November 13th, 2013
There’s been a series of fine sunsets over the last three days…

… and fine sunrises too, like the one I enjoyed early this morning, walking to the commuter train steps from my house (Mr UD usually drives me to the metro, but he’s out of town).

I’ve been so busy from morn ’til night these three days that it’s been hard for me to blog… I watched last night’s sunset from an incredibly well-appointed meeting room on the top floor of a fancy building at George Washington University, where I sat listening to sales pitches from online vendors who’d like to run programs at GW. Yes, GW is exploring all sorts of online initiatives, and UD has been asked to be part of this exploration because of her modest MOOC acclaim.

Yet if you read this blog with any care, you know that despite her online poetry lectures, UD is way skeptical of online education. So she is an oddball, a misfit, a brother from a seriously other mother, on this particular committee… Though she thinks she may be of some use to it, since her elaborate resistance to what these vendors represent is perhaps representative of a certain slice of the professorati, and GW might as well know what to expect by way of trouble as it tries to get some of this stuff up and running.

Still, UD is reflective enough (though just barely) to wonder, as she squints paranoiacally at this techie parade, whether she herself is sort of like totally well like over. Hopelessly twentieth century. Apparently everyone’s supposed to want to learn things by sitting by yourself and playing Sesame Street-like games and watching coached professors on a screen. Or on a phone or whatever. Everyone’s supposed to be dying to have a university-level discussion that’s organized like the opening of the Brady Bunch except that instead of the Brady Bunch it’s your fellow discussants. Students want this. Students demand this. Said the techie parade.

And actually there’s a lot to like if you’re a certain kind of professor. UD gathers that some online teaching will appeal to the self-important among us – displaced German university professors who enjoy being fussed over by a team of people whose job it is to sense what they will like and do that thing for them… Who will, let’s be honest, actually write and even sorta teach the course for them if they would like… Who’d run interference in such a way that they’d never have to get all down and dirty with, well, students… Bothersome things like that…

And, you know, it’s like that Monty Python thing… I s’pose I’m very old-fashioned… very old-fashioned… (Did I make that up? I can’t find the source of it.) But I just can’t wrap my head around it.

November 1st, 2013
For the first time in her teaching life…

UD allowed her students today to persuade her to use the enormous monitor superimposed over the whiteboard in her way-smart classroom (it has all the techno bells and whistles) in order to show them a short YouTube.

This is her honors seminar in modernism and postmodernism (main text), and she was talking about postmodern music – specifically Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis.

She was reluctant to do things this way, though she could see how watching it while talking about it together had its attractions; and she was reluctant mainly because she was convinced simply getting the thing going would waste class time. But this guy in class just strode up to the podium, pushed a button and then another button, and there it was on the screen.

And UD will admit that it was rather wonderful watching this ten-minute performance with her class and being able, in real time, to talk about the elements of Daugherty’s composition. She had sent the students the YouTube earlier that day, but there hadn’t been enough time for everyone to see it; and even if there had been, there’s no denying that watching it together was a good thing.

So I suppose I’ve broken a techno-barrier.

May 11th, 2013
‘I took an art history class at Truman in which we spent endless hours flipping through PowerPoint slides of paintings while the professor read, one by one, the title of each work. We received mountains of information, but toward the end of the semester, one student sitting next to me actually pleaded under her breath, “Teach us something!”’

I quoted this in a post a long time ago, and its source – Truman State University’s newspaper – no longer has it online.

I’ve always been moved – angered – by what that student found it necessary to plead. Her Teach us something! haunts me. It’s so easy to put away the PowerPoints and the laptops and smartphones and the rest of the other barrier technologies and just turn the lights back on and look at people and talk to them. Assuming you have something to say beyond a verbal data dump. The PowerPointed plus laptopped classroom is what UD has long called, on this blog, The Morgue Classroom, where everyone ‘s dead – instructor and students.

We can expect more outbursts like this one in our secondary schools and colleges – more Teach Us Somethings – as teachers and professors continue their dance with death in the classroom. The outburst has gone way viral; Jeff Bliss’s statement (“They need to learn face to face.”) is getting national and international attention.

