Slaid Cleaves: Below
It’s Complicated
If there’s any liberatory impulse in education it’s the existential challenge of complication. Especially in undergraduate education, the goals is to move students away from the simple, emotion-dominated decision making common to both adolescents and commercial culture, and towards the more complex, nuanced, rationality-dominated thinking that is the ideal goal or most important skill of both adulthood and intellectual culture.
Adults and intellectuals can fall (back) into simplistic thinking almost as easily as adolescents, depending on the subject and circumstances. (Love comes to mind.) That’s why I favor research that works as a counterweight to conventional thinking; it’s complicating adult simplicity. That’s especially true of intellectuals my age (especially but not all men) and technology (which we love as much as our dogs). This piece (“Study: Not All Kids Are Computer Whizzes“) fits the bill nicely.
Actually this is a brief radio interview with Dr. Allison Druin (University of Maryland; Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab. You can find out more about her research here). One off the great cliches of computers in general and computers and writing in particular is the idea that the younger you are the more you know about technology. In my experience, it’s more true that the bigger the age difference the greater the differences in technological knowledge.
Men my (50-ish) age know a lot about the personal computer but often little about game consoles. Men 30 years younger are most often the opposite. Dr. Druin’s research, too, suggests that there may well be developmental and cognitive differences in how we use new communication technologies, in this case, search engine results. Young kids, as it turns out, tend to find conventional search engine results difficult to interpret. Dr. Druin is investigating alternatives that may work better.
@TEOTD
Every writer has a weakness; mine’s spelling. It’s probably worsened by my sometimes spastic typing skills, and my sometimes sticky keyboard. (My other weakness is eating breakfast sitting here at the computer; bagel crumbs get in everything.) So I was fascinated to hear researchers suggest that texting might in fact teach a certain kind of language awareness that might help students learn to spell (“Phone texting ‘helps pupils to spell“).
I’m not quite sure that Britain and the United States have quite the same context surrounding language in general and learning in particular. I haven’t taught in Britain, but here the problematic use of texting codes is often closely related to an entire complex of issues related to that matrix of ideas that surround identity and authority in schools. In my experience it’s rarely a lack of spelling skill, in other words, and more a matter of resisting what some students consider an alien way of thinking.
That, in turn, may well be related to the sheer mass of media exposure described in another recent report (“Report: Media use by teens, tweens grows to 53 hours a week“).It’s not the media use that worries me– although I’m old fashioned enough to wish that there was more reading– it’s the advertising. I’d like to know how much of this media exposure is accompanied by commercial advertising directed at children. Ads are bad enough for adults; for children they are a disaster.
U.S. advertising is profoundly anti-social because it’s so narcissistic. Education is nothing if not social, and it demands attitudes and skills– putting off rewards, discipline, listening, cooperation– that contradicts (and hopefully partially counters) consumer culture. Children may well be learning important linguistic sensitivities by texting, but they only have the phone in the first place because advertisers convinced them they had to have it. I have to wonder if that dynamic is really helpful.
Kate Mann: Cowboys Are My Weakness