I admit that I am not a good multi-tasker. But I love to watch some movie or episode while I am cooking and I guess that is because we use different parts of the brain when we are physically involved in something and mentally involved in something else. Another multi-tasking I can think of is that I love to listen to something while drawing/painting.
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I liked your post and thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments. Talking about females in STEM courses, I did undergraduate in Civil Engineering, and in a batch of 120 students, we were 12 females. And my peers used to comment and remarked on how I being a female can get into Civil Engineering. I remember correctly that there were hardly 2 female faculty in our department. I agree that diversity is important in a programme/department but just the presence of diverse group may not be the only important aspect.
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Interesting post! One, because this is a tricky question and two, being a student and now a teacher, I can understand the perspective of both the groups. I enjoyed reading the research article “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own
Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity” and having a certain thing out of sight do makes it resistible for some time.
When I think about the Technology policy for the class, I find it difficult to draw the line. I want my students to use technology for quick searches and ideas (as I often do that) for better discussions in the class but laptops/cellphones can be a big distraction too.
Hi Julia, Thank you for your perspective on open pedagogy. I like your idea of integrating the available resources to build courses which are more effective for students and use innovative skills. And, I do understand that this initiative will be more taxing for the teachers in terms of time and efforts but is worth in the end for both educators and students.
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Ruixiang, your blog title caught my attention! You made a good point when you say that robots/machines cannot play the role of a teacher. However, I do believe that robots can assist teachers in a number of ways which do not need critical thinking and make life of a teacher much easier such as AI techniques are used by some computer science faculty to respond to student’s assignment related queries which is helping teachers save a lot of time.
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Thanks for your comment. I agree with you.
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Thank you for your comment, Zellie.
I was listening to someone from Disney and the person mentioned that the reason they are coming out with films such as Moana, Brave or Frozen is that early on kids (especially girls) should not get biased and feel the need of a prince to come and save them from a demon and that every kid is the hero of their life. Check this out: https://studybreaks.com/tvfilm/disney-princess-movies/
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That is such a good practice. Thank you for your comment.
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I second that and that is what encouraged me to give an example or two about the biases, I inculcated without even knowing (https://guptakhushbooce.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/127/)
I agree with you Oumou and it would be great if these values are enrooted in the children from the beginning but I think this seems to be an ideal situation and unknowingly/knowingly there are biases present in all of us. And we may not have the required knowledge to recognize that bias and therefore it is important to talk about these issues at university level too (and especially with people who are going to be in academia or in the industry).
