Reflection in an Always-on Learning Environment: Has It Been Turned Off?
By Helen L. Chen
Stanford University
Who are the students entering today's colleges and universities? Sometimes
referred to as the Net Generation or Millennials (students born in or after
1982), we know that this is a group that has never known a world without computers
and the Internet. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a study on
"Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 year olds" (www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm)
which found that not only are children and teens interacting with media (including
TV, videos, music, video games, computers, movies and print) for non-school
activities on average 6 hours per day, but a quarter to a third of
these students are multi-tasking, and using another form of media while reading,
using a computer, or listening to music. Video game designer and writer Marc
Prensky uses the metaphor of digital natives vs. digital immigrants (http://www.marcprensky.com)
to suggest that these kinds of experiences (video game playing, interactions
via instant messaging, email, and cell phones, watching MTV) have actually changed
the physical structure of digital natives' brains, how they think, and consequently
how they learn.
Educause's Diana Oblinger describes how the expectations of this generation
have implications for all aspects of college life. Faculty and instructors will
find the learning styles of these students oriented towards teamwork, experiential
activities, and the use of technology such as online discussions or simulations.
Institutions must provide students with a campus infrastructure that enables
them to be connected anytime and anywhere through cell phones, email, and instant
messaging. Administrators and staff must meet a strong expectation for excellent
customer service and immediacy with a low tolerance for delays during the admissions
process, and in student services and academic advising. The learning environment
that students reside in is one that is characterized by multitasking, visual
orientation, immediate gratification, and parallel processing (www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0342.pdf).
One could argue that coping with information overload and developing the cognitive
skills to effectively manage and critically evaluate and communicate information
are essential to 21st century literacy and students' future success. However,
my concern lies with what these digital natives may be losing in the process,
namely the opportunity and the skills to effectively reflect on their learning
experiences for the purpose of turning those experiences into meaningful and
reusable knowledge. Blog historian, Rebecca Blood, states: "We are being
pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to
reflect, we will be left with only our reactions" (www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html).
From Marc Prensky's perspective, this is both a challenge and an opportunity
for educators: how to build reflection and critical thinking into the learning
process but in a language and format that is relevant to how today's students
understand and live their lives.
The issue is not just about providing time to reflect, but recognizing that
reflection for the purpose of learning is a skill that needs to be taught, possibly
through an apprenticeship model. For example, at Middlebury College (VT),
lecturer Barbara Ganley (mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/)
has incorporated blogs (a web application that contains date and time-stamped
posts, weblinks, and commenting features on a common web page) in her creative
writing courses. In asking her students to make their thoughts public and open
to commentary, to share their works in progress, and to be exposed to their
peers and class community, she realized that as the instructor she also needed
to engage in the same activities and risks she was asking her students to take.
She did so by blogging on her own growth and evolution as a humanities and writing
teacher integrating technology into the classroom. For both faculty and students,
blogs have the potential to encourage reflective thinking and community building
through "blogging-as-conversation" rather than just "blogging-as-monologue."
Another example of how reflection can be reframed for today's students is through
such tools as electronic learning portfolios or e-portfolios. Reflection is
an essential component of an e-portfolio and is inherent both in the process
of portfolio creation (selecting which artifacts to include and juxtaposing
learning experiences in a digital space) as well as the actual portfolio product
(through annotations on individual or groups of artifacts which can then serve
as a concrete context for reflection with an advisor or mentor). At St. Olaf
College (MN) (www.stolaf.edu/depts/cis/web_portfolios.htm),
students in individually-designed majors create e-portfolios in web pages. They
use hyperlinks to illustrate the connections they have made among their courses,
jobs and internships, clubs and organizations, studies abroad, and research
experiences. The opportunity to create a rich representation of learning experiences
while incorporating various media-photographs, documents, video, sketches, music-can
be intrinsically motivating for students. At the same time, the public nature
of e-Portfolios can enhance or otherwise alter social interaction and communication
by facilitating the sharing of experiences and increasing occasions for dialogue
and feedback among students, faculty, prospective employers, and the larger
community.
The conceptual framework of the Learning Landscape, co-developed by Tracy Penny-Light
of the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and David Tosh of the
University of Edinburgh (UK) (www.eradc.org/blog/archives/learning_landscape2.php),
is one approach to thinking about the varied domains that comprise students'
lives - academic, community, and workplace - and the overlapping areas that
offer the most potential for integration, transfer, and re-use of knowledge
in other learning contexts.
In this model, e-portfolios support intentional
learners who are able to adapt to new environments and situations, synthesize
experiences from a variety of courses and environments, inside and outside the
classroom, on campus and off campus, in face-to-face and virtual environments,
and during and beyond their undergraduate years (see the Integrative Learning
Project co-sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities
and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/IntegrativeLearning/index.htm).
Blogs and e-portfolios are two examples of the social software tools that might
scaffold more reflection for our digital natives. We also can assign "shared-author
essays" where two students write alternating paragraphs of an essay, in
the process gaining access to self-reflection and a sense of audience, or how
other's make meaning. The adaptation of these, and other emerging social software
tools, has great promise for encouraging the development of intellectual coherence
and integrative capacities in our future graduates. While these "always
on" students are in our charge, it is our responsibility to help them make
meaningful and lasting connections as they live their frenetic lifestyles.
--Helen L. Chen (hlchen at stanford.edu) is a research scientist at the Stanford
Center for Innovations in Learning (scil.stanford.edu/)
and co-facilitator of the Electronic Portfolios Community of Practice (EPAC).