Education's New Facelift!

Sarah Smith Robbins discusses the need to think about students and not so much the University and to meet students where they are at, especially in terms of technology. Robbins is specifically addresses 18-24 year old students and looks at their technological habits, stating statistics such as 89% use email. Robbins states that today’s students are hyper mediated and contrasts the environment they are used to from the TV and Internet and compares it to the traditional classroom environment. Robbins says the new face of education includes social networking (such as facebook), contributed content (such as Wikipedia) and Multi-user virtual environments or MUVE’s such as facebook.
I definitely agree that there are many benefits to changing the current face of education. Though some traditional methods may still be of use, it is important to stay relevant in order to stay interesting. Even in my SL presentation last week, we talked about distance education and the benefits of going to class in Second Life vs. Logging on to WebCT. Ofcourse, students should still be expected to know how to write papers and to order their thoughts logically to form convincing arguments. But, as technology advances, online articles and blogs etc, are becoming increasingly popular and so students must learn to adapt to demand and changing environments. However, a downfall to this form of education is that students are increasingly relying on sources like Wikipedia. Although collaborative content has its benefits and allows students to participate in sharing and editing information, it is ultimately not a “scholarly” source and students are becoming more reliant on their peers than on the experts.
I believe there were a lot of strengths to Robbins argument. She was able to acknowledge that a changing an increasingly technological savvy environment calls for new forms of teaching. As well, she was able to give many personal examples from her own experiences with students in SL. Some weaknesses may include the fact that her statistics may have been out of date. As well, I agree with the comment at the end that students probably do have medial haunting, they are simply different. Overall, however, I believe she highlighted a lot of interesting points about the facelift that is much needed in the education system.