Yes, in this great land of ours, our forefathers had the foresight to see that university professors would someday attempt to block internet access in their classrooms. That’s why the founders enacted the Blocking Classroom Internet Access is Illegal law.
We’re building a new large lecture hall facility. [The writer is a professor on a campus architecture committee. She’s responding to an article Scott Jaschik wrote for Inside Higher Ed. I’ll get to the article in a minute.] I’m one of 3 faculty on the architectural committee. When I suggested software/electronic blocking technology as part of the 6 lecture halls of various sizes, our IT people said that was illegal. Anyone know if this is true? I can’t find it in my state’s laws (a Southern state) and it seems like lots of schools use such technology. As a faculty member about to teach (and want to) 450 students — I desperately wanted such software that I could turn on/off.
Well, you’re just gonna have to stay desperate! Especially down South the law’s really strict. If any professor tries in any way to get between a student and Facebook, the student can make an on-the-spot citizen’s arrest and incarcerate the professor for the length of her natural life.
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The article’s really neat if you’re UD. If you’re me, it gives you hope. A couple of professors at a recent gathering of professors went after technology in the classroom. They said all the same shit UD‘s been saying about it for five years.
… [T]he push to use technology in the classroom has diminished the roles of teaching and education. They said they feel that many sessions for faculty members about the use of technology are the equivalent of “Tupperware parties,” focused on convenience and not education.
… The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?
[One presenter] stressed that he was not arguing that technology is the cause of educational failings. But he said that — given that technology costs money and takes time to learn — shouldn’t more questions be asked about whether the entire emphasis on technology has helped enough to justify its continued use?
“There is a science and an art to teaching,” he said. And if technology is part of the science, it’s time to focus anew on the art. Audience members traded stories about colleagues back home who — on a day that technology in their classrooms wasn’t working to allow for PowerPoints or other tools — canceled class because they didn’t know what to do. [Are you fucking kidding?]
Others talked about how seemingly forward-thinking ideas, like the “hybrid” course that mixes in-person and online instruction, can backfire. One faculty member spoke about how, at her campus, students sign up for the courses with no idea what they really are – sometimes unaware that they still must attend class and others not understanding how to work online. “It’s been a real disaster,” she said.
There was no real manifesto issued at the session, but there were repeated calls to take back the classroom.
[A presenter] talked about his revelation last year that he could ban students from using laptops or cell phones during class. He said he immediately saw the quality of discussion in class go up. Faculty members may think, as he did originally, that since they would have used laptops for note-taking (if they had had them as students), that’s how they would be used today — and not realize all the Facebook action and messaging and surfing that’s really going on.
Telling students that cell phones must be turned off, he said, requires firmness on the professor’s part. He demonstrated the looks he sees on some students as they are constantly glancing down on their muted but decidedly not off cells, anxious about any texts they may have missed. [He] said he isn’t heartless on the matter and that he has been known to tell some students “go outside and get your fix. You are in too much pain” from not being able to use the cell. But they must leave to do so.
And the professors said faculty members also need to be more questioning about whether PowerPoints are really the best way to communicate with students. [One] said that he believes that they may work well in some cases, but said that “when you are lecturing, you are unfolding ideas, and on the screen you have an immediate snapshot.” [Incredibly important point. I’ve tried to get at it many times on this blog. Significant ideas need to evolve slowly in all of their complexity and ambiguity in order to be grasped. This means questions and comments from students; it means students being able to witness the professor in real time herself evolving, through spontaneous speech and maybe through writing on the blackboard, those ideas. This is known as the life of the mind, kiddies. PowerPoint plops the endpoint of ideas down in front of you, all done up and dead.]
He said he finds that the act of writing on a board more accurately conveys the path he is taking an idea
[T]he real problem is that professors are over-relying on their PowerPoints, and are losing the art of improvisation. A good faculty member, he said, must be like a good comedian – “knowing the audience, responding to the audience” and either extending one line of thought or regrouping when something hasn’t worked. [You can’t even see your audience when you’re giving head to PowerPoint.]
Faculty members who base their classes on PowerPoint, he said, seem to lose that flexibility, which he said was crucial to reaching students. “Just because your machine tells you to go, you go.” [You’re a machine slave; your students staring at Facebook are machine slaves. Way to learn.]
