A follow-up to Smale and Regalado (2017), Ugoretz (2005), and Smale and Rosen (2015).
At the beginning of this semester I have asked my students at Intro to Stats course at Brooklyn college to name potential challenges that might prevent them from succeeding in class. The course requires them to submit all home assignments via Blackboard and 15% of homework questions require use of statistical software SPSS available in Computer Labs and Library on campus.
Out of 30 students who responded to my online survey, only six explicitly mentioned technology related anxieties.
One wrote “Math has always been my weakest subject and now that its on computers makes me even more stressed.”
Other mentioned “having hard time understanding SPSS”.
The majority (17 out of 30) of students mentioned having a job (or several) to be potentially limiting their academic taskscape.
Ingold—an anthropologist by training—coined the term taskscape to describe “the temporality of the landscape,” suggesting that “as the landscape is an array of related features, so, by analogy,the taskscape is an array of related activities” (158).
quoted from Smale and Regalado, 2015, p.14.
Still, the results of earlier studies by Smale and Regalado, indicate that level of technology-related barriers to learning is much higher for students in CUNY system.
So I was wondering if our group could share their own anecdotal evidence of their current/former students (or perhaps even co-workers) having technology-related difficulties with academic/professional practices.
- How do you assess such barriers? And how do you adjust your teaching/professional practices to account for it?
- Do you use open platforms mentioned by Rosen and Smale in their piece on “Open Digital Pedagogy” (WordPress, Google Sites, Tumblr,etc.) to provoke engaging discussion bypassing teacher-student hierarchy in a way suggested by Ugoretz (2005)? Perhaps you can share some rules-of-thumb that you developed by using them or express frustrations with their efficacy?
- What institutional barriers to using technology for learning did you notice on CUNY campuses? For example, I know that students in William James building at Brooklyn College are not allowed to work in Computer labs without instructor. I assume that this is true for BC in general. But here at the GC we can use any computer at any lounge/lab at any time!
Productive Digressions welcome!
