Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Moving universities forward

Compared to London's Underground or Paris' Metro, the New York subway seems to be a mess. It's full, it's filthy, and occasionally it catches on fire.

There's a reason for this, I've been told: the European systems were largely rebuilt after World War II, thus leapfrogging New York's system which is just as old or older but has had significantly less reinvestment and reinvention.

I don't know if that's true but I keep it in mind when I look at our use of technology resources at universities. Universities in the 80s spent a lot of money putting in network infrastructure (eventually internet) that far surpassed what was available in the rest of the country, let alone the world, and they bought a lot of computers to connect to that network, too.

Now most of our students at Hofstra are coming to school with multiple computers plus, often, a game system, ereader, or smartphone, and they wonder why the network connection they have at school is slower than the one they had at home.

Some of that is simple technical information that they don't have. We purposefully slow down, for instance, traffic that we have good reason to suspect is illegal. And the internet is increasingly clogged with crud no matter where they are. We passed the point in 2009 when 90% of what traveled through the internet was spam.

But that technical information illustrates an underlying truth. What was cutting edge is now omnipresent, and necessarily, the first parts of that infrastructure that were built are kind of dirty, are really full, and occasionally catch fire.

There are huge pieces of that infrastructure that we cannot do without or else we fall off the earth. We need our large-traffic connections to the internet, and we need as much wireless access to that connection as we can get. If we want to use services that exist off campus, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, those are the roads we need to get there. Five years ago the holy trinity was podcasting, wikis, and blogs, but we still needed our network connections to get to those places more than anything else. Before that it was Blackboard - same story, as our Blackboard at Hofstra is actually hosted in Virginia.

I find that faculty worry far more about the endpoints - the devices they will use to get on the network - than about the network themselves, whereas students are the other way round. Students live in a world that faculty are just dipping their toe in; pay attention to the different priorities. I may have a jaundiced view of things since what I mostly get to hear are complaints, but faculty are the ones who complain about how many devices they get from the University (one computer) whereas students are the ones who complain about where the wireless signal appears slow.

We still don't have a laptop requirement for students at Hofstra, so we still aren't providing for the last 1-2% of our students who truly cannot afford a computer of their own. But for 98% of our students, owning devices is really not the challenge. For whatever reason, they or their parents have chosen to invest in the devices that do what they want to do; they want us, their network provider, to make sure they can do it.

Many faculty, for whatever reason, don't own the proliferation of devices that students do. Presumably faculty live rich, full lives without a laptop, a netbook, an iPad and an iPhone. To be honest, I can't really imagine such a life, but I certainly sympathize with the lifestyle. I've been camping.

If you are such a faculty member, though, let me encourage you to sympathize with the lifestyle students are living. You may feel that they're always on, distracted, insubordinate and insufficiently deep thinkers. Oh, I know, you would never use the word insubordinate, but isn't that what you're really thinking when you insist that your students take their electronic devices all out of their pockets and bags and place them face down on the front of the desk so that you can ensure they're not using them? If you haven't done that lately, I assure you your colleagues have. And those students often think faculty are disconnected, uselessly abstract, and power-mad. No, they'd never use the descriptor power-mad - they're not crazy and they want their good grades - but they think it just the same.

We can ignore this gap in lifestyle, in living approaches. After, all the classroom is an unequal power structure and it is up to the faculty member to conduct their class as they see fit. I don't question any faculty member's right to dictate the terms of class participation, and I'm a huge fan of the sentence "Let's close the laptops; I need you to listen to me right now."

But it's worth noting that we can also address the gap. It truly is a difference in how to approach one's life. A student who is always on with a plethora of electronic devices could be at the center of a peer learning network gathering academic research tidbits as easily as they are at the center of a social network gathering data about who's dating whom. That won't happen automatically, though, and it won't happen without our intervention. If we personally don't live and research that way, it won't happen for the students.

Research indicates that we do live and research that way. A study this spring indicated that 90% of faculty are using social media for research or work. So increasingly we the faculty are also online. What are the challenges that we're really facing?

Is it that actually only a small handful of colleagues are the kind who make the students take all electronic devices out of their pockets and place them facedown on the desk?

Is it that we fear what our colleagues will think if we introduce social media into our classroom (after all, they're playing Farmville too, they know it isn't all work)?

Is it that we don't know how to bridge the gap between the way we research and what we teach?

I think it's all three but the last is the biggest challenge. If we've been teaching for a while - and I've been teaching off and on for about eighteen years - we have methodologies we were taught, or that we've developed over time, and it's an enormous amount of effort to change them.

