Facebook and Academic performance: reconciling a media sensation with data
Is there a relationship between facebook use and grades? That’s an interesting point I had never thought of before!
But seriously, now that we’ve talked about a lot of these issues in class over the past weeks, I am much more interested in reading about the positive effects of these technologies in students lives rather than all the negative paranoia. Unfortunately, no matter what I do, my friends and family are still not convinced that texting and facebooking will not be the end of intelligence as we know it. My mom even forced me to watch that silly “In the year 2025” song on youtube for like the fiftieth time insisting that that is where we are heading if we don’t stop all this stuff, lol.
It also made me think about the summer class in TC where all of us grad students were playing around and working on our technology projects while you were in the back talking and walking us through stuff. We were easily able to multitask! We were sometimes working on podbean stuff even though you were talking about Twitter or whatnot, I don’t think students should be on facebook or texting in class, but at the same time, like with the Twitter experiment, students were able to understand what the instructor was saying, keep up with the class discussion, and participate all at once. Like several of our other readings have noted, this is a generation that needs to be multitasking. They thrive on doing many things at once and I think we need to give them more challenging things to do in the class or else they will multitask with the materials they brought with them.
Thanks for the Ad, now Help me with my Homework
It really was nice to read an article that didn’t just slam the negative effects of these technologies on students’ lives. I think reading this really helped me to see my own biases against gaming as a means of learning and how those thoughts are unwarranted and a little too negative, just like all the naysayers against social networking site. Is it because I understand SN but not gaming? Probably! I use fb all the time and I am not some delinquent! So why would students who game be? They’re not and we all need to learn how to embrace this.
I thought it was important that this article noted how student writing has actually increased because of social networking sites. My book review book talks about this as well. Students may be “butchering language” in their texts and facebooking, but they do know the difference between how to write in emails versus texts, versus school papers. A lot of our paranoia is unfounded, students are learning a lot of new skills from technology and we as educators need to embrace this, just like Gee and Prensky and them were talking about.
3 Ways educators are embracing technology
I have never Skyped and haven’t used the technology, but I know a TON of students are using it and I think I need to try it out! I loved the idea of the Spanish-American dialogue happening between the two classes and countries; it’s like having a pen pal but one that can help you learn in authentic ways. I agree with the conclusion of the article, we can’t ban these technologies (like the article on the banning of Wikipedia mentioned) and it’s silly to even try. The more we try to stop students from using them, the more they will rebel and the more policing we are going to be forced to do. Let students use their cellphones in between classes, who cares? Just make sure they know they can’t take advantage of this and come late to class or keep texting once they get there. I think it can be done, but it would take a lot of discussion rather than lecturing to get students to get on board with it.
