While researching something I was writing recently, I stumbled across an article by Doug Davis, Professor of Psychology at Haverford College and leader of the second NITLE Al Musharaka Summer Seminar in 2003. One interesting this about it is how quickly the technology become dated! But it is a good article and is worth a look.
When the technological and political events that now preoccupy us are exhumed and examined by historians, it will surely be remarked that never was the misfit between professors’ favored styles of teaching and the actual skills and predilections brought to learning by the young so great, or so rapidly increasing. Most of us struggle daily to use the personal computers, word-and data-processing software, e-mail tools, and Web services with which we are provided. We often despair of getting a whole class to read a few paragraphs of Freud with sufficient attention that we can have a real class discussion. On the other hand, the liberal arts college student who five years ago would have described herself as “not a computer person” now spends four hours a night on America Online, even as she tries to make sense of Freud with the best of her downloaded Nine Inch Nails music collection ringing in her ears. Her male suite mate spends a good deal more time playing a (female) Barbarian character in the EverQuest online role-playing game than learning chemistry. Faculty who feel pressured to lug a laptop computer and a bag of audiovisual connectors into class wonder whether this generation can tell the difference between a glitzy Web page and an actual argument, and many students find the “monotasking” of book and lecture a weak brew to accompany the smorgasbord of media to which they are wired. Surely we liberal arts professors are at a nexus having to do with the ways we and our students use information technology.
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There’s an article in Peer Review, a publication of the AAC&U that caught my attention recently. In “Transforming the Study Abroad Experience into a Collective Priority” Ross Lewin, Director of Study Abroad at the University of Connecticut advocates for a more holistic approach to the study abroad experience. In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on including some sort of experience abroad in undergraduate education, in response to the challenges of the global age, but Lewis raises concerns that the way these experiences are too often conducted does little to equip students to better compete of function as responsible citizens in the global age. Indeed, too often study abroad is little more than a vacation in some friendly European capital or seaside town. The solution, he argues, is to make the study abroad experience a collective priority.