I recently wrote an article about the impact of social media on how current students think and what implications that reality has on teaching. In that article, I discuss how social media has produced a powerful focus on self, but:
The learning goal is not student involvement alone but student engagement with learning, which is different.
We can observe and have experienced that students have indeed a lot of focus, but it is focus on self, self-publication, and the exchange of self with others. While this takes hours of focus and develops many great skills, it is not the same as focus on learning. That challenge remains with us, as teachers.
In the same article, I suggest that, although current students feel their “self” identity is paramount, it actually does nothing to help students towards open collaboration with others and with information. That is, to acquire new knowledge is to work with the ideas of others, interact with new information, think through the implications in relation to what I already know, and produce new knowledge. I suggest:
I cannot already know what I need to learn in a process of collaboration with others; such collaboration requires open and unpredictable social and academic interaction.
Also:
The positive benefits to learning of increased accessibility, mobility and continuous and global connectivity, which have been and continue to be explored and discussed, should not be minimized. However, the emerging challenges of developing skilled but fully engaged learners remains with us. We must continue to explore and reinvent learning spaces to support and develop new generations of learners who are capable of acquiring and applying new knowledge.
Therefore, I would suggest that the struggle is not with focus but developing highly literate and applied thinkers who can move beyond self and work towards new knowledge.
TIP: Continue to plan for the development of engaged learners and applied thinkers.
Coming up next, “What does “new literacy” mean?” Stay tuned...