E-mail is SOOOO 20th century…
One of the things we are taught when we are studying to become teachers is to “meet students where they are” in terms of their learning styles and preferences. It does no good to teach at a pace that is too fast or too slow for the learner, nor is it a good idea to use materials or methods that do not directly address the way a person learns. This idea is at the heart of constructivist teaching–find out what motivates a student and start from there to build a teaching and learning system that optimizes a student’s opportunity to learn.
It’s interesting to consider this in light of existing and emerging technologies. As teachers of teachers, those of us in schools of education (if we practice what we preach) should be meeting our students where they are in terms of their learning styles and preferences. These styles and preferences were typically developed in a world of ubiquitous technology in their homes, in a world in which e-mail, the world wide web, and computers have always been there.
That’s why a recent article on CNET caught my attention. In “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead,” Stephanie Olson writes:
The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.
Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.
“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.
“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.
There is a lot to digest in those words. How many terms did you encounter that refer to something about which you know little or nothing? Facebook? MySpace? Podcast? Mashup? Social networks? Does this suggest that your students–the ones in your university classes, studying to become teachers–know about something very important that you don’t? Read on:
“If I’m talking to any friends it’s through a social network,” said Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer. “For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people.”
Not only are some of the methods of communicating changing, but the devices used to communicate are also evolving. Facebook runs on cell phones. There are more than 15 billion cell phone in the world today and only a third as many computers, most of which are sitting on desktops [citation]. Most cell phones can capture video, send and receive text messages, and even work with e-mail.
Butler replied that she uses Facebook on her cell phone. “I need (Facebook) everywhere I go, but I log into e-mail only once a week,” she said.
More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging.
Social networks may or may not be the future of communications–things change quickly these days. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that we–post-secondary educators–need to be conversant with the tools that our students use and the learning styles that are fostered by them. We may tell ourselves that we’re using technology for teaching because we use Blackboard and send e-mail to our students. We may ask them to look up topics on a web page instead of a textbook or use a discussion board to post threaded comments. But to our students, this is probably neither engaging nor is it technology. It was all invented before they were born.
It’s soooo 20th century…
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