It’s icing on the cake that this happened in Texas, one of our most ignorant states. What are they up to in Texas high schools that’s making the news? A one million dollar football scoreboard.

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(UD thanks JND and UD‘s sister.).

February 15th, 2013
“I mean I could be talking about a, you know, Rwandan genocide, and someone in the back is laughing because they’re watching a YouTube video.”

Ah, the wondrous rich diversity of the laptopped classroom.

February 12th, 2013
Prosumer.

UD is back at the online education conference at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, where she continues to learn new words.

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But not just words. There’s the whole thing of whether universities will continue to exist at all if we can download MIT educations via MOOCs. (MOOCs are totally the star of this show. It sometimes sounds a like barnyard here – MOOMOOMOOc.)

The answer to that is you can’t download a college education, which includes not just the social, rite of passage stuff, but also immediate intellectual interaction with professors and smart fellow students – in classrooms, outside of classrooms.

Universities also collect smart people to think valuable thoughts and make valuable things. You can take all of those people and put them in think tanks and corporations, but only the university offers an environment reasonably free of ideology and the profit motive.

UD is aware that both ideologies and commercial activities exist on campuses; she is merely pointing out that unlike Brookings or the Heritage Foundation or Pfizer, the university stands at some remove from ideology and the profit motive. It enables a special sort of intellectual independence, and we rightly value and want to preserve that.

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“What is the unique value of physical presence?”

Too right. One of the breakout sessions lists this as a “very important” question.

February 11th, 2013
What? You want me to set the scene? Okay, I’ll set the scene!

Hold your horses. You know the scene. A dark rainy very early Washington morning. The conference hotel has an entrance directly from Metro Center – underground, see, so you don’t have to deal with the rain – but UD‘s wild guess as to which entrance took you to the Grand Hyatt was as wrong as it’s possible to be, so she just splashed through three long blocks but is now richly rewarded with a BIG ol’ breakfast buffet in one of your basic insanely beautiful American hotels. Everything’s brownish spartan eco in style — huge bamboo crammed into speckly brown containers kind of thing.

UD has been invited by a very confused organizer to attend this NSF-sponsored event which seems to be about er computers and their implications for higher education. Or something! It’s a mark of how wrongheaded this organization was in directing its invitation to UD that she barely understands its… er… ground of being. But she’ll blog this. Whatever.

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Humanoids? Okay, well, we’re all stretched out at long table-clothed tables and we’ve all got our scones at the ready and our laptops fired up. Bit of conversation behind me:

And you’re the director of … what?

For a bunch of techies, seems a genial, outgoing group. Many small gatherings chatting at the long tables. Fifty fifty men women? Think so. No doubt UD‘s invitation is about evening out the gender thing… What? Because she blogs? Has two blogs? Has a poetry MOOC? UD has also lately been invited to be on a panel at next year’s MLA about technology and the status of women in the profession… A colleague has asked her to talk to his grad seminar about the digital humanities which UD isn’t even sure what the fuck that means… Her photo is emblazoned on the front page of the last edition of the George Washington University newspaper, featuring her as the first GW professor to have a MOOC…

So is UD a pioneer??? A tech pioneer? Lordy.

I mean, read this category, Technolust. No, UD is not a Luddite, exactly – but she has always had strong Luddische tendencies… I think it’s safe to say that over the last thirty years UD has resisted every single new form of screen technology offered her… And she’s got that cranky old English professor thing about technology really being our enemy… But over the years she has gradually caved.

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Introduction taking place. Guy pronounces academia as if it’s macadamia.

“How do you do high-quality online education” seems to be the focus.

Uses “ideation” for “thinking.”

“Recent awareness of MOOCs and whatnot.”

“The elephant in the room is the MOOC phenomenon.”

“Cheating is a big problem.”

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Okay, so I knew some of this was going to piss me off and here we go. A totally stupid PowerPoint about how all students are bored in school because school isn’t like a Facebook session in your bedroom. Bullshit, honey. Have you ever heard of different experiences, different places for different sorts of experiences? Oh no – universities have to be exactly like online gaming dens or we’re failing our young people!


