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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

THE SADDEST STORY

In a few days, as you know if you’ve been paying attention, UD will relax in Ocean City, Maryland, an Atlantic coast resort, while her husband, a newly elected town council member for Garrett Park, attends how-to-be-a-politician seminars at the annual meeting of the Maryland Municipal League, which is always held in Ocean City.

These seminars will no doubt feature a good deal of Powerpoint use. UD has already weighed in a couple of times on Powerpoint, which she considers a bad idea for the university classroom. UD’s official position on Powerpoint is that if she were approached by a technology specialist at her university and asked to incorporate Powerpoint into her classroom, she would disembowel herself.



UD will of course not attend any of the politicians-only seminars her husband will attend. She and her daughter will either be sitting on the beach drinking Pina Coladas, or blogging (UD’s daughter has a web page of her own). But she will continue to think about Powerpoint and other technologies which have come into the American university classroom. And essays like the one that appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education today will help her focus on the subject.

Here an Emory University history professor who’s also the director of its teaching center sits in on a Powerpoint -- and other technology-laden -- class and describes what he sees:


Throughout the class the students took notes on the computers, creating a ceaseless keyboard clatter and making it difficult for anyone to hear the teacher's voice. Worse, as they faced their screens they looked away from the professor and away from one another. The class had no sense of communal purpose, and some students scarcely gave the professor a glance.

The PowerPoint remote control didn't work quite right at first -- tinkering with it caused a delay -- and students periodically whispered to one another about technical problems when they should have been learning the day's topic. One rogue was covertly checking his e-mail messages; another was browsing supermodel Web sites.



Powerpoint, UD has always felt, is ideally designed for autistics. Whether professor or student, if you fear and loathe people, if you want to sit in a private psychic and physical space forever, Powerpoint’s your man. If you are a student, you look away from the professor; you look away from your fellow students. If you are a professor, you hunch over equipment, fiddling with it when it doesn’t work, and manipulating it to the exclusion of your human surroundings when it does.

Powerpoint caters not only to the autistic but - much like television - to the retarded. It is slow, redundant, and has pictures. The Emory professor recalls a medical convention during which he sat through a lot of Powerpoint presentations. “Every word the doctors spoke was duplicated on a screen above their heads. It was numbingly repetitive.”

In the classroom, “Teachers' overuse of technology sends a baleful signal to students that the machines are necessary.” The technology is necessary when teachers have nothing to teach and students want to be left alone with their supermodel sites, just as they’ve been left alone in their bedrooms for the last ten years with their computer games. Powerpoint and other technology represents a continuation, within the college setting, of the life American students have been leading all along. It’s one of the things we mean when we say that American universities have become a consumer wonderland.



That’s why this is the saddest part of the CHE article:

What can we do? Professors, stop your engines. Take to class only your wits. Make yourself the center of attention. Let the students look at you, not at a screen, and let them discover the pleasure of learning as a communal activity. Let them watch and listen as you speak.


This is sad because teachers as confident articulate witted human beings who know something worth knowing, who are worth paying attention to for fifty minutes to the exclusion of everything else, who love provoking Socratic banter with their students, are disappearing.

How antique this language, for instance, from William Arrowsmith , sounds today!

[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship…[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.


See, if I were a parent, I’d pay money for my child to spend time with brilliant human embodiments of the best ideas civilization’s been able to come up with. That sounds kind of exciting. And after all, I’m paying quite a lot of money, as Daniel Cheever, Jr. pointed out recently in The Boston Globe:


Over the last 10 years average tuition and fees rose 51 percent at public four-year colleges and 36 percent at private institutions, outpacing the consumer price index. Undergraduate tuition and fees at elite private schools such as Harvard grew even faster. For example, Harvard undergraduate tuition and fees are $27,448 this year, up from $17,851 in 1995 and $9,500 in 1985. With room and board added, next year's bill at Harvard will be an attention-getting $42,000. That's as much as the average family income in the United States.

The real question is whether students are getting their money's worth. In most other consumer markets, cost is a function of quality, real or perceived. This is a fact of life when purchasing a luxury car or high-caliber professional services. There is a ''value paradox" in higher education, however, since families rarely consider cost in the context of the quality delivered. That's partly because most colleges don't know how to measure their quality. But if education is truly an investment in a young person, shouldn't we be able to understand the return on that investment?

….Who's doing the teaching? What are students really learning? Perhaps a student is willing to pay a high price for education when professors, not graduate student teaching assistants, are guaranteed to teach the course and grade the papers. Maybe a parent is willing to pay market rates for a course whose small class size lets professors establish personal working relationships with students. Right now, many professors prefer their research ''opportunities" over their teaching ''load." Yet isn't it obvious the quality of education erodes when professors are absent, classes are unmanageably large, or most students get honor grades?



Cheever’s evoking here precisely the communal as well as personal intensity of the Socratic classroom; the immediacy, the sheer human reality, of such settings, could not be further from what the Emory professor describes as “the anonymity and chill that the machines created.” The absence of surprise -- everyone will get an A; the course content’s already written down on a computer screen -- is attractive if your model of the university experience is identical to your model of any consumer experience, in which you know precisely what you’re going to get and it’s delivered in a pleasant package.

But, as both of these observers suggest, if undergraduate university education is a qualitatively different sort of experience from that of sleepy satisfied consumption, then at its core, differentiating it most strongly, must be serious shared unscripted human engagement in the real questions that animate thought. If no teachers at your kid’s college are able to propel her into this realm of excited reflection, if all of the classes offer nice drones who twiddle knobs, then you’re not getting your money’s worth.

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UPDATE: PK writes to remind UD of an article by Edward R. Tufte, an expert on the visual presentation of information, titled PowerPoint is Evil. It’s wicked good. A sample: “Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple.”