Take for instance the article with the rhetorically loaded title "A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn't Working". The professor isn't accomplished or successful, he's tech-happy! Practically goofy in the head! He reboots like a broken computer - is he even a person? Maybe he's a robot who's goofy in the head! And what causes this reboot? Someone told him his teaching advice wasn't working! Someone finally broke the news to him! He gave out teaching advice - but that doesn't work either! It's a massive pile-up of broken gadgets we didn't need in the first place! Get the trash can!
I hate these kinds of articles.
As often happens at the Chronicle and elsewhere, though, once all the standard preconceptions have been aired (as if to reassure their audience that they do hold the correct preconceptions), there is actually some small meat to the article. In this case, the meat is that Prof. Wesch has discovered that few of his colleagues have been able to successfully implement his suggestions for enhancing their classes with technology.
No one needs to be threatened by this, because the article is already framed to posit that Prof. Wesch is, at best, a half-crazy piece of technology himself constantly on the edge of a breakdown. No one would make the cognitive leap to suggesting that perhaps the fault lies not in Prof. Wesch, but in the colleagues who grasp the letter but not the spirit of his suggestions.
Fortunately, Michael Wesch himself does actually get quoted in the article (starting in paragraph 5) and he points to the issue immediately: what is missing in his colleagues' implementation of the technology is a sense of purpose.
Over and over again in our Catalyst Boot Camp, we stressed that technology on its own is nothing. Technology can only benefit a class to the extent that it facilitates something you already want to do.
Students don't do their homework? Tough to pace the class for both advanced and less advanced students? Quiet students don't talk? Students not grasping historical or geographical relationships? Concepts needing to be constantly repeated?
These and many more common teaching issues can be addressed with technology. But the issue comes first, not the technology. Technology implemented for no reason isn't just useless, it's time-consuming and probably irritating.
As it turns out in the Chronicle article, Mr. Wesch is juxtaposed with Christopher Sorensen, a teacher with 34 years of experience who is highly successful with the method he uses: lecturing.
(This section of the article, by the way, is titled "Learning from an 'Old Fogy'" - a subtitle that manages to insult Prof. Sorensen as well as the practically insane cyborg previously mentioned, Prof. Wesch.)
Prof. Sorensen spends hours preparing each lecture before every class. He gets psyched up and into a "fifth gear" before he lectures, and not surprisingly, he connects with his students very well. He doesn't expect his students to retain everything from his lectures, but considers his lectures a vital piece of the learning process wherein he's "plowing the ground" for the concepts and processes they will learn more thoroughly, and practice, when they read or do other homework. His primary goal in the lecture is to "convinc[e] students that his material is worth their attention."
It's not too surprising that Michael Wesch would find Christopher Sorensen's teaching method to be effective in its way. It isn't news to anyone in academia that some lecturers are compelling and magnetic, and that they convey the importance of their material as well as the details.
What the Chronicle article fails to address in its poor treatment of both teachers is that no one who has ever advocated using technology in the classroom has ever intended to derail faculty who are already successful at what they're doing. Fantastic lecturers shouldn't be necessarily encouraged to do more interactive things with technology; they're already connected with their students.
But the plain truth is that most of us would love to be either Michael Wesch or Christopher Sorensen. We'd take any road that would get us to where we can reliably, effectively reach our students. That's why we're reading articles about technology in teaching. We're dying to know. Should we be adding PowerPoints to our lectures? Do we need to care about clickers? How do we get students to shut down Facebook for a while and get as excited about what we're teaching as they do about that? Heck, at least we can figure out how to ask those questions! There's more public discussion and more resources available on technical questions than there is on tougher pedagogical issues that plague us. We're experts in our fields who already manage to teach pretty well or we wouldn't be where we are. But we're all still trying to figure out how to be better - just like the faculty at Kansas State University who are trying to figure out how to implement Michael Wesch's advice. (And if some techy tools can get us there, in however-many-we-need implementation steps, we'll do it!)
