The Rise of Technology
Will Classrooms be Exclusively Online in the Future?
The rise and development of technology has had a considerable impact on our daily life over the last 15 to 20 years and will continue to influence our life in the future. Technology enables the world's population to communicate with each other even if they are literally on opposite sides of the globe. This is a remarkable change in the way of communication, but not all changes coming from this technological revolution work to our advantage. As a future teacher I do have to consider how and to which extent these influences and developments will affect my future professional life. How is New Media changing the school as a place for education and as an environment for social- as well as self- and identity development? Right now the New Media are continuing their triumphant procession into the German classrooms. More and more media are used before, during and after the lessons to such a high degree that not the content of information dominate the conceptualization of lessons, but rather the way of how media can be used to convey this information. The growing focus on the use of media made me think about schools as endangered institutions for the education of our future children. Will they be going to schools as tangible buildings as we did, or will they attend online lessons in the internet? In order to further elaborate this issue I will illustrate the significance of New Media in our present society and their impact on our education system. Afterwards I will present some obvious advantages and disadvantages within the concept of online classrooms.
A profound knowledge in the use of New Media is nowadays mandatory to achieve a relatively high paid profession. In order to enhance the media competence of these future managers, consultants and advisors, the Ministry of Education in Germany and thus the respective schools in the German States provide curricula where these competences are trained. At least for the subjects I will be teaching in school media competence training is fixed to the respective curricula (Lehrplan English 47, 67-68; Lehrplan Geschichte 54 -55). Furthermore the teachers of these pupils themselves need sophisticated knowledge about the use of New Media respectively, in order to be able to contribute suitable exercises, challenges and projects for their pupils. The English department for the teachers degree of the Philipps-University in Marburg for example added a module to their curriculum in which the didactics and the competences in the field of New Media are supposed to be trained. (Heuser 18). This module is obligatory and the grade is taken into account for the student's final state examination.
After completing this media module I can only emphasize the seemingly endless amount of possibilities these New Media are offering to us and that they are by far not restricted to giving presentations or playing audio samples in the classroom only. A countless variety of powerful online tools provide coverage of almost every topic and methodological approach given by the respective curricula. These tools provide online platforms for vocabulary learning and practicing, online collaborating and publishing and may generate an increase of the pupils' creative writing ability by converting their own stories into digital comic strips or videos. Contrary to the classical teaching approach with textbooks which are branded with the image of being boring and demotivating, New Media are supposed to offer a higher degree of motivation and productivity.
Concerning the motivation and productivity of the pupils, it is very interesting to know that recent studies about the use of media in the daily life of young adolescents show that the older the children get, the more they use New Media like the internet or media in general (JIM-Studie 27). This indicates that media play an omnipresent role in the life of school children and leads to the conclusion that especially pupils are used to New Media in their daily life. Why should we not to use this "natural" enthusiasm and implement more media in our classrooms and lessons? But to which extent is the "medialization" of the classroom to the pupils' advantage and to which it may become harmful?
If we do start to think about a hypothetical establishment of online classrooms for certain subjects, we have to think about the technical preliminaries and equipment the teachers and the pupils need first. In order to work and contribute to an online lesson, all the pupils need the technical equipment and knowledge to work with a computer. The same study that indicated the pupil's affinity to media constitutes that 79% of the children between the age of 12 and 19 do have a computer at home, but that only 65% have a computer on their own (JIM-Studie 7-8). That means, that only two thirds of the pupils would be able to attend an online lesson at all - the rest would be left behind. Only if all children at their respective age own a computer with an internet connection, an online classroom would be possible. But as long as we are thinking about a hypothetical online classroom, let us think about the problems, disadvantages or even harms this concept evokes.
