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Youth and Online Learning:
Posted on Monday, December 11, 2006 at 4:24 PM by Jason Barker
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring, as part of their Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning initiative, a blog called Spotlight: Blogging the Field of Digital Media and Learning.
Each week the scholars involved with the blog write about a different issue. I found particularly relevant to my work in online biblical education to be the blog's week on credibility. In one post Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin note:
Contemporary youth are a particularly interesting group to consider with regard to [issues involving the credibility of online resources]. On the one hand, those who have literally grown up in an environment saturated with digital media technologies can be seen as ”digital natives,” who may be highly skilled in their use of technologies to access, consume, and generate information. This view suggests that in light of their special relationship to digital technologies, youth are especially well-positioned to navigate the complex media environment successfully.
On the other hand, youth can be viewed as inhibited, in terms of their cognitive and emotional development, life experiences, and familiarity with the media apparatus. This view suggests that although youth are talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack crucial tools that aid them to seek and consume information effectively.
Kate Wittenberg similarly points out:
While students clearly demonstrate a desire to explore freely the vast array of content and tools available through the Web, it is becoming equally clear that in many cases they do need some level of guidance concerning how to select and evaluate the information that they find.
This is very close to a point I made in my thesis for my MA in Applied Orthodox Theology (with the stultifying title, "A Foundation for Using Multimedia Software Applications as a Medium for Bible Studies for Orthodox Christian Adolescents"):
Learners with experience in hypertextual learning environments - which most adolescents now have through home and/or school Internet usage - are able to move as fluidly within the nonlinear structure as through a traditional linear educational structure; this fluidity is identical for both male and female users. This prior experience with hypertext creates within the learner a positive control belief regarding the potential for success in learning; combined with the fluid experience itself, this can often result in the learner experiencing flow (a state of intense concentration and enjoyment) while learning.
At the same time, learners who require a high degree of extrinsic control and guided learning can experience disorientation in a nonlinear, open-task learning environment. For this reason, multimedia applications are most effective when they provide both non-linear and linear learning paths: flexible, non-linear learning paths allow experienced, confident users to follow multiple informational routes; linear learning paths, however, provide the fixed structure and instructional assistance necessary to maximize the learning experience for users who require guided learning.
To use the See the Vision study of Acts as an example, users who are comfortable with non-linear learning can study by following an array of information paths:
- Choosing from a selection of articles on each chapter's home page.
- Choosing a topic of interest from one of the subject indices available from the top navigational menu of each screen; and
- Following the hyperlinks in each article to another article of interest.
Users who require a more limited informational path (or who simply want an overview of the material), however, can choose one of the resources available in the "Fast Track" menu for each chapter (the biblical text, a handout quickly surveying the chapter, and/or a quiz on the biblical text).
I believe these Bible study applications provide an effective educational resource by enabling users to tailor their learning experience to their need for more-or-less linear informational paths. Thus, to use the terminology of Metzger and Flanagin, the Bible studies provide a useful "complex media environment" that can be successfully navigated by "digital natives."
What can be said, however, about the way in which youths perceive the credibility of these studies? Even if the content and navigational structures are in fact solid - as, of course, I say they are - how can potential users determine (at least to the initial extent that they will be willing to interact with the material) the credibility of the information found in the studies?
I'll briefly talk about that in my next post. A little preview: one way credibility can be established - at least for Orthodox youth (who are, of course, the primary audience for these studies) - by youth workers.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Online Resources