Social Media and/or Education

This week has been a week of technological frustration. It seems that more and more teachers are embracing the incidious call of technology and requiring their students to sign up for and join countless websights (each with their own slightly different name and password that one must track). Students bring their laptops to class to click out "notes", visit three different sights to view grades, or frantically write out a blog that their classmates could, but probably won't read. Sometimes I feel like being forced to keep track of all these things makes my life harder not easier. Especially because I tend to be a strong kinesthetic learner and typing notes doesn't work for me. (Writing notes on a blackboard is ideal, but I'll settle for a skinny red notebook.)

My brother is enthusiastic about change--particularly the technological kind. He says that all change is hard because people are afraid of it. I think he could be right. But, really, is it so wrong to want a library of actual thick, heavy books instead of light, white 'Kindle'? (On the other hand, I would like to carry three books on the plane for the weight of one.) But what would I do without e-mail as a means of communicating with my professors? What would I do without Word and a printer to make neat-looking papers instead of writing my 5 pg essay by hand? And how would the stay-at-home-mother-of-three get a degree in paralegal without internet-based classrooms?

Just because this is a new way of doing school doesn't make it a poor way of doing school. But like all technology (and nearly everything else I can think of), the tools are only as good as the one using them. If the professor is capable and "savvy", then I predict the students will learn a lot from the technological tools, but if the professor does not use the tools to their full capabilities, then the students will suffer. (Illistration: I once had a little old Chemistry teacher who finally got a brand new 'SmartBoard' in her classroom. It could do a lot, but she treated it as projectable whiteboard/powerpoint display. It was a very bad whiteboard and we all wished she would switch back.)