2. How do you deal with different levels of technology readiness?
In terms of technology readiness, I guess what I've really seen—and I
count myself in this too—is a reluctance or perhaps a fear
of getting in front of a computer. So I think that it's important
for me, as an instructor, to recognize when a learner has that fear
or reluctance of the new technology. So I think, as with any teaching
and learning of a new skill, that an instructor needs to do an assessment,
usually an informal one, and then deal with the level of the learner.
As an example, the Antarctic field trip has photographs taken in Antarctica during some of the historic explorations and expeditions. So during this electronic field trip, when investigating various things on the Internet, some were choosing to look at some of those photographs. It was more visual and then they wrote about what they found. And that was appropriate, say, for that level of information literacy.
There were other students in the class who understood a lot about the ozone hole and so a few of those students felt very comfortable with something that was a lot more dense in terms of text and containing more scientific vocabulary. They were spending time looking at that information and then writing about that.