AGENDA: CURRENT EDUCATION IS BORING AND INEFFECTIVE.

Oh yeah we need to wire and film every moment of our students – are their fingers moving faster on the mouse? Great! They’re excited! Wire their fingers! Follow their fingers.

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WHY DO WE LOOSE JOBS?

She cannot even spell. She reads this big PP headline off the page for us – pointing her lighted pointer right over it – and lots of us laugh but she doesn’t even notice. She doesn’t notice that even as she pontificates about the importance of education, she cannot spell LOSE.

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Next speaker seems offended by MOOCs because they don’t reflect the educational technologies he prefers. He complains that there’s no science and research behind MOOCs. First, that’s not true. And second, even if it were, so what? He spends the rest of the talk flacking his particular journals, ed-tech approaches.

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Bio break.

Collaboratories.

UD learns new words.

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“There’s an audio narration that worked on my pc last night.” Plenty of tech fuckups in these way-tech settings.

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UD has just taken part in a breakout session (she thinks of acne and Alcatraz, but it just means a discussion made up of only some participants in a conference) in which computer science guys from MIT talked with UD about whether computers could capture the sort of thing she does – or say embodies – in James Joyce seminars. Of course the answer is no bloody way, but we tossed it around.

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Big Data. That’s this hour’s buzz word.

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Plus Affective Computing, where you connect a sensor to my groin while I check out the best deer poisons, and find the phrases that get me going.

November 21st, 2012
“Dr. Venkatesh says this goes against much of what he hears at professional development workshops that stress interactive learning strategies, often using technology.”

Duh. All over the world university tech people are meeting and telling each other how obviously superior laptops and PowerPoints and cell phones and clickers are to a compelling, knowledgeable lecturer. At many schools, they’re really shoving this stuff down faculty throats.

But whenever people bother asking students whether they appreciate dragging this crap into the classroom and looking at a lecturer’s neck as she bends over her PowerPoint, they say no. Actually, no; they don’t appreciate it.

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UD thanks Jack.

November 3rd, 2012
The University Professor as Degrading Contortionist

The simplest solution is often the best. It’s now undisputed common knowledge that laptops, phones, and other technologies brought into class distract you and those around you who are forced to be aware of your fascinating screen. Tens of thousands of professors, and increasing numbers of departments, ban laptops from the classroom.

And this is clearly the trend. In a few years, two or three techno-cults will survive on a few campuses; their directors-of-campus-technology leaders will continue to insist that watching Tits Galore while listening to a Heidegger lecture makes the concept of Geworfenheit ever so much clearer. But they will be shouted down; eventually, it will be very difficult indeed to find a laptop-friendly university classroom.

But professors aren’t always attracted to simple solutions. Faced with the laptop problem, they contort themselves, and they turn students who are supposed to be learning things into guinea pigs.

Take York University’s Henry Kim. Kim is fully aware that his students aren’t listening to him because they’re watching shit on their laptops. Instead of banning laptops, however, Kim has taken a page out of Erich Honecker’s East Germany and turned his students into a spy network. If a student sees another student using her laptop for non-class purposes (Kim has already had his students swear some ridiculous pledge, etc.), she is to report that to Kim.

“It’s not meant to be punitive — it’s almost like a thought experiment, and the whole point is to create a new social norm in my class.”

Comrade Honecker speaks! Creating new social norms by encouraging students to turn in other students – that’s the solution to the laptop problem!

October 15th, 2012
The Truth about Multitasking

A Columbia University student, on the laptop in the classroom.

Take, for example, an instance of tweeting while listening to a lecture: It’s tempting to think that we can divide our attention between a professor’s analysis of the Cold War and a clever 140 characters, but it would be more accurate to think of this as a series of micro-episodes, as we alternate brief bursts of attention between the two possible stimuli to which we may attend. Each one is a distraction that impedes our performance on the primary task.

