…[C]lickers add little to classroom pedagogy, and can ultimately diminish scholarship. Can use of clickers capture the thoughtful and creative responses that, hopefully, professors attempt to incorporate into their classes? Are we fostering an educational environment in which technology supersedes scholarship, an academy dominated by edtechtainment — pedagogy by gimmickry?
Badly written piece in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, but he’s got all the right ideas, and they can’t be stated often enough, so UD‘ll cite this and one other thing the guy says.
But yeah. Even in this short quotation, phrases that carry little meaning (“thoughtful and creative” — I mean, thoughtful, maybe, although it’s vague and namby pamby… But creative? It means – as in another phrase with which you may be familiar, creative writing – nothing.), and clunky mishandled words (hopefully) do quite a bit of damage.
What? You wanna know what’s wrong with hopefully? Well, who’s doing the hoping? Does the writer hope that professors incorporate creative responses into their classes? (And note the awkwardness of that incorporate. I don’t hope to incorporate responses into my classes. I hope to provoke responses from my students.) Or do professors hope to incorporate creative responses into their classes?
Notice, too, that like a lot of bad writing, this is wordy and redundant (No need for use of in the second sentence, for instance.). Also that it feels as though it’s in a passive, rather than active, voice. Also that it feels convoluted and kind of jargony. It’d be pretty easy to rewrite this sentence with way fewer words, and in particular avoiding classes and classroom. We’d also, in editing, want to simplify the sentence, want to make its assertion emerge more strongly: Can clickers help professors generate energetic and reflective responses from students?
Bad writing is really just the accumulation of unclear and unattractive language like this over the course of several paragraphs.
But anyway. Here’s something else he says. Various forms of classroom technology are
… handmaiden[s] of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and text messages to friends.
The semi-colon is incorrect, but otherwise the sentence is okay. It says something important; and UD likes the opera glasses bit.
The crucial problem with worrying, in tight-ass technical language, about the end of creative classrooms is that you convey the sensibility you’re worrying about.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:38AM
"The crucial problem with worrying, in tight-ass technical language, about the end of creative classrooms is that you convey the sensibility you’re worrying about."
This is true. But why is it true? For some time I’ve been looking for a good theoretical account of this link — between technology, creativity, and stupidity — and others like it. Anything to recommend, besides all your enjoyable techolust posts?
June 20th, 2008 at 10:20AM
Oona: The first name that comes to mind is ol’ Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” where he talks about the dehumanizing, abstracting effects of too-technical writing –
“Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
… As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself….”
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
But of course this isn’t really a theoretical account, which is what you’ve asked for.
A slightly more theoretical source would be, for instance, the tradition of the Southern Agrarians — the fascinating book I’ll Take My Stand, and the contemporary writing of Wendell Berry. Here’s a recent talk Berry gave:
http://www.bellarmine.edu/studentaffairs/Graduation/berry_address.asp
Berry’s very much, I think, aligned with the Southern Agrarians. Here’s the Amazon page for I’ll Take My Stand:
http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Take-Stand-Tradition-Civilization/dp/0807103578
Parts of the book are readable on Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HLxN4lXpgEUC&dq=%22i+ll%22+take+my+stand+%22amazon+com%22&pg=PP1&ots=Xrhia7KY40&sig=zWvyKbX2V6MxVDUZD_4D69pdetY&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Di%2527ll%2Btake%2Bmy%2Bstand%2Bamazon.com%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPR7,M1
There’s lots of obvious bad stuff you can say about these populist agrarian traditions of thought, but I find some writers within them to be very eloquent on the vile intellectual and writerly implications of the hyper-technological mind.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:26AM
There’s also Christopher Lasch:
http://www.amazon.com/True-Only-Heaven-Progress-Critics/dp/0393307956
Lots of problems with this book, but it thinks seriously about how technology can make us think and write and act stupidly.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:06AM
I’d disagree that the "creative" in "creative writing" means nothing. It’s not a phrase you can parse on its own, because obviously, all writing is "creative" in that it is created. However. I think in the context of creative writing classes, which is pretty much the only context in which I hear the phrase used, the "creative" serves to differentiate it from academic writing, which is (wrongly on both counts) considered mimetic, thus not "creative." So I think it means something sort of stupid, but I do think it means something.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:44AM
If ‘creative writing,’ in the context of college classes (and sometimes – yikes – creative writing majors) means to describe any kind of writing you’re likely to see in a university that’s not academic (this would exclude, I guess, technical writing and scientific writing — though aren’t you likely to see a lot of scientific writing — experiments written up — in college?), this is a really broad definition, and maybe so broad as to be meaningless. There are plenty of creative writing courses that feature the essay as a creative form, etc.
The real problem for me lies in the use of the word ‘creative.’ Writing I get. Creative I don’t get. As you say, all writing is created, so creative writing must be something special, something distinct. What is that thing?
Can it be defined in terms of a genre? No – there are genres within creative writing: poetry, drama, fiction. But creative writing is not in itself a genre. Nor can we define it in terms of writing that’s not mimetic, since the essay and the memoir are part of creative writing curricula.
What it is, in UD’s humble opinion, is an emotion-marker. It marks emotions having to do with excitement, specialness, individuality, risk-taking, genius… All incredibly attractive things that we all think we have, that we’re all drawn to…
But despite what Barney tells us, few people are creative in so special a way as to make it worth their while to spend large chunks of their undergraduate college years exploring their creativity. Better they should learn something.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:18PM
Hmmm….
One of my friends teaches creative writing so I have to be a little careful here. She is a good writer and I think that her students are better writers when they are finished with the course – the point of the exercise?
Saying creative to some people (UD?) is like waving the red flag. Perhaps those who are professors of creative writing might be safer in saying that they teach just plain ol’ writing?
As to scientific writing, that is another can of cat food. At our place, ever trying to get something for nothing, students can take a course that is designated writing intensive. I have always made my research students write a longish paper as a matter of course. Enough of these and they sometimes turn into an undergraduate thesis. Thus this would qualify as writing intensive, but I don’t let students use this option simply because I would feel dishonest in claiming that I teach writing.
Others obviously don’t feel this way.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:33PM
I have a clicker and sometimes use it to train my dog.
June 20th, 2008 at 5:16PM
wayward: Yes. That’s what clickers are for, as Maria, in The Sound of Music, tells the Captain, when he tries to use one on her. (Okay – maybe it’s a whistle.)
June 25th, 2008 at 4:31PM
[...] Margaret Soltan now to recognize that plenty of technologies hinder rather than help learning. [Clickers pop immediately to mind.] Nevertheless, for me there are a few minimum requirement that every [...]