Learning technologies change student-resource interactions not only by the amount of resources that are now available to students, but also by the quality of the resources.
Instead of students being limited to the textbook they receive from their school, that may or may not be outdated, they now have access to resources from literally around the world.
With that being said, quantity does not necessarily mean quality. For every respectable source of information online, there’s an endless amount of second rate information. Teaching students how to find valid and reliable sources of information is paramount to education in the digital age. However, I don’t believe it stops there.
Knowledge At Your (Digital) Fingertips
I want to talk about something interesting I learned from watching a video on Sugata Mitra. He is the Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, England.
He is best known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT. He is also the winner of the TED Prize 2013. In the video below, he talks about four things that modern students of the digital age need to learn in order to be contributing members of a global society.
- First, they should be adept at finding information quickly and easily on the internet.
- Next, he says they have to comprehend what they are reading.
- Third, students will have to organise the information they have discovered in a manner that makes sense.
- Finally, decide which information they will use to make a decision, solve a problem, or accomplish a task.
Mitra goes on to state that with these skills, there is no job or career that a student now will not be prepared for in their future.
