Back to the Future:
Preparing Students to
use Technology in Higher Education
Southwest Texas State
University
(Reproduced
with the permission of the publisher; Caverly, D.C. (2001). Back to the future:
Preparing students to use technology in higher education. Learning Assistance
Review, 6(1),
51-59.)
A graduate student e-mailed me the other day asking an
interesting question. He had read an article I wrote six years ago proposing a
scenario of what college would be like for students in the twenty-first century
(Caverly, 1995). Now that we are in that new century, he wondered which
predictions were coming true and whether we are preparing students for this new
environment. Here, I'd like to respond. Let me document whether technology in
post-secondary education actually has met these predictions, consider how it
will change in the future, and determine our role as developmental educators to
prepare students for these task demands.
I
proposed a day in the life of Cori, a college freshman in the year 2000 who
responds much like Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz. Here is the story that
has become reality in 2001 with citations for those of you who want to read
more. She awakes and unplugs her ÒtabletÓ (e.g., a laptop from Qbe; Manning,
2001) which had been recharging all night. On the screen is her daytimer
reminding her that she has a paper due in English Literature in two days.
Reading an e-mail from her parents to write home, she responds by requesting
money. An hour later, she arrives at her Chemistry class and opens her tablet
to connect to all the other students in class and the professor via a wireless
network (Apple Computer, 2001; Bluetooth, 2001). As the professor
balances a chemical equation on his white board, it is downloaded into her
tablet and she proceeds to collaborate electronically with Jake on the other
side of the room about how the equation was balanced (Cornell Chronicles,
2000). She takes notes using a metal stylus writing directly onto her tabletÕs
screen (Manning, 2001). When she saves her notes, her handwriting is
automatically converted to Helvetica font, dated, and a reminder added to her
daytimer to review the notes.
Since
it is a beautiful day, she sits under an oak tree and logs into the virtual
chemistry lab to complete an experiment (Model Science Software, 2001).
Manipulating the chemicals using her stylus, she is disappointed as the
experiment fails. Wondering why, she logs into the Learning Resources Center
and searches the Chemistry classÕs lecture as it was automatically videotaped,
converted into streaming video, and archived as a searchable database (Virage,
2001). She repeats the experiment successfully, realizing that she should have
used an acid rather than a base, writes out her lab notes, and e-mails them to
her professor.
Because
she spent extra time on the lab experiment, she is late for her Conversational
Japanese class. So, instead of being embarrassed by walking in late, she logs
into the class as a virtual student. She reviews the time she missed in only
ten minutes by viewing the streaming video in fast forward compressed to
remove the spaces in the conversation (Simpson, 2001). Once she catches up to
real time she sees four video windows on her tablet: in one corner, the
professor, in a second, his overheads, whiteboard, or slide show; in a third,
whichever student is speaking; and in a fourth, a student in Japan who is
taking the course via distance education. The other students can see her on
their tablets through a miniature video camera discreetly placed at the top of
her tablet. Now that she is in real-time, she contributes to the discussion
asking the Japanese student about certain idioms.
After
lunch, she returns to her room to begin her paper on southern gentleman in
literature and movies. Searching the electronic database at the library, she
downloads passages from electronic versions of a Faulkner novel and several
video clips of Rhett Butler from the movie Gone with the Wind. Logging out of
the library, her tablet automatically adds these references to her
bibliographic database in MLA style (ISI Research Soft, 2001). Satisfied with
her progress, she e-mails an outline to her collaborative writing group for her
part in producing their joint paper (Miller, 2000).
Her
friend Jake appears at her door complaining about his paper. Networking their
tablets, she sees that he has a reasonable draft, though several grammar and
spelling errors and only print references. She makes an appointment for him
with the learning center on campus to learn about using the proofing tools
(Microsoft Corporation, 2001) and electronic databases. He says he doesnÕt know
where on campus it is located. She quickly shows him the Geographical
Positioning System built into his tablet which maps out the way
(Travroute, 2001). She invites Jake to join her in an aerobic exercise class,
but leaves her tablet in her locker when she came back to her dorm. She doesnÕt
worry as she knows it can only be activated via her thumbprint (Ott, March 17,
2001). Exhausted after a strenuous day of studying, she falls asleep wondering
what college was like for her father.
