Educational Technology (Post 1)

Summative course for Masters of  Education Portfolio 

Educational technology (Post 1)

One of my primary investigations into effective use of technology in schools focused E-learning and Multitasking and how these affect pedagogy. While the literature is far from conclusive, it is evident from current research that multitasking and the constant connection to digital technologies, is having a negative effect on learning through the impairment of encoding information.  Off-task behaviors in instructional environments is challenging educators to maintain engagement while always connected students take a cognitive loss in nearly every digital multitasking endeavour they undertake, regardless of the  learning setting they encounter.  Learner motivations are directed toward more socially rewarding, non-academic engagement and therefore, at risk are deep reading skills and intimate understanding of complex issues.  Offline skills that would help mitigate online success are being neglected or ignored in deference to more engaging ways of digital learning.  The research however, is showing that digital technologies and always-on learners are at a cognitive disadvantage.  A learner’s social and academic worlds may intersect continuously, but this has consequences for the learner, the teacher and the educational institutions that have only just started to be seriously addressed in cognitive and educational instruction research fields.  Constant connection to attention-grabbing, cognitively novel, and emotionally rewarding, online content is causing both positive and negative changes for teachers’ course delivery, and content.  Examination and support via institutional channels must be increased in order to minimize the negative effects that constant connection creates and keep students focused in our new digital learning environment.
The current literature is replete with examples of how continual multitasking on multiple devices provide little added benefit at best, and impair retention and retrieval of fact-based knowledge at worst. I have read many papers, in my pursuit of a masters of education and my emerging technologies courses, which attest to the problems inherent in unfettered and unfocused and poorly implemented uses  of technology in education, either as mandated by ill-informed administrators or as means of remedial or entertainment modes of engagement. Therein lies the problem. A brief Google Scholar search can yield much literature critical of current practices, if teachers and educational leaders chose to be critical in their stance towards educational technologies. One such example.  (warning deep thinking and extended reading required ).