Popular
culture and education
Ryan Haynes, Osmosis
CTO and Shiv Gaglani, the CEO, are classmates from Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine. They developed a mobile app which uses pop culture
factoids and video to help explain the right or wrong answers as part of its
approach to learning. The app includes practice questions and uses push
notifications to help students reinforce what they have learned and how they
have performed. Gaglani said that emphasis on context and association could
create powerful memory so that students would remember the complex subjects.
Popular culture is associated with education nowadays.
Images, videos, apps are some of the common forms of popular culture used in
schools. Collins (2012) indicated that the use of popular culture could help
students to achieve better results. Popular culture jumps out of the boring,
plain traditional contents; it’s about the technology that we could make use
of; it’s the way that adapts the 21st century. Why would the mobile
app that I mentioned initially reinforce the learning? Roda (2011) showed that “it is possible to increase effective
working-memory capacity by presenting information in a mixed visual and
auditory mode rather than a single mode.” (p. 99) However, it is just a particular
example for medical school; it could be extended to other subjects, such as
science, geography. We could make animations or create a simulation system to
reveal some contents which are impossible to do on paper.
Nevertheless,
although popular culture has many advantages, I think it also has its negative
effect. Once I went to a high school and observed a class. The lesson I would
like to talk about was Maths. Students used a system called “Mathletics” to
learn and do the exercises. Mathletics could show students how to do a
particular question and leave similar questions as exercises. The interface was
gorgeous, which could engage students. But, the point is, some students didn't
do the exercise and play other games instead, since they both required
computers. This was even worse than teaching traditionally. Similarly, this
could happen at home. Students play games or do other things on the computer in
the name of doing homework. It might be hard for parents to recognise what a
child’s really doing. That decreases the quality of learning. So the negative
aspect of popular culture should also be considered when using it in the
education.
As
we can see, popular culture has both advantages and disadvantages, but overall,
students benefit more from it. Popular culture changes our lives, our way of
being educated; it engages students and contributes deeper research. Though it
has some negative effect, teachers and parents are supposed to work out a solution
for this problem and let popular culture serve education better.
Reference:
http://medcitynews.com/2013/08/what-does-pop-culture-have-to-do-with-a-med-school-study-app/
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