Casting Out Nines

I don’t make it out of my building very often at work, but I needed to go over to our library this morning to reserve a computer lab and to look for a particular book. I didn’t know the call number for the book, so I went to the nearest available kiosk computer to look it up in the online catalog.

I should have known it was going to be trouble when the nearest computer was an ancient, beige tower PC with a sticker on the side proclaiming it to be “Designed for Windows 98 and Windows NT“. And it was turned off, which is unusual for a public kiosk. So I turned it on, and it proceeded to literally rattle and whine while it booted. After entering in my login information, I was able to access the web browser — after 15 minutes had passed. 15 minutes from login to usability! I couldn’t even walk away and get on with the stuff I had to do today, because once the interminable login procedure passed, I’d be logged on.

After trying to use Internet Explorer to get to the library’s catalog — which resulted in a stuck browser — I finally just gave up and shut the thing down. Or at least, I initiated the shutdown procedure and walked off. For all I know, the thing may still be trying to shut down.

It occurred to me that university libraries are in a state of transition, and they could look like a lot of different things in the future, but one of the things that library must be is  a repository of  both information and the technology to access and connect that information. And increasingly, that dual role is shifting from books to computers and networks. If the public kiosk computer, to be used by any person randomly needing information about something, takes 15 minutes to boot and an unknown amount of time to actually use a web browser to get to the library’s internal web site, then something’s not right. And if there’s any truth at all to the digital natives idea, I think most students would have gotten a negative impression after the first 90 seconds had passed and they weren’t online.

[Disclaimer: There are other computers that work much faster in our library; but they aren't prominently positioned to be used by the general public. And I mean no disrespect to our library staff, who really are smart when it comes to technology and are probably just as appalled by a 15-minute startup time as I am.]

Here’s a promotional video for a new math curriculum from Pearson called enVisionMATH. (It must be a sign of the times that grade school math curricula have promotional videos.) Watch carefully.

Four questions about this:

1. Should it be a requirement of parenthood that you must remember enough 5th grade math to teach it halfway decently to your kids?
2. Does the smartboard come included with the textbooks?
3. Did anybody else have the overwhelming urge to yell “Bingo!” after about 2 minutes in?
4. When will textbook companies stop drawing the conclusion that because kids today like to play video games, talk on cell phones, and listen to MP3 players, that they are therefore learning in a fundamentally different way than anybody else in history?

The last question is all about the research-free digital nativist assumption that is the source of many lucrative curriculum deals these days. Data, please?

[ht Teaching College Math Technology Blog]

Editorial: We’re getting near the end of this week’s look back at articles from the past here at CO9s. I’ll have two more tomorrow and one more Saturday. Why twelve? Why, because 12 is an integer of the form , of course. Didn’t you know those are the best kinds of numbers?

One of the things I want to accomplish on this blog is question assumptions, especially where those assumptions have an impact on students and how we teach them. For me, there’s no bigger source of unquestioned assumptions than the current movement built around the digital native hypothesis — the notion that children today are native to the digital world and come pre-loaded with technological skills that we “digital immigrants” have to acquire. These assumptions simply don’t square in any way with what I’ve experienced as a teacher, and the extent to which these assumptions are driving pedagogical programs in this country is alarming and dangerous.

In this article, I lay out a sort of research program to delineate and open up for questioning just exactly what it is these people are assuming. Now all that’s needed is for somebody to come along and start collecting data — and see where the truth is. 

A proposal about digital natives

Originally posted: April 12, 2007

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 The video below, via Wes Fryer, gives a pretty good synopsis of the entire notion of “digital natives” and how they should be taught — if you drink the kool-aid believe the arguments of people who believe in digital natives. It’s 7:40 long, so take a deep breath and make some popcorn:

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The comments at my last post are suggesting that email has been surpassed by IM, Facebook, and text messaging among the younger generation as the preferred means of electronic communication. (Maybe of any kind of communication.) That really gives me, as a professor, some pause as to my assumption that if I need to get information out to students in a timely way (say, about a change in an assignment or a last-minute announcement for class) or create a space for out-of-classroom discussion of ideas or assignments, email isn’t nearly as reliable as I think it is.

I’m OK with that if it’s true, but then there are two questions that come to mind as being pretty important from my perspective:

• If I have information that I need to get out to my students quickly and be reasonably assured that they’ll get it in time for it to be useful, what is the best way to do this? Is there no one best way, meaning that I need a plan to send the info out in multiple formats? (That would be time consuming = bad.)
• Whatever medium/media is the answer to the first question, where is the functionality for it in the major course management software packages like Angel? If it’s there, does it make sense to use the CMS proprietary version of the softwar or some third party app? (E.g. Angel’s chat feature versus plain old AIM?)

Also, would students appreciate professors using IM, texting, Facebook, etc. for class purposes, or do they really want to keep “their” means of communication for social purposes only? I tried using Facebook last year in relatively close contact with my precalculus class, and far from the students appreciating my efforts, they really felt resentful and creeped-out by the fact that their professors were on Facebook, which is “theirs”.

If you read enough edublogs, you begin to encounter the factions that believe that students today are digital natives and have all sorts of rich information experiences all the time in their everyday lives. This is usually taken to mean that they use all kinds of electronic means of sending and receiving information, such as email. I’m already skeptical of that claim, and after the following experience from today I am even less sure about it.

We had some high school students visiting the math department at my college, and part of the program was a discussion panel with current math majors. One of the math majors was asked about some of the main differences between high school and college, and he mentioned the quantity of email that one has to keep up with as a major difference. He asked the high school students how often they checked their emails now. They all looked at each other sheepishly. The math major then asked how many students have email accounts at all. Less than half indicated that they did.

Less than half. How can that be, if they are digital natives? I think have at least half a dozen email addresses just for myself!

So now I am wondering: Do most of the students not have email accounts because they simply aren’t as technologically immersed as some people think they are? Or do they have some other electronic medium for communicating, like text messaging, that they use more frequently than email — so much more frequently that they don’t even have email accounts? I know texting is big among the 18-22 year old set right now, but it’s hard to imagine texting simply usurping the role of email, when you can get email accounts for free all over the place.