Announcing Swine Science Online.

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Swine Science Online includes the first course UD has seen that she acknowledges would probably be better taught online.

Swine Manure and Nutrient Management (1 cr.)

Function, application, and advantages and disadvantages of nutrient management systems. Manure production rates, manure handling systems, storage and manure management planning for land application and odor mitigation strategies.

From the Toronto Sun:

… “You can’t write a good essay if you’re also texting your friends and checking your Facebook page,” [said University of Western Ontario sociology professor Doug Mann].

Because many students now bring laptops to class to take notes, websites such as Facebook and Twitter offer a tempting escape from lectures.

Mann said many students come to class, sit near the back and zone out, rarely taking part at all.

Nicole Segal agrees. Heading into her first year at the University of Western Ontario next week, she took a first-year psychology course in Gr. 12 through WISE — Western’s Initiative for Scholarly Excellence — to better prepare for university.

She said watching people check sites such as Facebook distracted her from what the professor was saying, and made her want to do the same.

“If you see people in front of you checking it, you’re like ‘Oh, I’m going to check mine, too’,” she said. “Then you’ll get even more distracted and say ‘Oh, what did i just miss?'” …

… finds live to be better. Duh.

UD thanks Dennis for the link.

The Times of India:

[S]ome B-schools in [Bangalore] are seeing to it that students use laptops only when the `subject demands’, unlike the earlier no-holds-bar[red] usage.

… [W]hen students are permitted to get laptops for lectures, they either start surfing the net or chat online. The move is only to minimize such distractions in classrooms.

… [One school] defends the move on the grounds that engagement with laptops reduce[s] physical contact with teachers and interaction in classroom.

Ellen Schrecker, in Forbes, describes the process whereby tenured professors become contingent instructors who in turn become internet traffic directors.

She begins with a story.

… California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

One instructor, 700 students. Online. What could go wrong?

So okay here we are mid-August and we’re starting to get all the stories about how if you study the tech phenom it turns out that laptops and iPads and e-readers and e-textbooks make you learn less well. Here’s a recent story.

The reason that student up there in my headline stays with regular textbooks is that they force you to stay focused on one thing, and they force, as well, an active intellectual relationship to an argument, narrative, formula, whatever. It’s just your mind and the text, just you alone grappling with a particular aspect of history or science or art as it unfolds, as it presents itself in a certain chronological fashion.

Writers of textbooks work hard to introduce a topic, give some background, start with easy stuff, move up to more difficult stuff, etc. If you aren’t able to follow the course of this presentation, you are unlikely to absorb what the book wants you to absorb.

You absorb this material because your focused, engaged mind is allowed independently, over time, to shape an understanding of a certain thing, to see an idea emerge naturally from earlier ideas, to see how ideas develop and become more complex, etc. One researcher says:

“When I asked study participants why they didn’t use their laptops to look something up, I heard some version of ‘because that’s my distraction.’ “

With a laptop, you’re all over the place – Facebook for five minutes, something vaguely relevant to what you’re studying for three minutes, email for seven minutes, French taunting in Monty Python and the Holy Grail for six minutes. You simply can’t think straight.

“[W]ho is [online] right for?” asks a community college president. “[I]t’s really great for certain groups of students, but … to be online, you have to be very self-disciplined. It’s one thing to get up for a 7:00 a.m. class. It’s another thing to see your computer, and you can either play … some cool computer game with guns and stuff, or you can do your economics class. Probably the temptation for some students is not to do the econ class, and so we still probably need to think about ways to really make a connection with students, and really with faculty.”

All of this is obvious, mes enfants.

But it doesn’t matter. As with anti-depressants, there’s a universal market in these goods, and they’ll get shoved down our throats.

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.]

This excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise…

No, it’s from the Hartford Advocate, sent to UD by chris, a reader, and it’s an actual statement from an actual Trinity College student in which she notes that her efforts to focus on the murder of six million Jews are sometimes interrupted by previews of coming attractions.

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A history professor at Trinity says, “The laptop isolates you from your classmates. Your relationship in the class is no longer as part of a community.”

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The laptop works kind of like a burqa.

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Another Trinity professor also thinks laptops discourage discussion.

If you make a comment in class, you are very aware that others are paying attention to you. As a professor, I’ve accepted the fact that some people aren’t paying attention to me. But when a student takes a risk, it is important that they are taken seriously. If the other eyes are on a laptop, contributors are aware that people are not engaged with what they are saying.

It’s a subtle and important point. Let’s consider it more closely.

Offering comments in university classrooms takes a bit of nerve, because smart people in those rooms are taking what you say seriously.

But of course that’s exactly why you want to say things in a serious university classroom. The setting forces you to focus and reflect before you speak; the mere mental formulation of your idea or your objection or your question, the very preparation to speak, is a kind of education in honing your language, refining your point, thinking seriously.

Again, this is because you know that serious people are going to listen to you carefully and take what you say seriously.

