Blogging and pinging a change

For most of us, the idea of a digitised classroom is not new, because technology in big and small ways aids our interactions in all walks of life. But what happens when every minute action in your school or college begins to rely heavily in some way or another on digital technologies?

From making friends with new classmates on Facebook to sharing coursework on blogs, late night chats and changing the world by joining groups with a common cause, our realities are becoming more digital by the minute.

I recently attended a workshop in Taiwan on ‘Digital Natives’, where I narrated the story of the digital classroom. This is a story of three years of active engagement with digital technologies that shaped academic interactions. Inspired by a blog started by my undergrad lecturer Anil Pinto at Christ University, I took to posting notes, initiating discussions and groups online, meeting people with similar interests and eventually helped start an intellectual repository. We also Skyped-in lecturers.

While on the surface, the idea of doing things online might come naturally to a lot of us, things weren’t so simple for some of the other students, I interacted with. For a lot of us, doing work online or using digital aids is still an uneasy thought. We had to face resistance many times, just to realise that this is crucial, too, because such responses help you review your ideas of technology for all.

For instance, we were all asked to upload our midterm research papers on a website that checks documents for plagiarism — so that it could be seen if papers were well referenced and original in content. So, a few students scurried to the library to copy from some obscure book, thinking that the website could only find things that Internet search throws up. This was interesting, because it shows how perception of plagiarism changes with change in medium.

Digital classrooms are not a space for some people only, it’s not a matter of building something new, but rather locating ourselves in already existing digital conditions. Admit to it or not, even in denying the use of technology, we need to engage with it.

Also, digital classroom is a viral process, we didn’t need teachers to sustain it. With time there was extensive use of college email where people passed notes, scheduled time for shared problem solving, and used multimedia in class.

And what does this do? This changes the entire idea of classrooms and universities as spaces of receiving knowledge. The teacher no longer remains the centre of knowledge providing. From one to many, it becomes a many-to-many interaction. It is also more collaborative and compels even the silent students to participate.

But, this is not an agenda for digitising our spaces more. Logistics, problems of access etc always stand. Right now, it seems like another Matrix scene shot of what our future might look like, all wired and virtual, but is coming true in different ways.
The writer is a student at JNU and recently attended the Digital Natives workshop in Taiwan.