If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - More on the Digital Divide
To further the discussion on the recent post about the great digital divide and the classroom of today, consider the words of Marshall McLuhan, 1967, he of “the medium is the message” fame who always insisted he learned “in spite of his professors.” He of course also one day became a professor of English “in spite of himself.”
Today’s child is bewildered
when he enters
the 19th century environment
that still characterizes
the educational establishment
where information is scarce
but ordered and structured
by fragmented, classified patterns
subjects and schedules.
Marshall McLuhan, 1967
Add to that thought the rhetorical question, “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a provocative video compilation is worth a ……….”, then take a peak at this video:
For more on Professor Wesch’s Ethnography class and this project, visit Mediated Cultures. There is a detailed explanation of how the data was collected.
And for more on the digital divide we turn to response number 78 on the page from a professor:
I teach at a small college. Class sizes max 45. The average is about 15. Some of mine have been as small as 6. This makes for a very different, interactive learning environment than you have portrayed on your video (which is very well-done, I might add!).
My argument: technology IS the problem……..sorry if that’s not a popular stance. If our goal (as teachers) is to produce thinking, innovative, lovers of learning, then we need small classes with much discussion and generation of new (or not new) ideas. And readings (yes, readings) of current research and ideas that serve as fodder for those ideas.
I could be one of those students, BTW. At 53, spend way too much time on the web and emailing (like now!). How much better the world would be if we all interacted as human beings face-to-face (not on Facebook).
The biggest change that needs to be made in education today is to turn off the laptops, stop using electronic forms of communication and information gathering (half the stuff on the web is crap anyway), and meet is small coffee-houses debating interesting ideas. And, yes, reading. At least books and journals written by those with higher degrees have been vetted by people in their fields.
Back to the one-room schoolhouse and chalk, I say!
Sorry guys.
And a portion of number 111 Rod Heikkila
I am at once intrigued and saddened by the video. The “bewildered” student-in-the- nineteenth-century-study-space idea seems in the video to imply that McLuhan is judging the twentieth century, something he steadfastly refused to do. That they are bewildered is an observation, not a judgement of the worth of the nineteenth or twentieth century environments. They are bewildered because they are electronic mass media users who are not yet comfortable in either the pre-electronic environments inhabited by mediaevil villagers who acted together in real time and space or in the book-centered world of the nineteenth century
But I encourage the students to consider McLuhan’s point that the MEDIUM itself is the MESSAGE, and the AUDIENCE is the CONTENT of electronic mass media.
The students in the video are missing the point, I fear. Not one of them seems keen to learn anything that more than two thousand years of civilization have brought to them; that’s who they are or at least should aspire to be, whether teachers know their names or not. They have an unprecedented opportunity to become the greatest thinkers and doers ever, to create a global village worth living in; technology is just technology. In itself, it is (only) the message. The students need to expand themselves if there is to be any content worth viewing. I worry that multi-tasking facebook addicts will grasp little of what civilization needs them to grasp, if it is going to be inherited by anyone beyond today. The audience itself risks becoming the very thing from which it needs to be saved, and no technology can do that.
Which leads us to ask once again about “The Technology Debate - Giant Nuisance or Answer to Educational Ills?”
2 comments
I think there are more and less effective ways of using technology–and there are better and worse ways of investing in education. While it’s true that nothing can REPLACE the classroom, blackboard and chalk (though Whiteboards and Powerpoint are gaining ground), the point is that there are some things that technology can do for education that the classroom and chalk can not. For example, the student who’s too shy to speak up in an in-class debate is sometimes more than willing to contribute to an online debate. Of course, gaining the confidence to do it in person’ is also a valuable skill and should be learned.
Ultimately, technology keeps students connected to one another and a refreshing fact is that students who ‘don’t understand’ a piece of homework or didn’t know about something frequently post a question online—and most often have an answer in minutes. Now, what they choose to do with this information relies on their inner drive, and neither a chalkboard, nor technology, can teach that.
[…] their fine work. We still think the video that we posted a while back in our article “If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words then…..” is one of the most provocative we have seen regarding technology and its implications for […]
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