Disconnected connectedness

I think being a child of the 80s (generation X) taught me that where technology is concerned, anything is possible. I learnt to think outside the box. I am old enough to remember the time before computers, but young enough that they were part of my later education. While my schooling had nothing to do with computers or the internet, it all started to come about while I was at uni. Also, being a Physics student led me to think well outside the box.

So while I am not generation Y, and don’t have that inbred hyperconnectivity, I am not denying it and I’m willing to work with it. As Mark Pesce said, it needs to be incorporated and harnessed, not avoided. I need, however, to become the learner as Mark said at the end, and learn the technology.

I facebook, I do like to see my friends’ status updates, comments, photos, what they’re reading, what they are interested in in terms of current affairs etc. I use it as a connection – I might go on every couple of days, or at the most a couple of times a day, but it is not a hyperconnection. My friends and I don’t bounce ideas and conversations back and forth, we are not up to the minute with details. I don’t twitter… just haven’t found a place for it in my life. I do text, a fair amount. Probably 10 – 12 a day, nearly all with my partner who I live with, so I guess you can say we are almost hyperconnected. I email all day everyday with colleagues – work just wouldn’t happen without it. And I love Moodle, but I know I haven’t grasped the connectivity aspect of it.

The problem I can see with learning and particularly at CQUni, is that we are not just talking about gen Y. I think a lot of lecturers are actually seeing the benefit of connectivity (I’ll leave out the hyper for now) in learning and collaboration and sharing of knowledge, especially with flex students, but not all students can see that. Not all students embrace technology. Even if they want to, some don’t have the knowledge. So by asking (forcing) all students to use forums, blogs, wikis, google docs… there seems to be a fundamental chunk missing.

This was also brought up by John Medina that if a fundamental chunk of knowledge is missing, it really affects subsequent learning.

I know this from teaching Intro Physics. If a student cannot conceptualise displacement, they will not understand velocity. If they cannot conceptualise mass, they will not understand force. Even to the extent that if they cannot work with fractions, multiplication, decimals…, they will have trouble in all of Physics.

Colleagues of mine at Purdue University in Indiana were working with children aged 1 – 3 years. They were studying the children’s conceptualisations of cardinal vs ordinal numbers. If that is missed, along with other fundamental concepts, then the children are going to have a hard time with maths at primary school. They will have a hard time with maths at high school. They are probably going to avoid maths, they have been left behind by the system, the curriculum. Then they come to an enabling course at uni. What we do then is most important.

Without getting too side-tracked, I believe the same is true for computers, the internet and other technology. Some students come in and have never turned on a computer, let alone done a wiki. Then others come from school and expect this hyperconnectivity. The question is how to integrate the two extremes and everything in between? No, really, how do we do it?? Should I just be making my implicit curriculum ‘how to maximise connectivity as a student’? Or even ‘make sure you know how to be connected as a student so that you are ready for that in your degree too’? But still, how do I do that?