Teaching the 21st Century Learner

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Teaching the 21st Century Learner

• Darla Runyon
• Assistant Director/Curriculum Specialist
• Roger Von Holzen
• Director
• Center for Information Technology in Education
• Northwest Missouri State University

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Us vs. Them

• http//www.sciencemag.org
• http//www.brainpop.com
• http//www.yahoo.com
• http//yahooligans.yahoo.com
• http//www.ask.com
• http//www.ajkids.com
• http//www.hgtv.com
• http//www.nick.com
• http//sportsillustrated.cnn.com
• http//www.sikids.com

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Children age 6 and under

• Spend 201 hours / day playing outside
• Spend 158 hours using computers
• Spend 40 minutes reading or being read to
• 48 of children have used a computer
• 27 4-6 year olds use a computer daily
• 39 use a computer several times a week
• 30 have played video games

Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003
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By age 21

• The average person will have
• played 10,000 hours video games
• sent 200,000 emails
• watched 20,000 hours of TV
• talked 10,000 hours on a cell phone
• spent under 5,000 hours reading

Prensky, 2003
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Games Simulations

• Marc Prensky data on learning with games
  (http//www.marcprensky.com)

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Northwest Showcasehttp//cite.nwmissouri.edu/nwo
rc
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Technology the New Learner

• Video games provide insight into engagement, not
  entertainment
• Challenge educators to foster engagement in
  learning

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Dependence on Technology

• Are students becoming too dependent on technology
  to do spelling and basic arithmetic?
• If a device can do something better, more
  efficiently, more accurately, or quicker than we
  can manually, why not use it?
• Our focus must shift from the tools themselves to
  the capabilities of these new tools to empower
  students to do new things

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The Net Generation Learner

• Born in or after 1982
• Gravitate toward group activity
• 8 out of 10 say its cool to be smart
• Focused on grades and performance
• Busy with extracurricular activities
• Identify with parents values feel close to
  parents
• Respectful of social conventions and institutions
• Fascination for new technologies
• Racially and ethnically diverse

Howe Strauss, 2003
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Todays Learners

• Digitally literate
• Mobile
• Always on
• Experiential
• Social

Oblinger, 2004
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Hypertext minds Qualities

• Crave interactivity
• Read visual images
• Weak reading skills
• Visual-spatial skills
• Parallel processing
• Inductive discovery
• Fast response time
• Short attention span

Prensky, 2001
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Learning Preferences

• Teams, peer-to-peer
• Structure with flexibility
• Engagement experience
• Visual kinesthetic
• Things that matter

Oblinger, 2004
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Learning Preferences

• Students want to learn through exploration
• Looking for practical applications, real-world
  context
• Focus more on applying classroom lessons to
  real-life problems, institutions, or
  organizations
• Students want to be challenged to reach their own
  conclusions, find their own results

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Learning Preferences

• The new technologies can help create a learning
  culture in which the learner enjoys enhanced
  interactivity and connections with others
• Central issue How can technology be organized
  around student learning?
• Use tools to help students think and communicate
  effectively

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• Students
• Multitasking
• Pictures, sound, video
• Random access
• Interactive and networked

• Faculty
• Single or limited tasks
• Text
• Linear, logical, sequential
• Independent and individual

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Teaching the New Learner

• Multimedia format pervades nearly every part of
  life
• Television
• Audio
• Animation
• Text
• Students live in a world of digital, audio, and
  text
• They expect a similar approach in classroom
• Faculty must abandon notion that a lecture and
  reading assignment are enough to teach a lesson

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Teaching the New Learner

• Teachers Role
• No longer the professor dispensing facts and
  theories
• A participant in the learning process
• Faculty role will be unbundled--teacher to mentor
• Facilitate peer-to-peer learning

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Teaching the New Learner

• Must learn to communicate in the language and
  style of the students
• going faster
• less step-by-step, more in parallel
• more random access

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Teaching the New Learner

• Instructional implications
• Movement toward blended courses
• More collaborative learning approaches
• Continuous and formative assessment
• Greater customization of course content to meet
  learner needs
• Greater flexibility, user customizable materials

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Teaching the New Learner

• Interactive course site features
• Online quizzes
• Forms for providing feedback or asking questions
• Online voting
• Games
• Features for sharing pictures or stories
• Message boards
• Forums for offering and receiving information
• Features for creating/adding content

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Teaching the New Learner

• Diversity in structure, content
• singular unit should be kept short and
  alternating
• Course redesigns must be systematic
• Avoid incremental add-ons
• Simply adding a few computer experiences costs
  more, is more work for the faculty, and adds to
  the students' burden
• True innovations change rather than modify systems

Jack M. WilsonTen IT Commandments
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Teaching the New Learner

• Requires
• much less emphasis on the amount of material
  memorized
• much more emphasis on making connections,
  thinking through issues, solving problems
• Discard notion that schools can teach everything
  every student will need to know
• Old model primary challenge of learning is to
  absorb specific information

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Technology the New Learner

• The amount of information grows almost as quickly
  as the new technologies
• We process more information in 24-hours than the
  average person 500 years ago would in a lifetime
• Oldest universities established by AD 1500

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Technology the New Learner

• By the time todays kindergarteners graduate from
  grade 12
• information will have doubled at least seven
  times
• technological power will have doubled itself
  nearly nine times

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Teaching the New Learner

• Learning now a life-long process of coping with
  change
• The content of a particular lesson less important
  than learning how to learn

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Faculty Training

• We need to have a new set of expectations of
  faculty
• Foster a technology culture
• Need for continuous faculty training
• Reward innovation in technology-rich learning
  environments

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Whats Next?

• More conversation
• Faculty development and support
• A culture change!

Darla Runyon drunyon_at_nwmissouri.edu Roger Von
Holzen rvh_at_nwmissouri.edu