Uses of New Media in (Foreign Language) Education

There are four aspects of advantages and disadvantages of new media in education that shall be discussed in this post.

One can assume that most if not all young people possess knowledge about computers today, as it becomes more and more important in everyday life (internet, text processing, data storage, etc.); however, there ought to be some households that do not have a computer, too. The use of computers in education can help those pupils that are not familiar with or have limited knowledge about computers by enhancing their computer skills, be it the handling of an OS, text processing or research in the www. For these basic computer skills (and advanced applications such as Photoshop also), new media are a necessity, as these contents cannot be taught properly without a computer.

Another advantage of new media in school is its practical nature. Learning-by-doing is essential to the successful conveyance of e-contents and one of the main goals should be to provide pupils with confidence in handling new media.

The internet holds an exceptional position in new media education. Its uses for educational purposes can be diverse, however, there are two major aspects that are most likely to be used for education: research and e-learning.

Gathering information is fundamental and the internet hoards multitudes of information. The access to such information in the internet is also much more comfortable and faster than going to a library, which is quite an important aspect in the motivation of pupils. The downside is that there is no quality control over most information that can be found in the www; especially community-based sources like Wikipedia can easily provide incorrect information.

E-learning has the advantage that pupils can choose when and where to learn to a certain degree. It grants pupils a certain amount of autonomy which can be regarded as positive since pupils can learn how to take responsibility. This autonomy can be subject abuse. When in class, pupils can distract themselves e.g. by watching online videos or chatting with their friends, as I sometimes did it in school. Teachers can also abuse education with new media, as it did one of my English teachers from time to time. At the beginning of a lesson, she would give us a research task for the whole lesson (the task was taking ten minutes at max), while relaxing and making small talk with some fellow pupils. She exploited these lessons to the point, where the headmaster temporarily banned her from the computer room.

Depending on the place where pupils conduct e-learning, there can be another issue. If the e-learning happens in class, the pupils can approach a teacher, in case of a problem that might occur. If they are at home, however, they will have to write an email or wait till the next time they will meet.

There are many more aspects of new media in education that can be discussed of course, but due to reasons of space, they will not be dealt with here.

~ by gohned on May 3, 2009.