Many
college students are learning with these technological opportunities as well as
others that were unpredictable six years ago. The most obvious is the
prevalence of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs; Cavoli, 2001); small hand-held
computers for keeping schedules and information. Students like Cori and Jake
turn in their hypermedia papers on a CD-ROM that they ÒburnedÓ(Fass, 2001) or
post it on their personal webpages assigned to them by the college. They have a
choice to enroll in courses at their college, or through a myriad of distance
education courses provided by other colleges. More and more textbooks are being
produced by their professor as multimedia CD-ROMs and DVDs with connections to
webpages rather than generic textbooks primarily because of the ease of
updating (Rosenzweig, 1995). How do we prepare students for these learning
opportunities?
As
the Bachman-Turner Overdrive sang (Bachman-Turner Overdrive, 1985), the
learning opportunities of tomorrow will grow even more when CoriÕs little
brother Mike attends college four years from now. PDAs will become more
prevalent and faster using broader bandwidths (i.e., the ÒpipelineÓ allowing
the speed of Internet access) to deliver e-mail and Internet access (Gowan,
2001). As the pipeline becomes larger and faster, more and more information
access will be required by his professors. This will require a greater need for
Mike to be able to synthesize information from multiple sources. Easier access
to virtual reality will allow Mike to explore electrical fields (Dede, 1999) or
travel through his own digestive system with a miniature camera embedded in a
digestible pill (Given Imaging, 2001). Hypertext (i.e., a piece of electronic
text with links) will allow Mike to read any textbook through links to any
given wordÕs pronunciation, meaning, and syntactic function (Blumberg, 2001).
Biometrics like retinal scans, handprints, and voice prints will provide security
for his computer and classroom attendance for his teachers (Ott, March 17,
2001).
Technology
will do what it has always done; it will make MikeÕs life easier in some ways
and more challenging in others. For example, Mike likely will enroll in a World
History class where he will be required to complete inquiry-based tasks such as
a Webquest (Peterson, 2001). Here, he will be placed into a collaborative
learning group to discover the skills of a historian as they conclude how and
why Stonehenge was built in England.
What
learning strategies will he need to have in order to succeed at this
task? He and his group will have to know how to gather up information from a
variety of primary and secondary sources including text, video, audio,
graphics, and data; they will have to evaluate these sources for information
relevant to their task, for what information is accurate and complete, as well
as what is fact and what is opinion, all to provide evidence to support their
conclusions. After gathering the information, he and his group will arrange it into a possible
solution. This arrangement will emerge through analysis, synthesis, and
compromising toward a tentative solution. Finally, Mike and his group will have
to determine the best delivery system to present this solution. Should
they use a term paper, newsletter, multimedia slide show, webpage, or video;
what should be presented first, next, last; what sounds or visual images will
add or distract from their presentation?
Many
colleges have deemed these technological skills so important, they have
implemented technology competency tests (St. Edward's University, 1999). Almost
60% of college professors today require e-mail of students and 43% require
students to access Internet resources to learn from outside of their textbooks
and lectures (Green, 2001). This has tripled since 1995 and will continue to
grow as professors take advantage of learning opportunities outside their
classrooms.
As
the Borg of Star Trek fame would say (Great Star Trek Quotes, 2001), Mike and
his peers need to be prepared to succeed in these learning opportunities.
First, they will need technology access. While many of MikeÕs peers will have
technology access, increasing from an average of 32.7% in 1998 to 44.4% in
2000, the digital divide still exists for some African-American (where they
average only 29.3% access) and Hispanic students (23.7%); for low income (25.1%
for <$15-24K), single-parent (33%), disabled (21.6%), or urban (11.8%) and
rural (7.3%) students (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2000).
Next,
learning centers and developmental courses will have to teach new learning
strategies built on old learning strategies. In the foreseeable future,
students will still arrive at college needing to become more effective and
efficient in the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. National
statistics suggest there are as many as 34% of students today who still need
development in reading, 38% writing, and 44% math (National Association for
Developmental Education, 1998). While these numbers will be reduced somewhat
through national and local initiatives for the primary school population
(Paige, 2001), there will be many more first generation students attending
college, other older students retooling for a career change, still others
updating their technical knowledge, and still others taking advantage of
personal development opportunities (National Center for Educational Statistics,
2001).
These
new ÒtraditionalÓ students will not only need their old basic skills developed,
but they will need the new technical skills of a Knowledge Age worker (Drucker,
1994). These new learning strategies can be described by a heuristic: G.A.P.
