Emotional Response, A Vision of Students Today
This video created an emotional response within me as it articulated several frustrations in my everyday life. The information conveyed in the video is disturbing: the average student today has 26.5 hours of daily obligations, graduates $20,000 in debt, writes over 600 pages of text annually and most are studying for careers and jobs that do not exist today. The video poses the question of whether technology will be our savior or destroyer? Is technology the villain? I rather, believe that while technology adheres to Moore's law – doubling in speed and efficiency every 18 to 24 months, the academic institutions of the world have failed to adopt the same exponentially compounding paradigm.
Over-connectivity leads to over-commitment in my opinion. In the modern world, a terminal with an internet connection is always close by. For many Americans, the internet remains within their pocket at all times of the day. The availability of information has created a social expectation to be "online" at all hours of the day. The pressure to remain connected and maintain multiple simultaneous conversations is omnipresent; the result being iAnxiety and mild schizophrenia resulting from the maintenance of many online personalities. The sheer volume of correspondence can be a major detriment to students.
The quote at the beginning of the video is fantastic and characterizes the disenfranchisement of the modern student. : "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." -Marshal McLuhan. In many ways, students are not compelled to engage in the academic process since it has no relevance to the society in which they live, nor is information conveyed in the ways it is currently digested. In order for students to have a pertinent education, they must communicate and learn the way that society does as a whole. Well said in the video as the camera pans through the seats of a lecture hall – "If students learn by doing, what am I doing here?"
As the internet continues to propagate, academic and professional competition will continue to increase. Students are caught in the knee of this curve. Quality education is now readily available online, MIT's entire undergraduate catalog is now online. Once again, this creates an elevated expectation of today's students to digest all resources available throughout the cloud. This also expands the competitive arena of an institution globally. What we are seeing is the beginning of globalization of the academic sector. While the expansion of freeware education is socially beneficial – most traditional institutions have yet to modify their models given their existence. For example, if MIT can offer students a complete curriculum for free with exquisite presentation materials, lecture videos, notes and exams – other universities necessarily should at least match the quality of these deliverables for their own students who are paying for their educations. As the video identifies, the massive lecture hall with notes on a chalkboard is obsolete if not cruel. Otherwise, in several years there will be two groups of graduates – 1. freeware graduates with high quality education received from the prestigious institutions of the world and 2. traditional graduates, severely in debt with a sub par education from a single institution.
The current academic generation is feeling the full affects of over-connectivity, globalization and academic disenfranchisement. These truths do not illustrate a flaw in technological progression but the inability of societies and organizations to adapt new robust methods of communication. Recall that it took homo sapiens thousands of years to create drawing tools and even begin to establish a recorded history. We are now at a similar turning point where our written history and our access to it has become increasingly difficult to manage and process.
This video is right on target with the points its trying to make. The classroom today is much different than it ever was, it is becoming harder and harder to keep students attention.
ReplyDeleteThe cost of education is horrific, right now I am paying over $2000 for only 2 classes!!! Some teachers only have a book on their list because its required by the University. I have had teachers admit that there is a book on the course list but we don't have to buy it because we will only be using articles available on E-reserve. With education funding being cut it is getting more and more difficult for people to get ahead. As online classes become more and more popular, will the internet take over as the sole educator? Do they learn the material the same way or do they just search through the book for the answers, google the questions on their tests, and just simply pass the class whatever means necessary? Personally I feel as though something is lost when teaching is taken out of the classroom, maybe because I like interacting with and learning from other students or maybe because I would never find the motivation to sit at a computer for hours trying to finish the work.
This video created an emotional response within me too. As we discussed in class, the youth today spends just as many hours on the Internet as they do watching T.V. They might even spend more time on the Internet now than they do watching television. The web and technology is changing rapidly and it can be very difficult for us to keep up with it. Traditional institutions are not conforming to new advancements in technology. Like you mentioned, we are earning degrees that don't even give us jobs and kids graduate with thousands of dollars of debt. Traditional universities need to change their curriculum to fit this day and age.
ReplyDelete“iAnxiety”? is that your quote or from somewhere else because it’s right on. Well put. One of the reasons I have resisted jumping into all these social networking sites is because I don’t want to be connected 24 (or 26.5) hours a day. I think it does cause anxiety and a tendency to be overloaded with personas. When you’re constantly connected I feel like you must be constantly available for quick communication and replies. It forces your schedule to be mandated by whoever needs to hear from you at that moment. I’m going to fight this responsibility as long as I can but I’m losing more and more all the time.
ReplyDeleteI agree that iAnxiety is a great way to phrase it. I'm exhausted with the over use of the internet for information. I use the internet for social networking, research, email, homework, news, blogging, etc. Its tiring. And are we really receiving that much useful information? I don't think so. Its (useless) information overload.
ReplyDeleteWhile you make a point that now you can get a great degree online, would you want to? I feel like at the end of the day, you'd lose all human contact and your eyes would burn from staring at the screen. Its great that everything CAN be done online now, but I don't think it necessarily should.
Throughout my CU career I have been in the business school, journalism school, and tam program. I have been shown this video in all three. I have the same emotional response, the video has a depressing feeling. Many of the facts that are posted are so sad, mainly because they are so true. 'I buy $100 text books that I never open.' I am guilty of doing this before. This video opened my eyes to how much my life is dominated by media. I am bombarded with email,text, facebook, twitter, it gets so overwhelming. any times I wish I could disconnect myself for awhile and go on a media vacation. The likelihood of that is not probable because no matter where you go, even a billboard is a form of media. The point is that there are so many messages in the current world that people must learn to become multitaskers.
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