Flying Penguins versus Digital Elephants
Digital Elephants and Flying Penguins were the theme of Conor Galvin’s ( UCD School of Education) presentation on the ‘shiny-bright’ Higher Education world of technology-mediated Teaching & Learning in a lively and informative webinar hosted by IT Sligo.
On the bright side are the digital penguins. They include all those ‘new’ technologies that are helping educators (and students) to design learning around communication and the exchange of content and ideas. Projects using tools such as wikis, blogs and repositories are all penguins. Irish examples include The Bridge to College and the National Digital Learning Repository. Alice, an engaging 3D tool for teaching computer programming, has been found to increase student retention among first year Computer Science students. It has recently been piloted in UCD with positive results.
His elephants in the room are the challenges to higher education. Today’s students are the ‘millenials‘ born about 1990. Web and mobile technologies have been around since their early childhood. They have grown up using social networking, online games and media-rich technology yet higher education is still offering them unengaging technologies such as VLEs. Can education meet their technology expectations?
His second elephant is the emphasis of current education policy where the role of higher education is seen to be the delivery of economic growth and, incidentally, jobs for graduates. Learning and research are not seen as worthwhile ends in themselves.
The challenge for educators is to use the penguins to overcome the elephants.
A streamed recording of Conor’s presentation can be downloaded from IT Sligo.
Pernguin Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Add comment February 24th, 2010
