I’m going to rant for a second here about the decline of critical thinking. It all started with a student who asked me to share why we needed to make webpages for our online class. It was unclear what the correlation between making webpages and mythology is. I get the confusion. Some of that confusion is born out of how we classify the act of making a webpage (and what kind of people need to have that knowledge) and what we believe online learning (even learning in general) is supposed to look like.
On one level a webpage is merely another form of media. Asking you to share knowledge in the form of a webpage is no different than asking you to share knowledge in the form of an essay, save for the fact that we are used to writing essays. Sharing information about mythology through a webpage is really no different than if you do it in an essay save for the fact that the webpage allows for a greater sense of creativity and character. Consider it the ‘class presentation’ medium of the online environment.
Often students struggle with the idea of doing something that is different or doesn’t make sense in terms of what they’ve always done. My own assumptions play into this as well. I assumed that anyone taking a 200 level online class would have a fair degree of net savvy. Not true. Multiple students weren’t aware of how to make a webpage and at least one expected step by step instructions on how to do so. Here’s the thing I really hate about that: People want to compartmentalize knowledge or see learning in a vacuum. They don’t want to recognize that often you need to draw skills from other areas and learn different processes and apply them to your task.
Such is the college life.