I also find that a lot of faculty still think of the classroom as the place where students receive knowledge from the faculty member, rather than the place where students learn how to research and develop their own knowledge. (And if you follow that link: isn't it interesting to think about asking students to apply for a course, asking them what they bring to the course and what they get out of it? I know some upper level courses do this often. What if more of our courses did that? What's the difference between challenging the student and accepting them?)

This blog is supposed to be where I convey the thoughts I shared in our past Boot Camps (even if we don't get to discuss them, which is the best part). So here's a thought I often share: If you think you're teaching facts, forget it. There's little that's factual that your students can't look up. If there's a concept they really need to understand that you're sick of spending time conveying, let us help you make a learning object to address it - a video, an animation, an exercise. But don't spend too much class time on it. Students will get it or they won't, and if you have a learning object you can direct the students to it as often as you like and ask them to come to office hours if they really didn't get it (they will - give them a quiz on the concept, they'll sort themselves out fast enough). But finding out facts is now the job of Google, and no matter how you feel about Google there's not much point in trying to turn that educational clock back.

What your students don't know is how to evaluate what they see. They don't even know when "factual" is a reasonably contestable word. They don't know what's good information - or good research - and what isn't. That's the big difference between your use of social media and theirs, and we don't model our use of it enough for our students. We don't model for them how we pick the article we pick out of Google Scholar - we don't often even tell them about Google Scholar. We don't want them in our social networks but we don't explain how we use them and why we shut out undergraduates, either. And most importantly we don't direct them in how to form their own learning communities. We insist firmly that unauthorized collaboration is cheating, but we don't often direct good, productive collaboration - and we almost never model it. I know you've worked with a colleague on your last research paper, presentation, or book - at the very least you discussed it over lunch or after a meeting and that colleague probably helped you a ton even in a ten minute discussion. We don't show our students how that works.

So a productive bridge might be our own research, how we conduct it, how we write, how we collaborate, and then developing activities for our students that mirror some of that.

We might have to lower academic standards temporarily to bridge between their world and ours. We can have them conduct mini-ethnographies by interviewing people on Twitter or Facebook - and then we get to discuss the differences between that and real fieldwork. We might have to accept that Wikipedia is their starting place for a lot of research - and then explain why, and when, they need to bump up to academic articles. We might have to accept that a blog is informal writing, essentially a draft - and have them do it to get them to write that much more, to an audience, before they write any more "final" paper for us. We don't have to compromise what we think finished academic work is. But we may want to modify what the intermediate steps could look like.

Faculty sometimes think students will figure this out on their own, how to do these things. Most students won't. They order food online and are very plugged in, but we know two things about traditional college-age students: they have no idea how any of that technology works, and they have no idea how to use any of it for academic purposes.

Faculty who do should guide those students.

And if you aren't one of the faculty who's ready to try building a bridge (I recommend a small one, with plenty of failsafe supports), then that's where you need to focus your energy first: trying some of these tools for yourself. I'm right there with you in anti-capitalized revulsion for what multinational corporations have become. Still, you need to get a smartphone. Learn to text, try a new social media tool for yourself, get it under control, and find something you like. Because if you like it, if you really use it, you can model how to use it for your students in a productive, positive way. Or use the computer Hofstra provides for you, if you're lucky enough to be a full-time faculty member, to investigate those tools for yourself. Faculty Computing is always willing to help you try these things. If you intend to teach for more than a couple of years more, you really need to start at least investigating, as an observer, perhaps, the world the students are living in.

Technology tools come and go but the cycle of change in technology in a university is actually a lot slower; nonetheless, the era of more, more, more computers is over, for a lot of reasons over which the institution has no control. Almost all the students have a ton of computing devices and want the freedom to choose what they want to choose; many of the faculty have followed suit. We certainly need to reinvest in New York's subway system but it's not that clear any more that Hofstra needs to reinvest in more, more, more computers at the endpoints. Nationally the trend is toward facilitating use of computers as easily and securely as possible; this is true in private industry as well as in higher education. Try googling "byoc bring your own computer". It's not clear how much longer any large organization will need to keep purchasing such end-point devices. Ask yourself how many computers you use in a day and how many computers each of your students uses in a day. Very few computer users use only university-provided computers any more. Our focus needs to be on keeping the roads clear, keeping the connections open as best we can, and helping everyone, faculty and student, use all this infrastructure for a teaching and learning purpose. Turns out the internet is more like a highway system than a subway; I'll drive my Prius, you can drive your Suburban, and someone else will be smart enough to get a Zipcar, but if the road itself is full of potholes and blocked by downed trees, no one's going anywhere.

Our educational challenge, guiding our students to make intellectual use of the resource, is more like teaching them to read a map than memorizing place names. What can we teach that are skills they'll use throughout the rest of their lives to learn no matter what the tool du jour is?