What is Your Biggest Teaching Challenge?
What is the biggest challenge for digital media teachers?
The answer may surprise you,
The biggest challenge is managing students’ expectations.
While in London last week, I had the opportunity to talk to a teacher about his experiences instructing high school students. He teaches high school students how to think about digital media, to conceive digital projects and to complete their ideas using whatever tool is the best for the project — be it HTML, Flash, Processing etc. Admirably, these same students go on to teach middle school students similar types of digital media skills.
I asked him what his biggest challenge is teaching digital media. “Many times students come up with ideas that have the complexity of a graduate school thesis.”
My challenge teaching runs along the same line. I find that students are so familiar with complex digital media solutions, our digital media has gotten so sophisticated — be it highly interactive websites, smart phone applications, seamless delivery of broadband content — that there is an underlying assumption the things we use everyday are somehow easy to create.
For my graphic design students there is this common frustration:
What a student can imagine and design, they may not be able to technically create.
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Update 08/14/09: In all fairness, students are not the only ones who assume digital solutions are easy to create and implement. The public in general does not possess a basic understanding of what’s involved in conceptualizing, designing and building interactive projects. In large part, the digital media community is responsible for educating the public in order to develop this understanding.
I agree, I have that same challenge. I teach basic scripting, starting with xHTML, CSS and JavaScript, then move on to using Dreamweaver to create more sophisticated sites. But students right away want to know how to create elaborate designs, not realizing those are created in Flash (and take a lot of work). I am happy they are so eager to create but I have to pull them back a lot to start simple.
There is a whole article I read on this topic, of people thinking things are easy, not realizing the amount of work that goes into it. Something about the latest generation and their skewed perception about technology. Sadly, I can’t remember what the article was called. If I find it, I’ll let you know.