October 8th, 2012
‘Though not all classroom situations are suited to the use of technology, there are times when having Internet access can benefit students, according to Christopher Waters, assistant CIO and director of Teaching and Learning Technologies. “If someone is a visual learner, they might engage differently with an online tool than someone who responds well to just hearing the material,” Waters said.’

Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.

But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.

As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:

“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”

And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.

September 19th, 2012
A student at UD’s George Washington University…

… writes one of many articles in the student press about the gradual delaptation (gotta find a word for it) of the university classroom.

September 13th, 2012
‘[T]oday’s students enter their first lecture anxiously awaiting the professor’s electronic device policy. It’s not uncommon to hear hundreds of laptops clapping shut shortly after syllabi are distributed. It’s the sound of an epidemic.’

UD‘s only question, as you know if you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, is What took so long?

This article about NYU is amusing. One professor, who points out that laptops create a physical barrier between students and professors, says that if you love laptops in the classroom, “Drop out of NYU and go enroll in the University of Phoenix.”

The NYU student reporter is way down on no-laptop professors like UD. It turns out we’re motivated by fear:

[E]ducators are always afraid that their lessons will be overshadowed by the outside world. Often, that’s because their lessons are boring.

Digital media scholar and professor Melanie Kohnen, also of the Media, Culture and Communication department, thinks that teachers who enforce a draconian laptop lockdown are “motivated by the fear of losing students’ attention.”

It is scandalous. The idea of trying to arrange your classroom so that people pay attention…

Anyway. Read the comments on the article. They’re very thoughtful.

September 5th, 2012
‘“It’s just all the little games we seem to play to outsmart each other,” he said.’

Technology in the university classroom creates all these adorable cat-and-mouse games.

August 4th, 2012
Techtimonial

Maybe I hate the word; maybe I don’t. I don’t know yet. I know it doesn’t exist (no results in Google) so it’s all mine; I made it up.

Maybe it’s no different from Lobstermato. In Woody Allen’s essay, “Conversations with Helmholtz,” a man interviewing Helmholtz (a psychoanalyst) says that

I explained to Dr. Helmholtz that I could not order the Lobstermato (a tomato stuffed with lobster) in a certain restaurant. He agreed it was a particularly asinine word and wished he could scratch the face of the man who conceived it.

Blogs are written in real time. When I find techtimonial asinine enough I’ll delete the post.

Meanwhile, here’s part of a techtimonial from a former tech enthusiast – a political science professor at Queen’s University.

[My classroom] technologies were slowly teaching me how to un-teach, and they were teaching my students how to un-learn.

Aside from their distractive potential in the classroom, my students had become passive and expectant of pre-formulaic lectures.

Devices had become a barrier between teacher and student — rather than the revolutionary learning tools that everyone was claiming them to be.

Perhaps what irked me the most is that I’m now convinced that many university administrators have promoted the use of teaching technologies not because it enhances the quality of university education, but because of its potential to service vast numbers of paying students with fewer and fewer expensive faculty members.

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When presented with a visual display during lectures, students become passive. Most simply sit and wait for the next slide, taking their cues as to what is important from the slides and images presented. When I first banned laptops, panic set in. Students claimed that I spoke too fast and that they couldn’t write fast enough. When asked what they were writing down, to my horror the response was ‘everything’.

… Not only has a dependence upon technical devices caused students to disengage, professors are equally at fault for losing their skills to inspire, engage and mentor.

Often, their lectures conform to pre-formulated presentations that are nothing short of a series of bullets.

Many once skilled lecturers have slowly lost their ability to speak with personality, passion and throw ideas around in impromptu ways that leave heads buzzing with ideas for hours afterwards.

It’s what UD calls the morgue classroom.

June 27th, 2012
Laptop bans around the world.

The Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia has banned laptops, etc., in classrooms.

“Feedback from the professors has been very positive. There is a completely different atmosphere in the lectures and seminars. Discussion and communication with instructors has significantly improved,” said [an administrator]. “To be honest, it is difficult to understand why we didn’t do it earlier.”

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