(Gather, Arrange, and Present; Caverly, Collins, DeMarais, Otte, & Thomas, 2000).
Building on the basic skills of reading, writing, and math, G.A.P. teaches
students how to convert data (facts and figures) into information (data that
has been collected and organized) and then into knowledge (information that has
been understood by placing it into a context) as they bridge the gap between
information and knowledge. In the learning centers and developmental courses of
tomorrow, we will have to teach Mikes and Jakes of this world how to learn how
to Gather data from a variety of sources like textbooks, laboratories, the
Internet, and their own research through reading and listening strategies as
well as search engines and Boolean logic. They will need to learn how to Arrange number-based data into
information using spreadsheets (Dede, 1989) ; Arrange word-based data into
information using databases or mapping programs (Turner & Dipinto, 1992) ;
and Arrange visual-based data into what the author intended as meaningful
information (Pinkel, 1998).
When
converting this data into information, they are bridging the gap and beginning
to build knowledge. However, to truly understand, they will need to extend and
confirm their new found knowledge by Presenting it to others to test
out what they know, much like experiencing what we learn when we teach (Riskin,
1990). They will have to learn how to use technology such as word processing or
desktop publishing to produce single media documents or other more
sophisticated technology to produce multimedia documents in the form of slide
shows and webpages combining text, video, audio, graphic media.
ÒThereÕs
no place like homeÓ
As
other prognosticators suggest (Damashek, 1999), the future of developmental
education in the form of learning centers or developmental courses connected to
discipline based courses will have to change. Some will provide ÒJust In TimeÓ
instruction (Hall, 2001) where both faculty and students at an institution can
learn on a needs basis how to teach with or learn through what research has
found to be sound instruction (Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Peterson &
Caverly, March 15, 2001) and what research has found to be effective learning
strategies (Flippo & Caverly, 2000). For teaching developmental students,
these effective strategies include providing collaborative learning, teaching for
transfer, ongoing informal assessment, scaffolded instruction, an honoring of
cultural and linguistic diversity, explicit strategy instruction, building of
strategy repertoires, as well as extensive and authentic practice with student
choice. For teaching learning strategies, we need to teach students to be
active, constructive, strategic learners.
Notice
I am proposing that technology in developmental education should be used as a
tool to support what we know about good instruction and what we know about
effective learning. For example, you can use e-mail to encourage collaborative
discussion outside of class and to help students transfer newly learning
strategies to a variety of college learning tasks, use computer based adaptive
tests to continually update student progress, and use the Internet to provide a
wide range of culturally and linguistically diverse learning materials. You can
use better designed computer tutorials with hypermedia to provide another
explicit instructional input beyond what you teach, to demonstrate the
effectiveness and efficiency of various strategies designed for various tasks,
to provide a variety of authentic college level tasks for the students to
choose in order to practice these strategies. You can use technology like mapping
programs (e.g., Inspirationª, 2001) to understand before, during, and after
reading strategies like PLAN (Caverly, Mandeville, & Nicholson, 1995) ;
process writing programs like WriterÕs Helper (Wresch, 1998) or
bibliographic programs like EndNote (ISI Research Soft, 2001) to help
students develop research papers, or slideshow programs (e.g., Microsoft,
2001b) to produce multimedia, or web production programs (e.g., Dreamweaver,
2001) to produce hypermedia; and spreadsheet programs (e.g., Excel; Microsoft, 2001a) and
graphing calculators (Texas Instruments, 2001) to help students learn math
concepts. Notice in both situations technology is being use not to replace
instruction, but rather as a scaffold to support instruction and learning as
students develop.
Learning
centers and developmental education courses are well placed to help develop the
students of today grow to meet these demands of tomorrow. To succeed, we as
developmental educators will also have to develop along with these students.
This can take place through professional development activities like learning
at national conferences such as the National College Learning Center
Association, College Reading and Learning Association, National Association for
Developmental Education, as well as professional institutes like the National
College Learning Center AssociationÕs Summer Institute, Southwest Texas State
UniversityÕs Technology Institute for Developmental Educators, Learning Support
Centers in Higher EducationÕs Winter Institute, and the National Center for
Developmental EducationÕs Kellogg Institute.
Whether
we like it or not, the future will come. We need to be prepared to meet it head
on, and grow along with our students. IsnÕt that why we like developmental
education?
David
C. Caverly is a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Southwest Texas
State University in San Marcos, Texas.
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