These are people, after all, who have decided to spend weeks concentrating on the subject on which you are about to speak. Not only that, but in front of the room is a professor who has dedicated a good deal of her intellectual life to the same subject.

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The classroom theater is intense, highly lit. It is the supreme antithesis to Plato’s cave.

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It’s not a comfortable place to be, exposed out there in search of the truth. One reason the university has always been a profoundly idealized cultural location is that people instinctively respect the collective effort toward intellectual clarity and maturation.

You’re in the university classroom to be changed.

… For all the weighty material, [he] had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

… As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled.

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

… But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

[He] chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change … [H]e liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled…

Professor Obama, at the University of Chicago, relied on the fact that his students were engaged, willing to be unsettled, willing to risk responding to his provocations. … Why do you think Jose Bowen calls his movement the Teach Naked movement? At its best, in its essence, teaching has always been about exposure: Exposure of the thinking self, exposure of complex, contested truths.

Exposure over time, which is why a lot of PowerPoint use, with its Here it is, folks bullets, is bullshit. The classroom theater is narrative drama — You come back to that room again and again as, through slow and intense intellectual and social interaction, the deeper realities of the world reveal themselves.

Another Trinity professor gets it: “The kind of interactions that make a class dynamic get muted [with laptops]. Just keep typing, keep clicking, rather than … think on your feet or mull over an idea that a classmate or professor has just presented.”

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Does the classroom picture I’ve drawn describe every valuable and authentic university course? No. But it certainly describes the ideal of many university courses, no matter what the subject.

University courses are teaching you how to think about anything, not merely how to think about their particular subject matter. Professors are modeling the disciplined and unimpeded and active use of reason generally.

Listen to what the Trinity professors are trying to tell you.

“Sitting in a room with people to talk about ideas is a very precious experience. Once people graduate, they won’t necessarily have this experience on a daily basis.”

Glenn Gass, a music professor at Indiana University, is too diplomatic to say the other part of this. Not all professors are passionate, or care whether students learn anything. These professors are happy – grateful, really – to Powerpoint their way through fifty minutes of Laplandic silence.

Gass speaks.

“It drives me crazy as a teacher to see a bunch of glowing laptops, and they’re doing a bunch of things that aren’t related to class,” Gass said. “If you really want to learn, you can’t do something else while you’re listening.”

An IU lecturer, Michelle Mosely, speaks:

“I don’t allow laptops at all in my class,” she said. “It’s a distraction. I don’t even allow cell phones or laptops on their desks.”

Mosely, like Gass, has fairly large classes, and she said students in large classes believe themselves to be invisible in the crowd.

Mosely penalizes her students for using laptops or cell phones in her class, which results in a verbal warning, deduction of participation points or students being asked to leave her classroom and not receive credit for that day.

University of Alabama students chose Lawrence Kohl, a history professor, to give this year’s Last Lecture.

… Kohl said scientific thinking dominates every other way of thinking. Many modern-day scientists know people will like what they discover or create because people now rely on technology, he said.

“Our age has become disillusioned and dissatisfied with what humans can do,” Kohl said.

According to Kohl, the 21st century is a time of competition — countries compete, humans compete and even schools compete…

Humans use drugs to increase athletic performance beyond their natural ability, Kohl said.

… Kohl discussed how educators now have a misguided worship of technology, where they prefer the new over the old and compare the real to the virtual. Also, instructors should trust students to be able to learn without all [the] new technology in the classroom.

… The scientific mind is reshaping education to make it more reductive, Kohl said. One example is the goals and objectives instructors have to put on the class syllabus. According to Kohl, it is wasteful, corrupting and destructive of proper teaching. Some instructors may even create goals which are easily achieved.

… He mentioned that the clickers many UA students use are a great example of the reductive scientific mindset. Every technique will not necessarily work for every class or for every set of students.

Kohl said he disagrees with educators who claim that young people are better at multitasking than older generations.

… He said most people think new is always better than old, and this can be destructive because people may accept educational techniques without looking at their usefulness, necessity and implications.

… Humanities and fine arts, especially, cannot replace an instructor with technology because technology can cause the course to lose its value to students, he said.

Kohl gave an example of students who may be looking forward to taking a class taught by Rick Bragg, only to discover he is teaching the course through pre-recorded videos. Kohl said students would likely be disappointed, and a lecture can be a life-changing experience.

“Much of my career has been shaped by those who have long passed away,” Kohl said. “We need to create an educational environment of, by and for human beings.”

Kohl pointed out instructors should live up to the University’s slogan, “Touching lives.”

“Let them be human lives, and let them be touched by human minds,” Kohl said…

Sitting in my women studies class, an odd tranquility filled the room. [Awkward opening sentence. Makes it sounds as though a tranquillity was sitting in the room. Rewrite along these lines maybe: “An odd tranquillity filled my women’s studies classroom.”] Although the day’s topic revolved around sex-change surgeries, there were no obscene noises made by keyboards, no glare from a computer screen logged on to Twitter, and I was not subjected to watching a random YouTube video playing on a screen in front of me. Perfect tranquility for those of us who were trying to learn.

