Whenever you're thinking of bringing technology into the learning process, I think there's a few basic principles you should follow. Start small, start simple, and think big. And those seem a little bit contradictory, but start small means don't try and reinvent the whole process from beginning to end. Just change one little little piece of it.
Do something that seems relatively easy because you actually never know how hard it will be. Or what kind of trickle-down challenges or benefits you'll find. So start with something small and start with something that is relatively easy in the sense of being kind of ready to hand. Like maybe decide you're going to use everybody's phones.
Everybody has a phone. You have to plan for what happens if they don't have a phone. Maybe there's some very simple kind of technology you want to use that people are already familiar with. If you bring in something new that they've never touched before and they don't know, you're gonna have a much harder time.
So if you start small and you could say familiar. start with something that's familiar to everybody, then that part is, the beginning part is much easier. The thing that people skip sometimes is think big, which means, okay, you're changing part of the learning process.
This is your opportunity to stand back and say, why are we here? Why are we doing this? Sometimes I talk to professors and they say, what are the habits of mind we want to instill in, say, physics majors? And it's things like curiosity. And it's things like respect for experimental science or curiosity about experimental methods or it's things like open-mindedness and skepticism.
These are not like small little learning objectives like remembering the, you know, atomic number of, you know, carbon or whatever that happens to be, you know. These are kind of big things. So if you bring something small into the learning process and make it something that's familiar, let that be your opportunity to think about Who do we want these people to be when they graduate?
What kind of lives do we want them to have? Because that will also be very motivating, because if you do something very small, you might think, my God, we're just moving the deck chairs around. So if you do something small, you have the leeway, and you have the opportunity to step back and ask the big why questions.