According to George Siemens, a shift toward the triple helix model of education of universities, government, and business “form a strand of interaction to provide and to equip students for this online environment.” We must bridge the gap of comfort so that students will take to online education; their positive experiences with taking online courses and using online communication technologies will fuel the continuing growth of online education.
Over the last several years, I have grown increasingly familiar with online communications technologies through conducting WebEx seminars for student services and instructor training, course developer training, and just regular conference calls in which I interact with my colleagues from all across the country. Communications tools, such as Skype, oovoo, Windows Live, iVisit, and many others are becoming popular tools in the business world. eCollege, for example, has even added Elluminate features to its course management system to enable students to interact with each other, using video, desktop sharing features, and other software sharing capabilities. Blackboard is integrating wikis, blogs, and many other features into its course management system as well. Video conferencing is no longer the purview of business environments. Blogs, wikis, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, RSS feeds and many other communication technologies are increasingly relevant to modern community building.
A few years ago, I met Jeff Borden, Senior Director of Teaching & Learning for eCollege. He has an interesting blog post called “No Internet Allowed” at the following blogsite: http://blog.ecollege.com/WordPress/. There are quite a few other interesting blogs that examine other trends in educational technology at this site as well. In reflecting on Borden’s experiences at a university computer lab, I couldn’t help but recognize similar experiences. It seems strange in some ways that educators seem often to lag behind popular culture and business practices. No wonder students are bored in school; everything is so low tech.
Here is another interesting site that I came across related to this blog topic:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/teaching-skills-what-21st-century-educators-need-to-learn-to-survive/
The educator for the 21st century world must adapt to a very new virtual world that will continue to change the way that we work, play, learn and communicate.
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Great post.
ReplyDeleteYou said it seems strange that educators laf behind popular culture and business practices. While I agree that students may be bored with lack of or inadequate technology in schools, I do not think it is strange that educators lag behind. Educators lag behind for many reasons outside of their control such as lack of resources, poor training on technology, inadequate technolgy hardware in schools, poor infrastructure, lack of funding and more. It is true that some educators would be laggards and resistant to adopt new technology practices but many more are chomping at the bit to begin. Unfortunately, the tools are not available in schools as they are in the world of business.
Thanks for mentioning ivist and oovoo. I had not heard of these but will check them out.
Sandy
Yes, it is not unusual that educators lag behind popular culture when it comes to technology. The thing that I find fascinating though is that educators by their natures are both progressive in one sense and slaves to tradition in another. We are in many cases, trying to lead young minds to think critically and enable them to solve the problems of today by helping them understand the impacts on the future. We also want students to value the knowledge of the past. In fact, educators often compare the ways that they learned to what their students are doing, viewing with a great deal of skepticism these new fangled methods.
ReplyDeleteKimberly
Do you think that educators lag behind in technology simply because of the time element to explore new ideas? Due to such a packed curriculum from day one to the end of school, educators find themselves with little time to experiment with new and wonderful ideas. In addition, accountability comes into play with tests and evaluations given to students at the end of the year.
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