Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: PLAYBACK: Technology in Education: What’s Fun, What’s Essential and What Students Aren’t Learning

---

Clickers go mainstream; universities monitor what student athletes posts online; an examination of the role of technology vs. the purpose of education; and why more schools are teaching non-computer science majors “computational thinking”—all in this week’s PLAYBACK.

Clicking is Fun!: Already a familiar site on college campuses, clickers are moving into other realms where crowd responses are encouraged.

The New York Times reports on the shift of clickers from a classroom-based tool to a fun, interactive accessory now used to gauge opinion in churches, on cruise ships and in team-building exercises.

“Fans of the devices say they are efficient, eco-friendly and techno-tickling, allowing audiences to mimic TV game-show contestants,” writes Jan Hoffman.

“It’s like a Christmas toy,” said Bret Bullock, vice president of entertainment at Crystal Cruises. “Finding out how everyone is thinking is so much fun — you’re part of the show.”

The delighted shouts from middle-schoolers and seniors alike suggest that neither group is accustomed to having its opinions solicited. But with a clicker, “suddenly their voices are important,” said Professor James Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers. “If people feel their opinions really count, they’ll be happy and likely to give more opinions.”

Even if those opinions are superficial. After all, clickers give people too shy to raise their hand a way to make their opinions heard, but the devices don’t allow for nuanced responses. A technology that can instantly crowdsource and record shades of gray? Now that’s something to speak up about.

When Student Athletes Speak Online, Universities Listen: Last week’s PLAYBACK looked at password protection and privacy issues, fueled in part by the news that some employers are requesting Facebook passwords of prospective employees as part of the new-hire background check. (For more on the topic, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” covered employment background checks going too far in its March 28 episode.) Major universities are already ahead of the game.

Some schools are paying companies to track what athletes are posting to their Twitter feeds and on social media networks, scrutinizing posts for clues as to whether an athlete has accepted a gift in violation of NCAA rules. Privacy scholars are raising concerns. Pete Thamel writes in The New York Times:

Bradley S. Shear, a lawyer based in Maryland who works in sports law and social media, supports the bill Young introduced in Maryland. He said that a key difference in monitoring a student’s online activities, as opposed to an issue like drug testing, was that the content being searched for was inappropriate as opposed to illegal.

“The Supreme Court has ruled over and over again that students do not leave their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate,” Shear said. He said that any policy that required students to give access to “password-protected electronic content” was “a clear violation of their student’s First and Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights.”

He added of companies that monitor athletes’ online activities: “These companies are selling snake oil that contains a major legal liability time bomb. To me, there’s no difference in having to Facebook-friend a coach than turning over user name and password.”

Emphasis mine. Some might argue that Facebook users can always limit what their friends see. But those filters frequently change. In an age of “what’s private today becomes pubic tomorrow,” is this a true statement?

Role of Tech vs. Purpose of Education: Writing at DMLcentral, Lyndsay Grant has a thoughtful post about how and why technologies come to be used (or not used) in classrooms, and the barriers that block or limit digital media in learning.

Grant, a researcher at the University of Bristol, is working on a project to understand the ways teachers construct narratives about technology in the classroom. This post gives readers a glimpse of that work, as Grant writes:

Rather than asking ‘why don’t teachers use digital media in their classrooms’ we need to start with a more careful analysis of ‘how do teachers come to use (or not use) digital media in the ways they do?’ Addressing this question would mean acknowledging that technology use is not simply a matter of overcoming reluctance or practical barriers, but a complex weaving of individual teachers’ professional identities, their views about technology, and their values about education and how it relates to wider social, economic and political concerns.

These values and ideas contribute to a narrative about what digital media might have to offer a particular teacher in a particular classroom at a particular time. But it is also important to acknowledge that teachers have to work hard to juggle these individual narratives alongside broader, and sometimes contradictory, institutional and social narratives about education and technology. A focus on removing barriers that does not also take seriously these narratives, is likely to, at best, result in the kind of use that is far from the transformational ideals outlined above.

Computer Science for Everyone: It used to be that liberal arts majors weren’t required to familiarize themselves with hard-science subjects, such as computer programming. But that’s changing now thanks to higher computer literacy expectations in non-computer fields and new communication technologies that are more technically sophisticated.

Randall Stross reports on the growing belief that college graduates should at least be aware of “computational thinking”—the basic concepts at the core of all programming languages.

“There is little agreement within the field, however, about what exactly are the core elements of computational thinking. Nor is there agreement about how much programming students must do, if any, in order to understand it,” writes Stross. “Most important, the need for teaching computational thinking to all students remains vague.”

Take Grinnell College, for example, which offers a course called “The Digital Age,” covering “great ideas in the field of computer science, focusing on underlying algorithmic principles and social implications.”

“‘Literacy’ implies reading and writing, so ‘computer literacy’ suggests that writing programs is a required skill for activity under this name,” Henry M. Walker, a computer science professor at Grinnell, tells the Times. “However, general citizens may or may not have to write programs to function effectively in this technological age.”

Plus: In a post at TechIntersect, Bill Genereux discusses the importance of teaching media creation skills to so-called digital natives. While it’s often assumed that all young people are experts in communicating with technology, not only do many students lack digital media skills, but they are also unlikely to receive instruction at the college level unless their major requires it.

“The ones that we take note of are indeed adept in their media savviness, but they are outliers, not truly representative of the entire population of the millenial or net-generation,” writes Genereux. “Some young people are doing amazing things with technology, but most are picking the low-hanging fruit of social media tools like Facebook.”