Visual Turn

From a teacher in my course on authentic assessment of student learning:

The millennial generation is already inundated with technology and it’s up to the instructors to harness that and utilize it in the class.

My reply:

I think ultimately this may be the most important thing we can do — to carefully identify what kinds of technology our students are already familiar with (such as texting) and discover ways to leverage this prior knowledge for learning and assessment (such as texting collaboratively in Twitter).

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development is a good model here — if we stretch our students a bit beyond their current use of technology, they will grow, but if we stretch them too far beyond where they are, they may not be able to make the leap.

Pew Internet collects a lot of data on what technologies are being used and how they are being used. This might be an excellent way to go about selecting the appropriate technology for our assessments.

Teachers have their own Zone of Proximal Development. A teacher who uses Skype to talk to faraway loved ones is probably more likely to use similar technology in the classroom.

Maybe faculty development efforts in technology start at the wrong place.

There is much greater risk for a teacher to try a new technology in the classroom without having already learned to use it in “real life.” Your family will be forgiving if your Skype video isn’t perfect. Your students might not be. Maybe we should be offering workshops for faculty (and students) to learn to use technology outside of the classroom where the stakes aren’t so high, and then let the technology migrate back into the classroom on its own. Adults need both safety and relevance for learning, and both are abundant when you have a video chat with your grandkids.

— Visual Turn