Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
we have a discussion around trust, responsibility and good behaviors,” reports a for-
mer boarding school housemaster. “But now, there's a difficult culture where it's
'cooler' to do as little as possible and get away with it.”
Changes in the Student-Educator Relationship
The student-educator relationship plays a significant role in the student's social and
academic development; NDM appear to impact the student-educator relationship
on both a personal and a professional level. Many of the social changes discussed
by our educator participants relate to altered modes of communication and shifts
in power and agency from educators to students. While some of these changes
stem from deliberate pedagogical choices, others appear to be the unintended
consequences of technology.
Overall, teachers are pleased by this loosening of hierarchical strictures, which
they feel have led to better communication and better educational practices. There is
also evidence suggesting the sharp boundaries between disciplines such as art, sci-
ence, literature, and performance are more open to negotiation in general; it should
be noted that this type of progressive, interdisciplinary pedagogy is the exception
and not the norm in most American high schools. In one biology classroom, for
instance, students can pick a research topic and determine the form the final product
will assume—a conventional research paper, a video, a sculptural model, or another
form of their own choosing. Several educators remark how the ready availability of
visual and multimedia elements online have positively impacted their pedagogies
and have been received enthusiastically by their students.
Most of today's students rely on the Internet for companionship, entertainment,
and information; the technically inclined can find communities of like-minded peers
(Gee, 2004), the socially adept can keep tabs on myriads of friends, and the bored
can find a game to play, an intriguing news item, or a humorous video to watch
(Ito et al., 2008). In contrast, most of the educators we spoke with spent more of
their time offline, leading toward a correlation between one's length of classroom
experience and one's discomfort with new media. Educators coexist in the same
cultural mix as their students, but they may have the additional challenge of having
to 'unlearn' certain assumptions as well as face steep learning curves as technolo-
gies grow more diverse and, all too often, more complicated. The net result is a
youth population more familiar with online tools and practices. This generational
difference in experiences was expressed by the educators.
Interpersonal Changes.
Informal face-to-face engagements between educators
and students have declined for any number of reasons, some of which include
NDM's speed, efficiency, convenience, and ability to negotiate thornier issues from
a safer, rehearsed position. It is easier, say educators, for students to email difficult
conversations versus conducting them face to face, when emotions potentially come
into play.
Our participant educators describe a high level of communication between
themselves and their students today, as compared to pre-NDM levels before the
widespread availability of email. Students appear to make deliberate decisions