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:02AM
Blocking cell phones _is_ illegal. Theaters have had the idea :).
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:23AM
I took a calculus class recently, at the local community college. The instructor made students turn off their cell phones and did not allow computers for anything other than note-taking. No one used a computer to do that, as far as I could tell. However, he himself relied entirely upon the ‘whiteboard’ for instruction. Never having used this technology myself, I don’t really know how it works. But it seems extremely limited and limiting, to me as a student. There was never enough room for this instructor to work out the problems in a fully organized fashion. He often had to ‘find space’ in nooks and crannies of the limited whiteboard expanse. In some cases, he would use an animated presentation of the problem which, he said, demonstrated something or other about the relationship between the elements of the problem. But in reality, what the students saw would be a little model of the problem undergoing some changes while a series of numbers flashed away over to the side of the animated diagram.
I’m old. I first took calculus before everyone else in that class was born. I had to figure out how to use the graphing calculator, but I also knew how to do many of the calculations ‘by hand’ which, it seemed to me, a great many of the kids in the class did not. Many of the students struggled in that class and I really felt that the method of presentation was an obstacle, not a help. I thought about this a great deal during the course but it wasn’t until you wrote this post that I had an ah-ha moment. I think the quote in your post — “significant ideas need to evolve slowly” — hits the bulls-eye. And the idea that the instructor needs to be actively working through those ideas with the students, not simply proceeding through a programmed agenda, is also crucial to grasping what makes any instruction successful, no matter what technology is employed.
The students were required to buy a $167 calculus textbook. No reading assignments were ever made in this text. The instructor used it solely for problems for homework. He never discussed the presentations of theorems or proofs. It was a remarkable class, in many ways, I have to say. I felt those kids in the class were really getting gypped. Interestingly, to me, there seemed to be no sense of that on their part. They were amazingly passive.
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:58AM
[…] tip: UD. Original: […]
June 2nd, 2010 at 11:32AM
You can’t even see your audience when you’re giving head to PowerPoint.
(COL = Choked out loud…)
June 2nd, 2010 at 2:37PM
auntdeb: Thank you for that wonderful comment.
And yes – Teaching is about working through ideas slowly while engaged very directly with your students, so that you can see at every point whether they’re getting it, how they’re taking it, etc. Flashing a slide in front of them and then asking them to register a response on a clicker isn’t just bad teaching. It’s flat-out insulting.
As to the passivity of students – indeed. Some think it’s about growing up doing little other than watching tv. Providing in-class laptops is just the thing for such people, right?
June 2nd, 2010 at 4:19PM
I’m sorry, I just had to let you know that your bracketed commentary was the most hilarious thing I’ve read in at least a few months. I laughed my ass off. Thanks.
I’m TAing a lab section of a course on media and technology in K-12 classrooms and I’m going to require my students to read this post…
June 2nd, 2010 at 6:35PM
joshua: More than anything else, I aim to be funny. So your comment makes me very happy. Thank you in return.
June 3rd, 2010 at 6:12AM
UD, years ago someone in Human Resources told me it was illegal in the state of Connecticut to give health insurance to GLBT domestic partners. Of course, it wasn’t true, which I learned when I pursued it. Valuable lesson: consider the source.
One good way to reduce texting and surfing in class is to occasionally stop abruptly and give a quiz on what you just said. Ta-da! Old fashioned and low tech, but so effective.
June 3rd, 2010 at 8:00AM
Since TR mentioned effective low tech…
It is a shame that the lecture demonstration has fallen out of vogue. Possibly for safety reasons, but more likely due to, ah, laziness.
If you set off a carbide cannon in class, folks will immediately wake up. And then you can explain to them about how you can make anything from a salve to a star -> if you only know how from black coal tar (acetylene). In the good old days, master teachers of chemistry were master lecture demonstrators. Hard to do with Powerpoint.
(Sorry for chemistry lesson…)
June 4th, 2010 at 7:21AM
Students are paying more and more, and getting less and less (partly their own fault, of course). I can’t possibly imagine what it would feel like, as a parent, to pauperize myself in order to foot the bill for this kind of education.
June 4th, 2010 at 10:15PM
Tenured Radical: Yes, the whole it’s illegal thing has 1,001 uses…