity.
I did not want a disconnect between reading, seeing, and doing. I didn’t want students to break up the flow of ideas by transferring from a book where they read about a topic, to a Web site for accessing media elements and assessment.
To me, learning is about the flow of ideas and how they pin to an underlying conceptual structure. Students who acquire knowledge piecemeal are rarely able to pull it together into a coherent cognitive map. They need help from their text and their instructors, and perhaps from their peers.
As instructors, we sometimes get caught up in measurable objectives, but these objectives can unfortunately reinforce piecemeal learning at the expense of underlying concepts and structures. I’m not suggesting that objectives are useless, but rather that we need to think beyond them to include higher order learning. One way is to make sure that activities, such as watching videos and touring software, takes place within an overall structure, whether that structure is provided by a textbook or by the instructor.
Also, just as we instructors get caught up by detailed learning objectives, so too do students. They sometimes have a difficult time seeing the forest for the trees. They get so wrapped up in keystrokes, that they never see the concepts.
Experienced instructors suggest going at concepts with a heavy hand. What might seem obvious to you, is often not at all clear to students. You can use a variation of the “3 to go” rule: 1) tell them the concept, 2) give them examples in the form of demonstrations, keystrokes, and activities, 3) reiterate the concept. That’s how you can put learning into context.
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