Teaching Technology to Digital Immigrants

Introduction

John Dewey was a pioneer in the field of education, namely with his contribution to educational theory. One of the basic tenets of Dewey’s 1938 publication Experience and Education is the idea of a democratic educational experience, also known as the progressive movement. Dewey believed that education should be both “accessible and [enjoyable]” (p. 34) rather than the traditional authoritative experience in which the teacher is the holder of all relevant knowledge and the student is an empty vessel to be filled with that knowledge. Like Freire (1977) decades later, Dewey valued the prior individual experiences of the learner and claimed that “all genuine education comes about through experience” (Freire 1977: p. 25).

In 1973, another educational pioneer, Malcolm Knowles, introduced us to his theories of education. While Knowles’ predecessors theorized about learners in a more general way, Knowles himself focused on the adult learner. With Dewey’s progressive theories in mind, Knowles established the “groundbreaking” idea of “andragogy and the concept that adults and children learn differently” (Knowles, et al, 2005, p. 1). Knowles and his co-authors define andragogy, in part, as “’an honest attempt to focus on the learner’” (p. 1). Whereas Knowles pioneered the actual theory of andragogy, Galbraith (1990) and others have made significant contributions where actual teaching methods are concerned. In Galbraith’s Adult Learning Methods text, eight chapters focus on foundational perspectives of adult education, a few center on instructional design, and this text, currently in its third edition, clearly has college instructors in mind, which is the focus of our research in this article. Specifically, we will examine, in part, the literacy divide that exists between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” terms coined by Marc Prensky (Prensky 2001). Then we will use that information to support and explain what we have found to be best practices in educating digital immigrants in instructional technology. Our best practices are derived from over ten years of educating high school and college-level faculty in instructional technology. This training was funded by $443,658, total, in grant funds from Louisiana Systemic Initiatives Program (LaSip) ($222,741), Louisiana Board of Regents Traditional Enhancement Grant Program ($120,159), Louisiana Board of Regents SELECT Grant Program ($89,258), and Louisiana Tech University Research ($11,500). The result of our primary and secondary research is a list of seven key “do’s” when training faculty in instructional technology.