Jessi Zhang
Professor Lyndsey Weiner
WRT 205
24 February 2014
How Does Institutions Facilitate Discipline Within Academic Technology Use?
As a student, I believe that technology is often used as an enabler for surpassing our natural limitations as humans. Technology is often employed in hopes that it would assist and help students learn more efficiently and the instructors to teach more effectively within a classroom setting. Although studies and other research can often be considered contradictory with respect to the overall effectiveness of technological use and the real reason behind that effectiveness due to the fact that students can be easily distracted with the possibility of performing off-task activities in terms of technological usage (Benedict, 6). Many undergraduates who attend prestigious universities often expect the faculty within those institutions to obtain premium knowledge of technological use before passing out that information to the students.
Many difficult ideas must be resolved in order to understand this situation. First, I believe that we must get a good understanding of what kind and how often technologies are used by students and their faculty members. Second, I believe that we must understand the experiences in the context in which they live. Personally, I find that the context in which disciplinary structure permeates higher education in America controversial and very debatable. Last but not least, I want to explore differences in how students and faculty members, two different sets of groups who use technology in different kinds of academic purposes, analyze and facilitate these technologies.
One possible reason for the connection between the use of technology and positive education outcomes is that technology is often in contact to increase time-on-task. For example, U.S. Department of Education recently commissioned a data analysis to speculate the relationship between certain learning outcomes of online and hybrid courses. A hybrid course is often considered learning within in an actual classroom that is run by web based educational technologies. The scientists that conducted the study stated that both online and hybrid courses have a huge positive impact on certain learning outcomes, with hybrid courses obtaining a greater impact on student education (Wylde, 5). To sympathize with arguments against the simple connection between technology and education, the scientists hinted that positive effects associated with mixed learning styles should not be