[ED 257A] Week 1: ICT Literacies

----------------------
This week's reading is based off of:

Kennedy & Judd, 2011 "Beyond Google and the 'satisficing' searching of digital natives"

Lai & Hong, 2015 "Technology use and learning characteristics of students in higher education: Do generational differences exist?"

---------------------

We started our first week with a brainstorming session on desired characteristics of instruction and instructional materials followed by a discussion of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and course management sites.

Kennedy & Judd highlight a growing trend in the current generation of students (dubbed "Digital natives" or the "Google generation") of "satisficing" their studies through cursory online searches are just sufficient to complete the task. This I thought was an apt observation of how students today approach their studies, regardless of field, in light of the emergence of the Internet and ubiquity of information. Indeed, we saw this trend in our own class demographic when polling for digital learning characteristics of ourselves and the undergraduate population we teach. The poll is taken on a scale of from 1= Strongly Agree to 5 = Strongly Disagree. For example, many of us are comfortable with a several forms of technology.

Perhaps because of our digital literacy, we are also guilty of "satisficing" in expecting to find an answer to our question quickly. Often times this is through a Google search, or nowadays, Wikipedia.

 In being digital literate in so many technologies, we have adopted the mindset that multitasking is the way to accomplish and learn. However, research has suggested we don't truly multitask, just switch between tasks quickly and that switching process could be cognitively costly. Certainly food for thought.

While the ubiquity of information is certainly powerful, it can hinder good habits. I observe this in my own field. A current trend in materials science is high-throughput computing (for example, the Materials Genome Initiative). The idea is because we now have powerful supercomputers, we can now do massive number of calculations on arbitrarily complex systems to identify new materials. We have all this data now, but the question is, can we reasonably screen our data without error? Are we losing information by throwing it away based on some pre-determined criteria? Before the advent of big data, much of research in condensed matter physics was driven by physical intuition and the ability understand general physical concepts. While high-throughput computing affords us a great tool, I believe it is important to understand the limitations of a tool. The same applies to using the Internet for educational purposes. It is important to be critical of what lies in front you.

We also covered the tools in course management sites, such as our own Gauchospace. In starting to teach my own course MAT 188, Gauchospace has been an extremely important tool to communicate the course and provide supporting material. It was enlightening to learn about all the effort that goes into Gauchospace. From my own experience in graduate classes in the engineering and sciences, Gauchospace is underutilized. It was not until I took courses in the Education department and had to build MAT 188 that I was made aware of all the features that Gauchospace has. Perhaps this is a manifestation of what Lai and Hong alluded to in their study of whether generational differences exist in the usage of technology in higher education. That is, the technology divide occurs not so much across generations but rather across fields of study (and gender). What are your thoughts on why this occurs? Offering courses that graduate students from all disciplines can participate and exchange perspectives is a great avenue to lessen this divide, and I'm excited to partake such a course this quarter.