Ronda’s Second Post
August 3, 2009
One measure of agency we used for instructors in higher education came in the form of a question about partcipants’ comfort level with Web 2.0/social networking tools. We posed the question in terms of personal use, instructional use, and professional/scholarly use. When asked to rate their comfort level with the use of Web 2.0 technology for instruction, over 86% participants rated themselves as moderately to highly comfortable, while less than 14% said they were comfortable only to a limited degree. This was true for both females and males, though the ratios between moderate and high degree of comfort were roughly inverted. Moderate comfort was indicated by 52.5% of women and 27.3% of men, whereas high comfort was 35.6% for women and 59.1% for men (see chart below).
So much for numbers, right? It’s a snapshot. We must avoid exaggerating the importance of these statistics with a small sample size, but it will be interesting to see if the stereotypical “confident male” and “somewhat tentative female” trends continue when we reopen the survey during the launch of our website. I’m sure there will be plenty of room for gender studies in this rich field.
To enhance the agency of our participants and, thereby, the value of our data, we supplied an open-ended “comments/other” section for most questions asked. Not surprisingly, we found their comments more fascinating (and perhaps more revealing) than the numbers.
Some instructors said they felt comfortable with the technologies but were concerned or doubtful about students’ openness to them. One said students “rarely take me up on the offer” to use digital alternatives for creating and submitting assignments. Another expressed excitement at incorporating online tools in the classroom as early as 2000 only to “pay for that in evaluation forms,” which s/he attributes to student resistance.
Still others are concerned/defensive about the notion of “friending” students on FaceBook and fear having their agency/privacy wrested from them in this arena, dreading the idea that this type of social networking with students might become compulsory.
Despite the fears and concerns of some, others tout positive experiences with encouraging multimodal assignments that incorporate YouTube and other media, engaging students in critical discussions and opinion pieces on the pros and cons of social networking.
As so many us in this class have said already, the agency (and level of comfort with any socio-technological innovation) lies not in the tools but in ourselves [butchering the Bard yet again]. To what degree to we need to feel “comfortable” in order to feel we have agency? How much does individual attitude affect personal agency, regardless of context, rhetorical situation, audience, etc.?
Submitted by Ronda Wery
