I’ve been meaning to ask you about technology in the class room and what your thoughts are on its role in shaping the students education both in and outside of the classroom environment?

–Question from a Colleague

In 2000, when I applied for a full time faculty position at Schoolcraft College, I needed to show that I could effectively incorporate technology into the classroom. Therefore, as part of my teaching demonstration, I created an effective PowerPoint presentation. In my first few years teaching at Schoolcraft College, I forced reluctant students to get e-mail accounts because they would need to know how to effectively use technology as they began their professional careers. Because I was supposed to be teaching research writing–not e-mail writing and technology, 0ne student filed a complaint with the Dean because I was forcing him to get an e-mail account and to use the Internet for part of his research. These were skills he knew he would never need.

When I began teaching film in 2006, I spent hundreds of dollars on DVD collections of short films so that I would have access to them in the classroom. My class was considered exciting and innovative because I was able to screen such a variety of films; something that was not common at the time because obtaining short films was both difficult and expensive. Although YouTube had been launched the previous year, it was still primarily a venue for teenage boys being stupid.

Today, the world of technology has changed in such a way that students have access to more information using their cell phones that I could have dreamed of incorporating into a class even as few as five years ago. For example, YouTube is no longer just teenage boys being stupid. It now provides access to over 7,000,000 short films, feature length documentaries from sources such as the History Channel, TED talks by prominent speakers, and so forth. Schoolcraft College has on-line databases that give easy access to thousands of academic journals. Google Books has scanned more than 20,000,000 books which are easily available to students.

In addition to the proliferation of quality materials available to our students via technology, there has also been a glut of sources that are superficial, specious, incomplete, or contain outright lies. For example, within a day after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elevated to the papacy, memes had already surfaced which quoted him as saying that “Women are naturally unfit for political office;” a position he was reported to have taken after Christina Fernandez de Kirchner was elected president of Argentina. Although a simple Internet search would reveal that there is no record of the quote prior to 13 March 2013, within 13 hours of being posted in Facebook, it had already reached the 18,000 followers of a Facebook page on which is was published and generated 11,000 shares. The quotation then appeared without attribution in El Pais, a newspaper published in Costa Rica.¹

Unfortunately, for individuals who are digitally illiterate, “simple” Internet searches are not so simple. For example, if a student wanted information on “study skills,” she or he would get 141,000,000 hits using a Google Search and 119,466 results in Academic Search Complete. What is a digitally illiterate student to do with such overwhelming results other than get overwhelmed?

Because of the vast amount of source material technology makes available to our students, I no longer consider—as I did when I applied to Schoolcraft College 13 years ago—that the primary issue concerning classroom technology is how to best use it to provide content to my students. Instead, I see helping students develop skills in digital literacy as paramount; skills that allow them to manage content in the classroom and in other aspects of their lives.

–Steven L. Berg, PhD

¹Statistics in this paragraph are from “Infeliz frase de Papa Francisco sería solo una ‘leyenda urbana‘” and Snopes.com.