With the freebie and alcohol fuelled excitement and chaos of fresher’s week behind us, LSE’s new students have (hopefully excitedly, potentially groggily) started their first full week.
For many students, studying at LSE will be nothing like any educational experience they have ever encountered. With different uses of technology in further education and other higher education institutions, we were interested in finding out which technologies students already used in their learning, and which technologies they would like to use in their learning at LSE.
So on our stand at Orientation week, we asked students to write down just that. We used the term technology flexibly, and allowed students to come up with their own definition of what technology meant to them.
Here’s how they responded:
We received a range of responses, with most students mentioning popular mobile devices, such as iPads, iPhones and laptops, collaborative tools such as Google Drive, Dropbox and social media. Some students claimed to be familiar with documentation markup systems, such as LaTeX and course specific reference websites, such as the Stamford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Some even had experience with coding and statistical software such as SPSS. Reasons for using these technologies included storing and sharing materials, collaborating with peers and organising classwork. However, not a single respondent claimed to use a desktop computer, perhaps indicating that students have embraced the convenience and flexibility of mobile devices and collaborative platforms.
When asked what they would like to use in their learning at LSE, students showed an interest in learning coding and course specific software, such as STATA. Many also expressed an interest in using iPads and Kindles as an alternative to carrying textbooks and for scheduling and organising.
Students seemed to define technology in variable terms (several responses, for example, simply listed the devices students owned), and responses showed varying degrees of skill and experiences using the technology they defined for coursework. Students seemed keen to use mobile devices in their learning, perhaps because of the convenience and accessibility these offer. Many students mentioned using social media for learning, although none expressed interest in using it in their learning at LSE. Some felt that a deeper knowledge of coding would be useful, although reasons why were not forthcoming, and it seemed as if students felt these skills could be useful in future careers, but didn’t have a clear picture of how coding would benefit them at LSE.
These responses seem to counter the digital native narrative, and shows that students come to university with varying levels of IT skill and know how to use it in their learning. However, students mainly mentioned wanting to use technology for convenience and learning coding for potential future careers. Barely any students mentioned academic sources, such as JSTOR and Google Scholar, whilst Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), such as Moodle and Blackboard and reference managers, such as Endnote and Mendeley were not mentioned at all. As it was fresher’s week, students may not have been aware of VLEs and reference managers. However as many of the students we encountered were postgraduates (who have likely used at least a VLE), it does raises some interesting questions about what students perceive to be learning technologies:
- Are convenience and career opportunities the main reasons why students are interested in technology in learning?
- Are VLEs so ubiquitous that most students don’t even notice them anymore?
What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below and let us know.
A few unformed thoughts on this:
I’ve always believed that most students don’t see a VLE as anything other than a website. I also suspect that very few people, if asked to name “a technology”, would come up with “the web”. The web is a seen as a pervasive medium; I think people relate “technology” to more discrete things, like specific devices or applications. So it’s not really surprising that Moodle didn’t get a mention – the devices that they use to access Moodle did.
The same goes for sources like JSTOR. Even a room full of librarians and learning technologists could probably list technologies all day long without mentioning any online journal providers. I don’t really see these results as indicative of a change in how students perceive technology.
I do find the big interest in programming fascinating though. It would be interesting to know if that interest is also seen at other universities.
I too found that the most striking part of the Wordle/tag cloud. It’s a shame they don’t say why they want to learn coding.
I think students of quantitative subjects should at least learn how to take an input, perform a transformation on it, and return an output. A lot of economic and financial modelling is performed using spreadsheet software (sometimes with catastrophic results), and although those models are encoded in formal languages sensu stricto, they’re a lot harder to validate and debug than those expressed in proper programming languages.
We’ve known about the students’ interest in ‘coding’ for a long time, but like you, have never been able to get to the core of why, what they want to use it for, or even what they mean by ‘coding’. It seems some mean building a website, while others want to specifically learn VBA or Java. The sense that it’s a ‘good thing to know’ belies the fact that (with the exception of basic web design), it’s not something you can easily or even successfully dabble in.
The most interesting thing is why students think coding will help them in the future. Unless you’re going into a specific IT profession requiring coding, I fail to see what benefit it offers (other than satisfying curiousity).