Education Gets Technical

iPad, iLearn?

How many times have you found yourself in the middle of a lecture that just won't end? So you drift off into a daydream about the spring break vacation you’re planning or the next topic for your blog, only to snap back to class just in time to hear those eight paralyzing words, “You’ll need to know that for the test.”

Thankfully education is changing, it is adapting to the new force that media plays in our lives and reinventing itself to be more beneficial to our changing brains. Things like the Khan Academy and the Worldwide Center for Mathematics are lending themselves to the classroom of the future. Even here at North Dakota State University we are already seeing some of the small changes being implemented; we are using blogs and Facebook accounts to complete classroom assignments. We have many distance education courses, classes that are only offered in an online format.

Salman Khan, was tutoring his cousins who lived out of state, started the Khan Academy. He began by posting the videos he made for them on Youtube to reference for supplemental information or to watch as a refresher to a subject not fully grasped.  Pretty soon, many others were watching his videos and were able to understand topics they didn’t comprehend. These lectures have been highly successful and teachers in California are starting to use them as part of the curriculum. The classroom has experienced a “flip”, the teachers are now using the tutorials as homework and what used to be homework is being done in the classroom. This allows the students to have a self-paced lecture at home, and it allows more time for the teacher to interact personally with the student instead of giving a “one-size-fits-all lecture”.

The Worldwide Center for Mathematics is taking education down the same path, they have changed their textbook from a physical book to an online PDF format, and the best part is, it’s free! There are two versions of the textbook the one with the PDF files and a 45-minute video lecture at the beginning of each section and the upgraded model, which includes video solutions to the problems in the book.

This innovation in education is changing who is and isn’t considered a student. Through access to tutorials like the ones at the Khan Academy, we are able to be students of any discipline at any time. They say education is a lifelong process, and now it truly can be. On the Khan Academy you can learn everything from basic math to advanced calculus to history and economics. Instead of resisting the change in our daily lifestyle, some companies have instead chosen to harness that energy and make a change in the way education is administered. Finally, I would like to finish with an a little Youtube video I found entitled "A Vision of Students Today" created by a class at Kansas State studying similar topics. 

Magicians, advertisers or both?

In this video Dr. Johanna Blakley argues that the typical demographics used by media companies to track our likes and dislikes are slowly ceasing to matter. Advertising and media companies like to categorize, or compartmentalize you. This helps them assume what your likes and dislikes are going to be. For example if you are a 10-year-old girl, in a middle class family, in the US it is likely that you are going to be a fan of Justin Bieber (this could also hold true for their mothers).  But, the Internet and social media sites have made it easier for people to branch out and take an interest in new hobbies or ideas. Our tastes are can no longer be presumed by advertising companies, so they have started to monitor which sites we visit to try to figure out our interests. While this can be more difficult because they can’t know your age or gender for sure, they can get to know what interests you.

So, advertisers have turned to “taste communities” to find out more information on where the people’s interests lie. Through these communities they are able to acquire information on what interests have linked these seemingly random people together and also what other interests they have. As Hank Wasiak explains in his blog about a second “disruption” in advertising (the first being television) it becomes less about “we the people” and has transformed into “me the people”. Meaning that advertising needs to be individualized. Bob MacDonald, CEO of Procter and Gamble, explains the reach of this new era of advertizing.

“What I would like to have is a one-on-one relationship with seven billion people in the world and be able to customize offerings for those seven million people. Digital [advertising] allows that relationship.”

This change in advertising will force them to master the art of listening, or as Hank puts it, “grow bigger ears”.  Advertisers will also have to immerse themselves in these social circles in order to get a clear picture of whom they are working with and to completely understand their culture.

Instead of looking at this change in advertising as a loss of demographics and the way it used to be done, it is more important to embrace the change accept the challenge and meet it head on. Hank ends his blog with this quote:

“An idea can turn to dust or magic depending upon the talent that rubs against it. Now is the time to be magicians.”