Chasing Gaolposts

One of the problems of planning research on history and the new media in teaching is that you have to run to keep up. I’m finishing a research methods chapter for next years work, and this morning I find an article whoch requires adding another layer to the questions

There is an article in the New York magazine called ‘Say Everything’ which I noticed last weekend but didn’t read. Will Richardson has picked up on the main points in his blog though. The critical section that Will quotes is:

“More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

and his comment on it is that teachers (and we can include lecturers in this) find it difficult to adjust to the openness of ‘Web 2.0′ and the new generations’ concept of what constitutes private and public space. For many academics the lecture hall was a ‘private’ space, even if you were performing in front of 350 undergrads. if someone is going to video that on a cellphone and post the video on YouTube, well, many lecturers will have a problem with that.

What I am really interested in though is the implications for how we teach using ‘web 2.0’ I’m planning on looking at how tech-savvy our students really are, how tech savvy they feel they are and how far we can challenge them to use new media for learning without leaving the non-digital natives behind. I think now that I need a couple of questions for the survey to elicit what their concept of private space is – I think many students in my dept regard their writing for assessment as a ‘private’ space; something they do at 3am while running on coffee and I grade in my office. I know some of them are uncomfortable with collaborative writing in wikis, and I had planning to investigate the extent to which this was a problem with the technology – but maybe it is an issue revolving around the very private (repressed?) attitude to learning that many Irish teenagers have.

So now I have to rewrite the survey design, but first I need to rework the methods a bit and before I do that, I need to fold some of this background into the lit. review. I think I’ll ‘cheat’ and just add this blog entry as an appendix and an example of reflective practice.