After reading "Education needs a Digital-Age Upgrade" I am sort of left feeling neutral. It seems that it is essential that Education keep up with modern times but I do not think that that makes earlier methods of education obsolete.
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To take an example of just one classroom convention that might be inhibiting today's students: Teachers and professors regularly ask students to write papers. Semester after semester, year, after year, "papers" are styled as the highest form of writing. And semester after semester, teachers and professors are freshly appalled when they turn up terrible. (Heffernan, 2011)
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I strongly disagree that professors are appalled with our "papers". I would like to think that some of the papers that I have wrote were somewhat inspiring. I know I've put a lot of thought and heart into them. The biggest obstacle for students writing papers is the time restraint and that they have to be a certain length. I know that papers do not turn out so good when you start them a day before they are due. Also when you are using "filler" to make them long enough. There are always a lot of specific guidelines you have to follow when writing these papers: what to write about, how many citations to use, what types of references to use...ect. All these rules make it hard to be creative.
When corresponding online with peers you have more freedom. There are no guidelines to what you must say and you can write as much as you want to get your point across. Even though I believe "papers" should have less restrictions, I do not believe you can replace writing lengthy, thought out, inspiring papers with blogging...ect. If these types of papers were not created then what would we ever reference?
References
Heffernan, V. (2011, August 07). Education needs a digital-age upgrade [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/education-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade/?hp
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I completely agree. To think that a teacher might hate a paper that I spent a long time on is really frustrating. Teachers need to understand that some students spend a lot of time on their paper and put a lot of effort into it. I'm new at this blogging and if a teacher wanted me to write an intire graded paper on here chances are of me passing is slim. Teachers need to be able to understand that not every student is used to technology.
ReplyDeleteI agree that papers we write shouldn't have so many restrictions put on them. I do like having a general idea of what to write about it sometimes helps get the writing going, but I dont like it when I'm told it has to be this long and no longer than this. It is essential that kids learn to write good papers and how to read them, because as you said we have to have things to reference.
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