Comment Technology and Education (Score 2) 140
The authors offer some inventive ideas about managing attention. Education, they predict, will adopt briefer, more varied learning experiences, instead of the traditional lectures that "numb the brain's of today's students." A classroom, they suggest, might be outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools. (This gives one pause, given the post-Columbine hysteria. In U.S. schools, teachers would probably zap kids who were bored rather than challenge them.)
If nothing else, technology will make the linear thinking obsolete and open the door for alternative languages, interesting hypertexts, and more diverse histories accessible to students.
It's easy to label the students as the "ADD" or "MTV"generation, but they've always existed in each generation and this thinking is probably more a desire to get out of the box more than anything.
The purpose of the traditional, American classroom was to socialize young people to participate quietly in the established social order. American twenty-somethings in the 1940's and 50's did not have the internet; they bought Charlie Parker records instead.
Perhaps the dismay at technology's boom with young people is that each individual will live their own "underground" and only give the now-crumbling Westernized knowledge doled out in college lectures the brief nod it deserves.
If nothing else, technology will make the linear thinking obsolete and open the door for alternative languages, interesting hypertexts, and more diverse histories accessible to students.
It's easy to label the students as the "ADD" or "MTV"generation, but they've always existed in each generation and this thinking is probably more a desire to get out of the box more than anything.
The purpose of the traditional, American classroom was to socialize young people to participate quietly in the established social order. American twenty-somethings in the 1940's and 50's did not have the internet; they bought Charlie Parker records instead.
Perhaps the dismay at technology's boom with young people is that each individual will live their own "underground" and only give the now-crumbling Westernized knowledge doled out in college lectures the brief nod it deserves.
