Response to Intro. and Ch. 1, Part 2

After my group’s first chat, I wanted to add something more to my previous post. We were chatting about ways that students transfer from “traditional” to “new” media, and what those terms meant. I think that “traditional” media means, basically, print media (newspapers, magazines, books), and “new” media means non-print (web, television, etc.).

I’m 29, and I learned mostly through traditional media in school. We had computers and computer classes, but they seemed more additional things in elementary and junior high school than anything else. Not until high school and college did we actually have classes on how to effectively use the web for research.

I think that this causes a big disconnect with today’s students when we become teachers. Teachers have a tendency to teach how they were taught because it worked for them. That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that it will work for our students. This is a tough lesson for us to learn. Today’s students are more apt to go right to Google to do research instead of to the traditional non-fiction section of the library. If we can think of ways to show students that both methods are valid and can give you a much broader range of information, we are doing them a much larger service.