{"id":22,"date":"2009-06-15T20:33:58","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T00:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2009\/06\/15\/students-online-their-engaged-is-not-our-engaged\/"},"modified":"2009-06-15T20:33:58","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T00:33:58","slug":"students-online-their-engaged-is-not-our-engaged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/2009\/06\/15\/students-online-their-engaged-is-not-our-engaged\/","title":{"rendered":"Students Online: Their Engaged is Not our Engaged"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/oliviahotshot\/3590148411\/\" title=\"SLER6_1_09_008 by Olivia Hotshot, on Flickr\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3325\/3590148411_22cf66d2c3.jpg\" alt=\"SLER6_1_09_008\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus<\/p>\n<p>Photo Courtesy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/oliviahotshot\/\">Olivia Hotshot<\/a><\/p>\n<p>We faculty who teach with technology claim we can multitask.  Yet there is a bigger question: can anyone really do that? And what does &#8220;engaged in learning&#8221; mean to the Millennials we now teach?<\/p>\n<p>I went to the June 2 Second Life Education Roundtable with those questions in my head, after hearing our topic from organizer AJ Brooks. AJ pulled off a coup by bringing Harry Pence, (SL: John2 Kepler) to a voice-chat meeting where Harry discussed his ideas and took questions from the audience.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Points worth noting:<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Harry defines engagement as involving &#8220;being focused on the matter at hand&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>We tended, as a group, to dismiss the idea that our minds can really multitask. Harry noted reading in Howard Rheingold&#8217;s blog about two types of attention, &#8220;multitasking&#8221; and &#8220;continuous partial attention&#8221; (Visit <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/blogs\/rheingold\/detail?entry_id=38828\" title=\"\">Rheingold&#8217;s entry on attention<\/a>, as well as higher-level links to his <a href=\"http:\/\/vlog.rheingold.com\/\">Video Blog<\/a> and his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rheingold.com\/\">Web site<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>Harry has never had a college student say &#8220;that&#8217;s too much&#8221; when he presents using voice and screen, but older audiences often get lost.<\/li>\n<li>His college students agree with him when he says that their younger siblings are truly fluent with networked technologies and will replace them in the workforce.<\/li>\n<li>AJ Brooks made a salient point I have often found true with my students: they are adept at using but not understanding the technologies. Iggy&#8217;s examples from his students: how few reallly can solve problems that require alpahnumeric fixes (such as tweaking source-code) or making proper back-ups or hardware hacks that come naturally to old geezers like me who can work on their own cars and build stuff with tools.<\/li>\n<li>KZero&#8217;s diagram of Virtual Worlds by age of users, Q4 2008: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kzero.co.uk\/blog\/?page_id=2563\">http:\/\/www.kzero.co.uk\/blog\/?page_id=2563<\/a> shows SL with a smaller, and older, demographic than many of the virtual worlds younger Millennials are using now. The open question remains whether or not they&#8217;ll take to SL or something like it, with user-generated content, when they get older.<\/li>\n<li>We noted how many of the worlds younger users encounter do not permit creation of new content. CathyWyo1 Haystack then asked, &#8220;do we want a generation of kids who are passively engaged or actively involved in the creation of their space?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>We all grew concerned about a generation &#8220;taught to the tests&#8221; and not encouraged to do as much collaborative learning. Harry noted a class in high school he encountered, where &#8220;Principal put them at the end of the hall b\/c they were making too much noise and having fun&#8221; and making noise.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m fond of Rheingold&#8217;s maxim that &#8220;Mindfulness and norms, my students helped me see, are essential tools for those who would master the arts of attention.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Can one be mindful of two things at once? Yes. Do them equally well? That I don&#8217;t know, but that too is where the norms for my class come in. In fall, if a student is online during class and it&#8217;s not course related, the norms are this: first time = warning, second time = &#8220;skipped class&#8221; in gradebook.<\/p>\n<p>You can read the entire transcript of Harry&#8217;s talk <a href=\"http:\/\/virtualworldsedu.info\/slroundtable\/090602.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Location: Montclair State University Virtual Campus Photo Courtesy of Olivia Hotshot We faculty who teach with technology claim we can multitask. Yet there is a bigger question: can anyone really do that? And what does &#8220;engaged in learning&#8221; mean to the Millennials we now teach? I went to the June 2 Second Life Education Roundtable &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/2009\/06\/15\/students-online-their-engaged-is-not-our-engaged\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Students Online: Their Engaged is Not our Engaged<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6904,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6904"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}