A very slow worry

I often think of the beginning of "A Midwinter's Tale" when Michael Maloney talks about his nervous breakdown as a long slow buildup. Some nervous breakdowns come quickly, catastrophically, he says; others have more of a slow build. He, he says, is 33 years old and this nervous breakdown had started when he was 7 months old and was just starting to really get a grip.

I've been worried about higher education's relationship to communication technologies since, oh, about 1994. Clearly not every class needs a technology component; clearly technology should only be used to serve the class' learning goals. But how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Not every faculty member needs to be able to communicate using 21st century methods. But how many should? Not every student needs guidance in being a digital citizen. But how many is the right number?

The Chronicle and other reports on higher education are filled with fear and numbers. How many credit hours will be required for students to get financial aid? How much profit is for-profit education making? At what age should professors retire? How much does it cost a student to earn a degree versus how much will they earn in the career they get after they earn it?

Few ask the overarching questions. Politicians don't like such questions because they don't lead to good soundbites and faculty don't always like them either. I hear way too many people on campuses responding to these questions with the answers "everyone knows" - unexamined. They're uncomfortable questions when they seem like challenges to the status quo. What is the purpose of higher education? If it is to educate workers and not citizens, what should our curricula look like? Likewise if it is to educate citizens and not workers? What should a college-educated person know or be able to do? What are our responsibilities as faculty to change higher education in general?

And then the technology-related subquestions: what should a college graduate know about networking or digital security? What should they know about digital privacy? What will the educated citizen or worker do with the technological resources available to him or her through the rest of his life? How should college be preparing our students to do those activities?

Then here's the real kicker: How long can we ignore these questions?

Most leading colleges and universities are struggling with the same questions and activities that we are. We have many digital resources - but not an infinite amount. To what should we be allocating our resources? This always leads me back to the same questions I ask myself: How many classes using technology is the right number? How many faculty should be tweeting, how many should be wiki-ing, how many should teach students what code looks like, how many should expect students to demonstrate the ability to write a lucid blog post? How many should touch on media literacy, video composition, local and global inequities in technology resources, or the ethics of Photoshop? If we have 600 classes posting syllabi online but only 50 using discussion boards actively, is that enough? Do our students feel that learning is a 21st century activity and are we equipping them to do it for themselves for the rest of their lives?

To me there are a lot of reasons to use technology in teaching, and I've already blogged about some of them: more time on the task at hand outside of the classroom, more writing and reading experience, more opportunities for feedback, more accommodation for different learning styles. But there's one compelling reason I keep coming back to figuring out what to do next: because our students practically live online, but they don't learn there. It would be a shame (yes, I said this in The Chronicle years ago, I'm still recycling the line,) it would be a shame if the only things our students couldn't do online is learn.

The right number of teachers using technology and the right number of technology-enhanced classes is whatever number it takes to make sure that all of our students have a chance to learn how to learn using these tools. The right number is whatever number it takes to convince them that learning is a 21st-century activity, not a 19th-century one. The right number is whatever it takes to get them engaged and active now and not thinking that a class is just a hurdle to jump over.

I don't know what that number is, but I have been worrying for more than 15 years that we're somewhere below that number, and the worry is juuuuuust starting to get a good grip.