Over the last few months, I’ve had several reasons to expand my scope of cursory research to beyond how technology can be brought into the classroom. It is certainly something that is still interesting, but I’m firmly of the mind now that it is not the technology that we need to be concerned with (I’ve been this way for a while), but rather the human elements that will interact with the technologies. With this in mind, there are several elements of the human factor that may or may not ever be influenced by technology – on of these is that cascade of events that starts in the crib and results in a productive citizen. Technology is certainly going to come into play as a range of accessories that will help things along perhaps, but as an entire unit, technology has no real role that I can think of. So why am I talking about it here? Well, I’ve got my reasons, and if you want a hint, take a look the post earlier in the week.
The education system seems to be committing all manner of fouls on its students. From stripping away creativity to having students preform tasks with little relevance to “their world”, it certainly isn’t easy for students to maintain “buy in” to a system that will help them all succeed. Some parents may be adding insult to injury by “hurrying” their babies along by having them enter the school style world much sooner than others. One of the ways that these fouls play themselves out is through burnout.
Skimming through my feeds this morning, I spotted an article on some work being done out of Finland on burnout and there seems to be a very simple formula. Optimism, encouragement and task focus combine to create students who are less likely to burn out and eventually succeed. This seems to be the case at just about every level of a child’s life. The work that I looked at this morning was done by Katariina Salmela-Aro of the University of Jyväskylä who has three relevant papers – School-Burnout Inventory (SBI) – Reliability and Validity (doi 10.1027/1015-5759.25.1.48 European Journal of Psychological Assessment 2009; Vol.25(1):48–57), Achievement strategies during university studies predict early career burnout and engagement (doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2009.03.009 Journal of Vocational Behavior (2009)) and Adolescents’ future education-related personal goals, concerns, and internal motivation during the ‘‘Towards Working Life’’ group intervention (doi: 10.1080/17405620802591628 Psychology Press (2009)) – on the subject.
While there is little if anything there that one can take away and put a technology spin on, there is one point to consider. Much of what we claim technology is able to do involves creating better connections between people and content. Our collective mission is already one to enable instructors to be able to encourage students along their studies, make tasks that can be focused on and do so in a manner that is as transparent as possible, so what does this add to that? I think it adds a bit of fuel when it comes to why we develop certain systems or adopt policies when it comes to IT. We certainly don’t want the IT to be one of the factors that contribute to the burnout of students, and we would hope that the tools that we create or find to be part of a classroom those that are going to move students along in being able to succeed.
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