MediaShift Article – NYU Professor Stifles Blogging

Anybody see the interesting PBS article about this student vs. faculty issue at NYU (where I teach as an adjunct)? From the PBS website, the lengthy and detailed MediaShift piece isĀ NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student.

Interesting.

My experience is I try to do anything at all possible to get my students to use and integrate technology into everything they do, often to great resistence from students. I wonder if my students are just older or in fields where technology use is less integral (or am I grasping for straws here?). Nevertheless, while there is certainly a lot of processing and learning here to go around, this does not seem like the most pleasent situation.

How technology in education can go both ways, I suppose.

2 thoughts on “MediaShift Article – NYU Professor Stifles Blogging

  1. @Maru del Campo

    Thank you for the links and the comments, Maru. I had heard about this article, but not yet seen it. Gives me some more to read this evening!

    In thinking more about this topic, my own assessment is that traditional teaching, where the teacher is the center of action and attention, is a hard habit to break. Effectively, we are struggling to break the very methods that we learned and developed within. I have gone to formal schooling for more years than I can count, and nearly all of them have been faculty-focused. I am sure this is similar–everything that comes into and flows out of the class should be sanctioned from the professor. Organizations are like this with tight and limiting controls on firewalls and networks, and even the US government does this with phone conversations in the name of national security.

    I wonder if what this professor did is really far-off from what many others would do in the same situation–how do we handle encouraging free-thinking but simultaneously afraid of the possible results?

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