Expert says education fails to optimize use of digital technology

CEBU, Philippines - A Vatican-trained social media expert and priest said education has failed to engage or leverage digital technology.

Fr. Stephen Cuyos, MSC, said educators and learners of this generation are deeply and highly into social media, but education has not coped up with the advancement of digital technology.

“The problem here is that the persons who are tasked with education still need to have knowledge and skills to use and teach the technology,” Cuyos said.

He made the statement during the recent three-day national convention of the Catholic Education Association of the Philippines (CEAP).

CEAP is a national organization of over 1,000 non-stock-non-profit Catholic schools catering to both basic and tertiary education.

Cuyos has bachelor and masters degrees in social communication, majoring in television. He graduated summa and magna cum laude, respectively, and was trained at the Universitá Pontificia Salesiana in Rome, Italy. He specializes in website design and construction, photography, digital audio-video production/editing, Linux and open source software.

According to Cuyos, social media is a platform designed to be used and shared for social interaction and can be a tool for educators and students.

He said that through social media, users become active producers of data that sparks the drive towards collecting more data and “learning”.

During the convention, he cited photo and video sharing and pointed out how it allows students to tell stories to each other visually, often explaining complex ideas and serving as motivation for reading and writing.

Also, Maria Aleah Taboclaon, civic organization head, likewise said there is a dire need to help children learn how to behave themselves on the Internet, which is a more effective way of ensuring their safety than preventing them from going online.

“You can’t stop today’s children from going online because children are native online citizen,” she said.

Taboclaon said that while adults go online out of necessity; children experience the Internet as part of their reality, their way of communicating with friends, in having fun, and experiencing themselves.

She said that because the Internet is a virtual “buffet table”, where almost everything is visible and accessible to almost everyone, the children are at risk.

In particular, she said, the risk of young people encountering pornography is real, adding that children as early as seven and eight years old are already familiar with pornographic sites.

“This is disconcerting because the same “buffet table” that offer children access to sexual content also offer sexual offenders anonymity,” she said.—(FREEMAN)