Digital teaching

It is Friday at a high school in Norway. The teacher writes ten exercises on the blackboard and the students type them into their Word documents on their laptops. At the same time they search Google for the answers on the internet. As the teacher puts a full stop after the last sentence, the students have already found the answers, written them or copied them into their Word documents and uploaded their finished assignments to It's learning. Their weekend homework is done as the school bell rings.

New situation in the classroom
There are great differences between the classroom situation ten years ago and today. High school students now has their own laptop and keeps any number of applications running without the teacher's supervision. In recent years, students and teachers alike have been challenged on how to use the digital resources most effectively in the classroom. This challenge also extends to shaping curricula, textbooks and teacher education.

"Many teachers keep themselves updated and are good at implementing digital material in their teaching. However, schools today lack understanding and tools, including support in curricula and exam regulations, to meet the expanding digital text culture," Arne Olav Nygard says. He is a PhD research fellow in Literacy Studies at the University of Stavanger.

Observing usage of texts
He currently observes students and their use of digital texts at two different high schools. He has conducted several interviews and monitors a selection of students by means of social media like Facebook and blogs. Among other things the researcher has noticed that the students shift between many different reading and writing situations during an ordinary school day. The student can answer a question from the teacher, then launch a message on Facebook followed by a text to his father in rapid succession.

"When the student writes an answer to her teacher, she observes the academic value systems and style that she has learnt at school. When she writes a message on Facebook, it is with short comments, abbreviations and smileys. And when she writes home, it is often without a smiley and with very different codes from the ones she uses to friends. We are talking about three different texts written in three different situations during the same class. But only one of them is directly connected to the class and recognized by the teacher," Nygard says.

Time to change our perception of texts
Nygard points out that schools have traditionally distinguished between good and bad reading and writing. How this is perceived is linked to technology and to values.

"It is high time that schools change their views on the use of texts. The concepts from the time of texts on paper do not apply any longer. Schools must become more preoccupied with organizing knowledge in new contexts that have consequences for how we think about reading and writing," Nygard thinks.

The researcher is particularly concerned with the students’ participation in a large and rich text culture that the school has no language for today.

"We cannot view text and knowledge as something immutable the way it has been with storage and dissemination as printed material", Nygard explains.

Today storage and dissemination are done digitally and the digital texts are characterized by being flexible and changeable. Nygard mentions Wikipedia, which is user driven and where anybody can define and cooperate in generating knowledge over time.

"Cut and paste are normal text procedures among young people today. This should not be regarded as bad use of text, but instead be taken seriously by giving students the right challenges. If you ask them to write an analysis of A Doll´s House of Henrik Ibsen, you know what you will get. Teachers of Norwegian can consider other types of assignments, e.g. tasks where the students must evaluate and compare. Here they cannot reproduce old lore", says the researcher who has lectured on the new digital text culture for teachers around the country the last two years.

The teacher is still the expert
Very quickly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace have become part of everyday life for the young generation – also in school. No wonder that the teacher becomes an old fogey in the digital world.

"That’s not correct," Nygard says, and kills a myth.

"The students do not enter the classroom and get the better of their teacher. Most students are good within a very restricted field. They can play some games and are quick participants in social media. But if you ask them to solve a problem where they have to use sources, they may not know how a search engine works. One cannot google one’s way to all the knowledge in the world. If one is to become a competent seeker of information, both linguistic precision and general knowledge are required. This is where the teacher comes in with his or her expertise," he says.  

Nygard knows several teachers who are actively employing the new digital area of knowledge. He is more critical of the exam in Norwegian, which he thinks is an anachronism.

"When sitting for an exam in Norwegian, students are locked up in a room for five hours and asked to solve a complex problem without any input or discussion with other people. The school measures how well the students manage a fictitious genre, but doesn't determine the importance of text competence, i.e. ability to find information, critical use of sources, combining the text in an appropriate manner and cooperate about the text. Text and text generation are social dimensions that disappear in the exam paper. The school can no longer overlook the fact that writing and reading are linked to social, technological and historical areas," the researcher thinks.

Do you want to know more?
Arne Olav Nygard, Department of Cultural Studies and Languages, UiS, tlf.: 51 83 15 27
e-post: arne.o.nygard@uis.no
blogg: http://www.arneolavnygard.com/blog

Texst: Karen Anne Okstad
Translation: Arne Neset
Photo: Elisabeth Tønnessen