Those Kansas State faculty are all probably just as interested in any tips Christopher Sorensen has to offer about how to make lectures more engaging too. Because we're all trying to do the same thing: get better at teaching. Which is incredibly difficult, constantly changing, dependent on a universe of variables we can't control, increasingly undervalued, and oh yeah, necessary for the good of our students and our society.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, like most news outlets in the United States, simultaneously holds the preconceived notions that:
- Technology is being pushed into our schools.
- Technology is the sine qua non of the 21st century.
- Technology in education is at heart a silly waste of time and money.
- There are great faculty who don't need technology.
- Most faculty are already great faculty.
But only #2 and #4 are actually true. Those of us on the faculty know that there's no such thing as faculty who just "are" great faculty. Being a great faculty member means doing a lot of hard work and constantly trying new things, lest you or your class become stale. We are always in a state of becoming.
As in any field, I believe that most faculty are actually working hard to become great faculty. Great faculty connect with their students and convey the importance of learning as well as impart a great deal of factual information or processes for learning.
Students today have grown up in a highly connected world very different from that in which most faculty grew up. There is an extremely deep cultural divide between students and faculty today, much deeper than is usually recognized. Great faculty need to bridge that gap as they do what they do, and it isn't getting any easier.
If there is a reason to use technology - and remember, there should be one, or one shouldn't bother - the reason is that it can actually help bridge the cultural gap between students and faculty. It can be used to convey to the students the immediacy, the importance of the topic being addressed in the class. That message can come across because, as in Michael Wesch's class, the teacher immediately addresses questions that the students raise via communication channels they're comfortable with, like Twitter. It can come across in a religion class when they look at a controversy trending on Twitter about a Hindu goddess printed on bikinis.
It can also come across when students using clickers see an instant graph of their opinions on a complicated topic, or their evaluation of a fellow student's research presentation. It can come across when students get frequent feedback, from weekly quizzes that just check how well they're keeping up with the material, and an email from their professor if they start to fall behind. It can come across when they write a blog topic on a play they're struggling with - and the play's author responds with his current thoughts about the same scene.
Technology can help bring faculty and students closer together. Technology can help convey the material or the importance of the material to students.
It can only help. The work, the idea, the goal has to be the teacher's.
I long for the day when these teeth-gritting articles are quaint artifacts of the past. Can't we all just agree on some new basic principles, that aren't preconceptions at all, but the solid results of 30 years now of using technology in teaching? Can't we learn?
The average college faculty member wants to connect to students and have students learn. The average college student wants to do exactly what they did before (in high school, or in their first years of college) which earned them A's and got them to the point where they are today. The average college student lives his or her life online. The average college student believes that college is not life - that learning is not life - because it doesn't happen online, it happens in lectures they find boring or other similarly non-riveting "class" activities.
The average college professor can help to bridge that gap through strategic, purposeful use of technology in their classes, uses that make the class constantly real and live to students by presenting them with problems to solve, research to do, and opportunities to synthesize what they learn into real essays, real presentations, or real research with real audiences. (If you want some ideas on how to do this, drop me or my staff an email.)
Even some lectures - like Michael Wesch's - can help teachers connect to students with the help of technology, even as some lectures - like Christopher Sorensen's - manage to do the same just fine without it.
Faculty who have already learned how to use technology to connect with their students and accomplish their teaching goals are not "tech-happy". Faculty who are already successful without having to do these things are not "fogeys". Faculty who don't fall into either group, who are still trying to figure out how best do what they want to do - connect with students, get them to learn - with or without technology, should be called "conscientious". That small group of faculty who ignore that they are not yet successful and who ignore that technology might be able to help them should be called ... to task.
And journalists who imply that the world is better now because one of our "tech-happy" cyborg-profs now (finally!) understands that really connecting with students, with community, is the true goal of teaching (because he rebooted!)... well, I don't know what they should be called. I don't know much about journalism. But I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be called "journalists".
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