October14
From time to time I get emails. Usually they’re about boring things like my course, my work or cheap pharmaceuticals but occasionally I get a good one. Today was such a day and I found an email from another student at my college posing me a question for an article for Durham’s student newspaper, The Palatinate. The question read as follows:
Some students have argued that Durham is behind the times when it comes to technology, and that we should be using more up-to-date means of learning, eg podcasts etc.
Could I possibly get your views on this, and what you think Durham is doing technologically already which is good, and also what more it could/should do to benefit students.
I am primarily of the opinion that the most important tool in learning is the teacher, shortly followed by the ability of the student to make notes quickly and in their own manner. That is why despite how much I’d like to use a laptop in lectures I still end up with a pad of paper and a pen – its far easier to make notes that way. In the same way, I much prefer lecturers showing me something and writing it myself than having handouts with all the information on because at the end of the day the information is there with or without the lecture (in books, on the internet etc.) but I’m in the lecture to learn it, not to find out about it.
I’m definitely someone who likes technology for technology’s sake, but that doesn’t mean we should force it into important areas just because we can. Having an interactive whiteboard is good if a lecturer uses it to annotate a diagram, allowing us to do the same and saving time of drawing the diagram, but useless if the lecturer shows us 25 slides, talks a lot and gives us a print out. We had a lecturer last year who printed their slides with lines next to them for notes, yet never gave us an opportunity to write anything useful as she just persisted in talking too fast over the slides.
Podcasts are something that a few people get into, but its nothing special – its little more than a radio program that you can choose when to listen to and produce slightly more easily; I don’t recall teachers ever broadcasting lessons before so why start now? The internet can be a great provider of resources, and in Durham the phrase “everything you need is on DUO” is a popular one. But putting aside the fact that DUO is an ugly and difficult to use piece of software is it even right to rely on it for teaching? If everything we needed was on DUO coming to lectures or even University would be pointless. Clearly the difference is in actually being taught, and nothing beats that like talking and note-taking.
Put simply the best teacher I ever had was amazed by what technology could do, and as such taught entirely on a whiteboard with us taking notes on booklets produced for the course, and never available online. She used the technology for handy breaks in lessons where she’d show us amusing videos and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
