We’ve all laughed at them.
We’ve probably been that person as well.
As a professor, I see it every semester – new students walking into the wrong classrooms or standing in the middle of the halls looking perplexed. Even on a university campus as small as ours (Oklahoma City University), new students get lost. They stand, schedules in hand, and wait for someone to offer help or for someone to pass who looks friendly enough to ask.
Students at the University of California in San Diego won’t wait idly for help if they get lost on campus. Instead, they’ll pull out their iPhones and launch their interactive campus map app.
UCSD is the most recent university to make the mobile move with a university-created free app providing an interactive campus map, including where particular classes are located; college sports scores; and the ability to call, text or e-mail the campus community. Officials also are creating a similar Blackberry function. Read more here.
The university isn’t the first to use apps to help students navigate their university lives. The Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas A&M, Ohio State, Duke, and Stanford are among universities using mobile technology to help students. A Japanese university recently launched an application that allows university officials to track student attendance. Read more here.
Given our preference for travel aided by GPS, these developments seem like wonderful ideas. I hope my university soon can offer similar amenities.
from → Journalism Education, Media Industry, Multimedia, Stories
Blogging, tweeting, texting, status updating, and e-mailing are just a few of the ways today’s college students write.
But all of this writing doesn’t necessarily mean this generation is composed of better writers.
“Some scholars say this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands,” according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers” discusses what one professor calls the “age of composition” because of the amount of writing people now perform. The studies addressed in the article show how today’s college students write more outside of class than in a classroom setting. They also show that students enjoy social writing, even though it has not positively impacted writing and grammar test scores. Students describe their social writing as more persistent and meaningful to them than their class writing, according to another professor.
The question becomes how to use this passion for outside writing within the classroom boundaries. In other words, how can educators use students’ desire to express themselves socially to help them academically? Perhaps professors make the writing less relevant to students simply by associating it with academia. IDK, but I do recognize that social media is creating a generation of writers who cannot form proper sentences or spell words correctly.
from → Media Education
