Most academics that I know tend to have several false assumptions about their students, but these assumptions underwrite all their teaching practice. In thinking about this, and how to teach students these skills instead of assume their existence, I am trying to work out some simple tasks that will let students learn how to, in this case, judge the validity of online content.
The first assumption academics make is that students learn and think (by think I don’t mean opinions, I mean approach problems, theory and so on) much like themselves. This gets expressed in our insistence on using assessment tasks and methodologies that owe everything to academic practice, but virtually nothing to professional practice outside of the university. So students present tute papers (because of course they all have to be able to present at conferences), write essays (since the humanities essay is of course the major form that graduates use to write professionally), and sit exams.
The second major assumption is that students understand theory theoretically. That like us academics they have the high level abstraction and contextual skills to see theory as a schemata and so can see how it hooks into other theories, other contexts, and of course this means that academics are able to take a concept from discipline A (let’s say de Certeau’s notion of the strategic and the tactical) and apply it to discipline B (academic writing and blogs where blogs are tactical in regard to the essay’s strategic). Never mind that this is actually where, ideally, the student should be at the end of their tertiary education, or that for many students this is just not a learning out come that is viable or relevant for them cognitively, professionally, or personally.
What this actually means is that those students who best match ourselves (for instance already have these skills) will perform brilliantly and, tautologically, become our personal exemplars of how good we are at teaching. But we haven’t taught them anything, these students can already do it, they get it (and will probably go on to postgraduate study), we just provide some specific content in a specific disciplinary field. Those students who don’t have these skills, well, they’ll get through, and will learn some content, but not what goes on behind that content.
This was very apparent to me in the Google exercise that we did in class the other day. No one has ever had to teach me how to evaluate online resources, and that is not because I’ve been using the Web since the beginning – I have the skills that let me abstract these things successfully, which is probably why I enjoy being an academic. Yet virtually every student (well, I only had 8 in the class) did not know how to evaluate the results of a Google search, and most had no idea how to use Google properly in the first place! This is not, yet, the Internet generation, though most would have had net access throughout their secondary schooling.
So the task is to teach this. This week everyone had to find something online that was about how to write good hypertext (whatever that might be), and they needed to blog and discuss what they found. Though thinking about it now I’ve once again put the cart before the horse, since most of them aren’t information literate enough to trust their judgment about what they find in the first case, but this ability is presupposed by the task I’ve set. Hence I need to step back a bit, so in next week’s lab I’ll get everyone to discuss what sorts of qualities or properties they used to judge how authoritative the content they found might be. I can see I’ll probably have to place that front and centre for quite a few weeks, so that those students who aren’t like me can build their very specific checklist and literally tick things off as they view online content. We will get there, and I do regard this as a major learning outcome for these students, for once they are competent about this a lot of content questions and problems look after themselves.
Tags:
hypertext,
Network Literacy,
practice,
teaching