Supporting the Social and Ubiquitous Computing Expectations of Undergraduate Learners
Dr Susan Gasson and Dr Denise Agosto, the iSchool at Drexel
The defining characteristics of the next generation of Undergraduate students are emerging as those relating to “digital natives” who grew up with digital technologies and their social uses. Technologies and applications that provide ubiquitous access to information resources and permit constant access to social network contacts have stabilized as this generation moves into higher education. These young people have never known a world without pervasive, informational technologies and have heightened expectations of how such technologies will be used. They do not, in general, have such a strong technical understanding or interest in the technologies that they use per se, compared to previous generations of students. Instead, they see these as enabling technologies, that mediate interactions with family, peers, and other social contacts, and that enable access to a wide range of informational resources. These students have wider social networks than preceding generations of learners. It appears that they may have developed very different strategies for actively in information-seeking and learning to previous generations of students and to the majority of their instructors. Yet most of our evidence is anecdotal: we have little research to explain the expectations and learning strategies employed by these students, or the degree to which instructor responses to these expectations support the intended pedagogical model.
This is a study of how Universities as social organizations respond to and shape the introduction of new technologies in the delivery of higher education. From a human-centered computing perspective, we employ research methods and perspectives based on the values of interaction design:
“ The companies that drive innovation will not be those that focus narrowly on technical innovation but those that deal with the larger context in which the technologies are deployed” [Winograd, 1987, pg. 156].
Few studies of technology use in education consider the fit between the forms of technology deployed and the instructional paradigm that is intended to guide learning and information-seeking. Research investigating the impact of rich media information resources and ubiquitous and social technology applications on educational outcomes has been inconclusive as it has ignored the relationship between uses of technology and instructional method. In addition, current studies provide little information by which we may understand the technology-related expectations of learners, or the strategies that they employ for information-seeking in coursework. These expectations and strategies may well undermine the intended instructional paradigm. An alignment between instructional method, technology-mediated delivery, and an appropriate form of informational medium is essential for deep student engagement in learning. The objectives of this research are:
-
To assess the impact of various digital information services, rich media, social technology applications, and ubiquitous technologies on the pedagogical approach and method employed by instructors of undergraduate student courses.
-
To assess the impact of various digital information services, rich media, social technology applications, and ubiquitous technologies on the learning strategies of undergraduate students.
-
To compare student vs. instructor expectations across a variety of courses and disciplines, in order to develop a framework for human-centered technology mediation that takes into account the needs and expectations of Undergraduate learners and their support for a range of instructional methods and philosophies.
The intellectual merit of the proposed work lies in providing an assessment of the impact of rich media and ubiquitous and social technologies on students’ information-seeking and learning strategies and in exploring how the use of various forms of technology supports or undermines the intended instructional paradigm. We integrate two traditionally separate domains into an interdisciplinary study, combining information science and information systems perspectives on technology support for undergraduate learning.
The broader impacts of this research will lie in reporting on lessons learned from this research, to inform the design of higher education scaffolding environments for the next generation of undergraduate students. Most technology-mediated course scaffolding relies on trial and error. We will provide a framework that allows instructors to deploy appropriate course delivery, presentation, and information-search technologies for their intended instructional approach. A planned web repository will disseminate findings rapidly and globally, employing the technologies that we study to illustrate our findings.
