Gadgetry

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released its latest report, “Generations and Gadgets.” And not surprisingly, millennial students own more gadgets than other generations.

The study found that:

• 85% of adults own cellphones
• 63% of people ages 18-45 own gaming consoles
• 5% of all adults own an e-book reader
• 4% of adults 65+ own tablet computers like the iPad (the largest %age of all age groups)
• 9% of adults do not own any of the above-mentioned technologies; 43% of people 75+ are in this category
• 74% of millenials own an mp3 player; 56% of people ages 35-46 own an mp3 player
• 57% of millenials own a desktop computer; 70% own a laptop
• 69% of people ages 35-46 own a desktop computer; 61% own a laptop

With all of this technology around us, how can we make better use of it in teaching and learning?

Are college students learning enough?

A controversial new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," written by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, suggests that colleges and universities are not doing enough to help students learn the skills needed for the 21st century.

The research study included more than 2,300 undergraduates from 24 colleges and universities. It found that:

• 45% of students showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.
• 36% showed no significant improvement by the end of their senior years.
• 50% of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester.
• 33% of students did not take any courses requiring 40 pages or more of reading per week.
• 35% of students studied five hours per week or less.
• 17% of students didn't meet with a faculty member outside of class during the first year of college.
• 9% of students never talked to a professor outside of class.

The authors based their conclusions on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), an essay-only test designed to measure higher-level thinking and expression.

Some scholars have a fundamental problem with the CLA. They say that critical-thinking skills are deeply entwined with discipline-specific knowledge, so it makes no sense to use the same test to measure the writing and reasoning abilities of students in different majors. Arum and Roksa disagree: "[T]he students who had the strong­est CLA-score gains during college in the Academically Adrift study were actually those who majored in science and mathematics, departments where they are not necessarily required to write many essays."

Their major concern is: "not just the levels of student performance but that students are reporting that they make such meager investments in studying, and that they have such meager demands placed on them in their courses in terms of reading and writing."

The Rotten Weird

Yeah, I no that the tittle of this log post has misspelled woods in it. But it past thru spelt cheek with know prob. Sew it most bee OL. Hears a store about witting.

Once upon a time we wrote papers by hand and, when we were certain that they were ready, we typed them on a typewriter. We spent a lot of time honing our ideas and writing drafts. We didn’t want to retype pages if we could avoid it. We looked carefully at our spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and made sure that we wrote full sentences and clear paragraphs. We understood the importance of citing other people’s ideas. We read the papers before we handed them in, and we took pride in what we had written.

Many students today will never know this feeling. Technology is interfering with the writing process. In general, I like the advantages provided by technology—it’s much easier to edit my writing, to make changes as my thoughts more fully develop, and to create beautifully formatted documents. But I also think that technology is interfering with the thought processes necessary for good writing. It’s too easy to substitute spell check and grammar check for proofreading. And it’s too convenient to do otherwise.

I’m seeing an increase in the number of courses in which students are being taught how to communicate through videos and other multimedia. I think that this is a good thing. But not at the expense of written communication. I think that every Rutgers graduate, regardless of country of origin, should be able to write coherently. And I’m not sure that we’re doing what is best for out students when we increase multimedia communication and reduce written communication.
What do you think?