Why does my head hurt so much? It wasn’t like this when I was at Uni.

Reading Hara (1999) and Noble (1988).

Do you think these issues are representative of the broader picture of technology adoption in universities?

What issues would you personally identify as problems associated with the use of digital and networked technologies in education (either in your practice or more generally)?

A Students Perspective

'I need more individual help', it is much easier for the tutor to explain this to me than it is for me to sit and study and gain my own understanding. Why? Because I have a busy life I have 100s of facebook friends to gossip with and many other distractions that are much more interesting than learning. So you sit with me tell me what I need to know to pass the exam. In fact do I need an exam, can’t I just copy and paste something of the internet after all, it holds all the answers doesn’t it? It’s alright for you when you were a student you never had all this technology to deal with. Buy the way it is fine for me to use the technology but on my terms, don't force me to try and interact online and produce collaborative work it's too time consuming I'll do it down the students bar and hand it in on a scrap of paper.

I am paying for this course so tell me what I need to know, and if I choose to use facebook and twitter during the lesson, and turn up late or give the odd lesson a miss; put up with it.

A practitioners perspective

By creating all this innovative learning and presenting it in a format for web based access will I be making myself surplice to requirements. All this technology is for ever changing having designed discrete web pages before Web 2.0 apps I now have to move to a new platform. My delicious account although safe now, looked like it was going to crash and burn and I have learnt how to use Jing, Picasso, Google Docs, Diigo the list is endless. All this technology, my head hurts talk about information overload. If that’s not enough my students email me 24hrs a day and expect an immediate reply and ask to many questions because they email as their first port of call. Why won’t they use the conference?

The technology doesn’t always work anyone who has tried to do an Elluminate online tutorial will know how stressful this can be. Because I study distance education I am biased and probably too much so if I was honest (Hara 1999). I feel sorry for the laggards that lag behind because students expectations are that they will use technology and develop shared documents online and converse in a facebook group with the rest of the class and tweet each other during lessons and… and …. the list goes on.

Oh dear I just want to teach my subject, why won’t the students listen to me, why are they always on their phones, why do they not get involved in the discussions oh why does my head hurt so much? It wasn’t like this when I was at Uni.

Hara, N. and Kling, R. (1999) ‘Students’ frustrations with a web-based distance education course’ [online], First Monday, vol.4, no.12, http://firstmonday.org/ htbin/ cgiwrap/ bin/ ojs/ index.php/ fm/ article/ view/ 710/ 620 (last accessed 10 February 2011).

Noble, D.F. (1998) ‘Digial dipoloma mills: the automation of higher education’ [online], First Monday, vol.3, no.1,http://firstmonday.org/ htbin/ cgiwrap/ bin/ ojs/ index.php/ fm/ article/ view/ 569/ 490 (last accessed 10 February 2011).