For me as a future teacher one of the biggest obstacles concerning the concept of an online classroom will certainly be the issue of grading the pupils' work. First of all we have to define the traditional way of grading the pupil's work in a classroom. We combine grades for oral participation and written examinations or tests into a final grade. With online classrooms there would be no grade for oral participation at all. Future teachers are solely forced to rely on the work handed in by the pupils. On top of that, we can not know for sure that the pupils have worked on their own or just have copied content from Wikipedia or other online sources or databases. Testing the pupils' work for possible plagiarism constitutes a significantly higher amount of work for the teachers. On top of that just a few of the online classroom tools offer the possibility of an e-examination or test in order to evaluate the pupil's learning progress.
Additionally the largest disadvantage to the concept of online classrooms in my opinion is the omission of social interaction. Next to the own family, school and the interaction with your respective peer group is one of the major influences in the social development and the identity building process of a young adolescent (Berg 47-48). Friendships which are established in school may last the rest of your life. Many of the first serious encounters with the opposing gender are experienced in school years. These encounters may evoke some of the most basic emotional experiences in life like collegiality, dependence, discipline, envy, jealousy or even love for the first time. If these essential interactions are superposed by communicating via so called social networks or even entirely left out of the child's social development, the child will never be able to constitute a peer group of his/her own. As long as children feel no urge to join a peer group or sports club in their leisure time because communicating via social networks seems to be a sufficient interaction with other children, their lack of physical activity exposes them to possible obesity.
As previously documented there are many advantages of the concept of online classrooms which cannot be met by traditional teaching approaches in a physical classroom, but I do not believe that classrooms should be exclusively online. Sure, some online tools, websites or learning platforms and software do offer a broader variety to methodological and didactical techniques, but almost all of these approaches have a traditional equivalent in a physical classroom. The classroom, especially with its function for an establishment of a foundation for self and identity, is too important to be extinguished.
A very interesting approach of how New Media can be used in classrooms is provided by Jörg Zumbach in his book Lernen mit neuen Medien - Instruktionspsychologische Grundlagen. According to his traits of a constructivist learning environment New Media definitely support pupils in their learning process, because New Media are considerably better at providing a familiar learning environment compared to textbooks. This familiarity leads to a significantly more realistic and relevant connection between task and pupil, because the pupils are able to see in which way the solution of the presented problem is relevant for their own life. This is just one of the beneficial aspects of Zumbach's traits. Other traits concentrate on the advantages of multi-perspectives, the individual reflective responsibility within the pupil's learning process or the multimodal presentation of information (Zumbach 18-26). Nevertheless all of Zumbach's traits are based on a physical classroom, not on a virtual online classroom.
New Media can have the ability to enthuse and inspire the pupils' creativity, but the children's whole educational and social development should not be centered and dependent on computers and online learning. Teachers should rather see New Media as an additional supportive element to their didactical and methodological techniques.
Bibliography:
Berg, Hans-Jürgen. Entwicklung Einer Schulklasse Zur Gruppe : Erfahrungen Mit Interaktionsübungen in Einer Berufsfachschulklasse Im Lernort Berufsschule. Diss. Phillips-Universität Marburg, 1990. Frankfurt A. M.: Haag + Herchen, 1990. Print.
"Hessisches Kultusministerium - Gymnasium8." Hessisches Kultusministerium. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.kultusministerium.hessen.de/irj/HKM_Internet?uid=3b43019a-8cc6-
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Heuser, Sabine. "Englisch_4_Komplett_Modulhandbuch_Jan 2008." Modulhandbuch Englisch Lehramt an Gymnasien. Jan. 2008. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.
<http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb10/iaa/studium/studibera/la-mod/lapdfs/ kc_english_4_modulhandbuch>
"JIM Studie 2010 - Jugend, Information (Multi-) Media." Jim Studie 2010. Medienpädagogischer Forschungsverbund Südwest. Web. 27 Feb. 2011.
<http://www.mpfs.de/fileadmin/JIM-pdf10/JIM2010.pdf>.
Zumbach, Jörg. Lernen Mit Neuen Medien - Instruktionspsychologische Grundlagen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010. Print