View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

Digital Wave

I always love when teachers become the taught. Every once in a while, the student-teacher relationship is turned and students get to be the teachers. Those situations often arise as the result of a normal class discussion, and most teachers genuinely enjoy learning something new. In recognition of the fact that there are some areas in which students are more qualified than teachers, a wise teacher (Mrs. B) at my school developed something called Digital Wave. Once a year, a group of tech savvy students team up with some tech savvy faculty (there are more of us than them) to create a series of workshops on various technologies. The concept has evolved somewhat from students being in an assistant role to actually leading workshops.

We decided this year to do something slightly different. In the past, Digital Wave has focused on technology that teachers can use, but we realized that so many teachers don’t know anything about things like Twitter or Facebook. For a group of professionals working with a group of students who widely use social networks and other technology-related tools, teachers are often ignorant of them. Our task was to change that, and I think we were at least partially successful.

I ran three sessions this year on Twitter, iPhone, and blogging. You can see various pictures of me presenting courtesy of Riley Kaminer. My goal was never to get teachers (and a few administrators) to go out an start using Twitter, buy an iPhone, or start blogging, but to make them aware of how students are using these tools. Interestingly, many teachers realized that the iPhone in particular could be a powerful tool for education.

So why am I talking about this? I’m convinced that the typical student-teacher relationship is functional, but not ideal. It’s great for a student to learn about something from a teacher, but if the relationship isn’t reciprocal, then both sides are missing out on something. Students have the ability to improve the quality of education for everyone by teaching teachers how to use new tools, or simply making them aware of their existence so that they understand their students better.

In the coming years, I hope that we can expand Digital Wave to include more student-run sessions. There are so many areas in which students have the capability to enrich teachers’ knowledge, and reap the benefits afterwords. Outside of spontaneous classroom exchanges, students need the capability to break down the traditional one-way information flow between teachers and students. Programs like Digital Wave allow that to happen, and both teachers and students are better because of it.