Social Foundations of Education and Media

Hi Dr.Stoloff,
Just curious; have you found in your research that teaching today requires educators to become more of entertainers than instructors? The reason I ask is because we have to compete with TV, PlayStation, Ipods,Myspace,email, and so many other things. It just seems that in my experience kids today need more bells and whistles in order to stay engaged in learning activities than from what I remember when I was growing up.

Maggie Tarbox
EDU 553

   Maggie Tarbox 10.28.06 @ 9:09 pm

Good point about teachers as entertainers. Here’s an international discussion on that topic -

http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej28/f1.html

But I remember when I was a child, people complained about comic books, TV, rock music on the radio, …

Thanks for your comments.

David

   stoloffd 10.28.06 @ 11:37 pm

Interesting discussion,
One salient point was ”

I believe that today’s students are more capable of multi-tasking or dividing their attention than students of the past. But if we want their full attention it is best to compete for it rather than demand it. I would like to know if other teachers have a similar opinion.”

Maybe kids are capable of multi-tasking, but I wonder if the end products are high quality if they have such divided attention?

I do agree that teachers need to compete with, rather than try to eliminate distractions. If the topics are lively, the class is interactive, and the discussions engage students I find that covert text messagint et al. becomes less of a problem.

Maggie

   Maggie Tarbox 10.29.06 @ 6:53 pm