The presentation at Digital Natives workshop at Taipei, Taiwan (16/08/2010)

1. The Digital Classroom Of education and digital conditions

2. How it started… Undergraduate program, media studies and enthusiastic lecturer, first forays into the digital classroom Initiatives by the lecturer, certificate courses on culture, technology, gender etc Also, class notes, live blogging from class, exchanging course work on a central platform

3. Experiments in education www.anilpinto.blogspot.com

4. Changing the medium Students’ initiatives: personal blogs, subject based blogs, using Ning for course discussions Taking attendance on phone, skype lectures… Trouble: Problems occurred when not all comfortable to participate

5. Notions of plagiarism Case study: Write a mid-term research paper and upload it on turn-it-in. The grades will be based on the amount of originality (thought and content) in the paper. This made students uncomfortable, since primary source of info is the internet Some tried to surpass by referring books, but books have online versions too! Book/paper vs. Internet

6. What the students could not foresee is that the same material is indexed online. This hints towards the curious change in nature of medium which highlights their notions of each space Library: thousands of books, obscurity Internet: Surveillance, indexed Also, importantly, the “google” phenonmenon

7. Peer-to-peer The classroom disseminates, from one to many, becomes many to many Chat lessons, passing on presentations, brainstorming etc Interactions happen at two levels- on using the technology and on doing work with it

8. The Digital classroom A three month course on understanding the dynamics of a digital classroom, with no predetermined course work. Inside: debated notions of university, classroom as a space, didactic model, what do digital technologies do to this? Does the way a classroom looks, change? Outside: A culminating survey on degrees of resistance/comfort with technology in campus

9. The Digital Classroom Understanding after survey: results ranging from extremely favorable to otherwise Classroom as organic space: intervention of technologies creates levels of access, barriers for some, techno-utopia vs. dystopia Also, awareness about our already wired existence- not mere addition of tech For some, it was a moment for student mobility

10. Conclusion Setting up an intellectual repository Making students contribute in different measures Not a question of move towards or against technology, but a realization that our conditions are already digitized in proportions

11. FinNoopur Raval Student, Art &Aesthetics JNU, New Delhi, India noopur.raval@gmail.com