From day one, our professor was very adamant about her non-computer policy — simply, no computers allowed. “The following activities disrupt an educational environment and will not be tolerated: talking, texting, phone calling, giggling, playing Texas HoldEm or other games, im-ing, emailing and surfing (on the web). Should you engage in any of these, you will be asked to leave,” states the class’ syllabus. [Giggling?]

The student paints a scenario:

“I’m only going to take notes,” you might be telling yourself, but let’s paint a scenario. You’re in your chemistry class and your professor is rambling on about something you learned two quarters ago. You are, at the moment, taking notes on your laptop. What to do? Option A: Google something random. Option B: continue to take notes, despite the fact [that] you are falling asleep. Most if not all would choose option A. Although I myself take pride in my note taking abilities, I have been known to wander the path of YouTube occasionally during class. It seems as though human nature takes part in this attempted compensation for boredom. Even with insane multi-tasking abilities, students will more than likely miss a vital part of lecture and end up suffering come grade time.

… is the headline in the Seton Hall University newspaper.

Subhead:

STUDENTS LOSE PRIVACY IN CLASS

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If UD had written the article, the subhead would be:

PROFESSORS LOSE DIGNITY AND TRAIN OF THOUGHT IN CLASS

All a matter of perspective, I guess. But UD, a professor, sees mainly the pathos of academics reduced to spies… Instead of lecturing and leading discussions, the Seton Hall classroom monitors are as distracted as their laptop-using students.

These professors must constantly run their eyes over their surveillance screens and — while trying to think and talk about civil engineering or geology or absurdist plays — interpret the images they see in order to determine whether or not they are relevant to the class. And then I guess they must decide how to punish wrongdoers…

Some Seton Hall professors have begun using surveillance software to monitor student activity on their laptops during class.

DyKnow software allows professors to monitor student’s laptop activity during class. The professor downloads the DyKnow software, which allows the professor’s laptop monitor to become a surveillance screen.

… Professor James Kimble of the communication department is one professor who uses this software.

“I’ve grown increasingly concerned that internet access is a distraction for my students, so much so that I feel confident in my growing belief that it is affecting student learning and, ultimately, student grades,” Kimble said…

The students are pissed; they defend their right to show contemptuous disregard for the person addressing them from the front of the room.

So this does not seem to UD a good solution. She feels sure, what with American ingenuity and all, that students will evolve DyKnow-blocking software (it probably already exists), in response to which the professor will install DyKnow II, etc.

Laptop wars. A bit unseemly. Time to get on the ban-wagon.

… The new policy benefits all students, not just those taking laptop notes. Countless numbers of people know how distracting it is to see other peoples’ laptop activities. Whether people are playing games, chatting on Facebook or reading gossip sites, it attracts the attention of those behind and next to them. Losing access to the Internet not only keeps the attention of those who would be surfing, but also those who are distracted by their neighbors.

… Some students feel that they have a right to do as they wish during class – and as long as they sit near the back of a lecture hall, how will the professor notice what they’re really doing? Simply put, goofing around during class is disrespectful to professors. For an expensive education time in the classroom should not be squandered. If you really can’t live without the Internet for an hour, don’t bother to go to class.

… [B]anning the Internet during class time reduces the amount [should be number] of distractions and helps students concentrate…

The editors of the Indiana University newspaper argue that professors should have the ability to cut off students’ internet access during class. They quote the dean of the University of Chicago Law School:

[S]tudents and faculty [need to be] focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner.

… banning laptops. I link to it only because I link to all of these things.

Oh, wait. There is one wonderful moment in it. A comment from a student explaining one instance of laptop use:

I went through a history class that was just every single day death by PowerPoint. And it just, it was awful.

It’s technology v. technology: An asshole in front of the room is too lazy to teach and students are too afraid or indifferent to protest. So students find their own defensive technology in response to the situation.

The result is what UD has called the Morgue Classroom, or TPD: Total Pedagogical Death.

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By the way, some American university students have formally protested excessive or inept faculty PowerPoint use at a number of campuses.

From an article in Slate about laptops in university classrooms:

… George Mason Law professor Michael Krauss has been banning laptops for five or six years now.

The way his first-year law-school classes are taught, Krauss said, is by asking questions for the students to answer in discussion. Distractions and the Internet aren’t Krauss’ concern in banning laptops; the reason for the ban is that laptops have “become a substitute for thinking.” The material in a law class requires a lot of thought to help understand concepts, and students who type verbatim what is said in class into their notes aren’t giving themselves any time to absorb and analyze.

… Tablets like the iPad will only make it harder for students to pay attention in class and for schools to ban the device. Since the iPad can be used to read textbooks, professors might be unsure which students are goofing off and which are legitimately studying. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to mind. In the fall, the school is going to give each new incoming student a MacBook and an iPad. How distracted will those students be?…