You can teach young dogs new tricks... But can you teach young students new media?
Web 2.0... the social web, collaborate, share, create, mashup... Hey its YOUR web so go crazy. Its hard to have a day or two without hearing something related to the social web and how the Internet is changing everything in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Heck, its maturing faster than your dog. And speaking of dog aging, supposedly one cannot teach an older dog new tricks. But how about the new dogs? They can supposedly learn anything. This is a good time to make a large conceptual leap over to learning New Media in our schools. In classrooms and lecture halls, university labs and IT groups, the social web is well being its social self... everyone is talking about it and it’s the life of the preverbial party. While the informal dialogs are everywhere, its probably time to start thinking about some formal dialogs about the need for teaching new media in our institutes of higher education.
Teaching and researching new media in our schools and institutions is truly uncharted territory. As a recent article at ReadWriteWeb makes points out, it is becoming increasingly important that we start considering how and why new media should be taught in schools. The article makes a number of references to additional sites and information including mentioning some key players in new media research and thinking. I would encourage you to visit the links in the article. The one standout quote from the piece is this:
The new media world of blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis, podcasting and more is all so new that there are hardly any established standards or best practices well established yet. That said, there are definitely skill sets that make a world of difference in a practitioner's efficacy.
This is a rich area that researchers in assessment and best practices can explore as more and more professors and instructors either teach new media production, use it in their work or research is effects on society. One thing is for certain, whether you believe new media should be or should not be formally taught, these technologies are not going away. They will continue to have a larger and larger impact on how we interact, explore the world and, increasingly, learn.
The challenge is summed up in this quote, again from the ReadWriteWeb article:
Academia tends to be woefully behind in almost everything it teaches. Experience in the private sector tends to be a faster and more effective method of learning almost anything. Hard sciences may be the exception.
The internet is changing faster than almost anything in this world, so expecting academics to be capable of offering timely teaching in this field may lead to serious disappointment. That may be shortchanging a lot of hard working teachers fired up about the web...
Rather than see this as a downer, I would say it should be a call to action and a challenge. No longer can educators afford to slowly adapt to this new technology. Its time to embrace it, incorporate it and figure out ways it can be used in teaching, learning and beyond. The old dogs of education may in fact have to learn a few new tricks, but is that so bad...suddenly everything old is new again. Onward...
Keene
PS - The comments below the ReadWriteWeb article are worth reading. It’s a lively discussion.
