This earnest Harvard student, writing for the campus paper, even goes to the trouble of interviewing Facebooking fellow students. Why do they do it?

Two reasons emerge:

1. The professor is dull, confusing, off on tangents all the time.

2. They’ve got other urgent business to transact during class.

It’s true that you can now run, say, a real estate agency and sit in a lecture hall at the same time (Jared Kushner ran a real estate empire and went to Harvard – undergraduate – at the same time); and I think UD speaks for all professors when she says Fantastic. She wouldn’t think of interfering with her students making money while she talks about Keats.

The article writer takes the quality of teaching thing very much to heart; he notices that some of the famously good teachers at Harvard experience little Facebook use in their classes. But he makes a mistake when he concludes that the solution to the problem lies in professors being more like Facebook:

Rather than perceiving technology as a competing force in the classroom, our creative and distinguished faculty should explore innovative teaching methods that harness the same technological force to uniquely personalize class content and deliver it in a powerful, Facebook-type manner.

The hot professors the student singles out – Niall Ferguson, for instance – don’t compel attention because they’re Facebooky. They compel attention because in their lectures they meld a strong – even charismatic – personality with a restlessly polemical understanding of their field, and indeed of the world.

Ferguson wows classes by candidly sharing his strong opinions on world history and current events.

Far from the just-sitting-there information available on the web, strong teachers are up and about, exhibiting to students the crackling synergy of mind and material.

[T]echnology use [by students] in class has become a norm, something that I feel not only distracts and prevents us from understanding and learning class material, but also disrespects professors and other speakers in the academic setting of the University… If you do not think you can get through class without falling to this temptation, it may be in your best interest to try another method of note-taking such as returning to the olden days of pen and paper. You might still get distracted by daydreaming, but it is much easier to snap out of a daydream than it is to pull yourself away from the Internet.

This University of Virginia student responds to one of the most idiotic claims tech-pushers make: There’s no difference between surfing and daydreaming, between clicking through one visual world after another and doodling.

The editorial board of the University of Maryland student newspaper knows irony when it sees it. A much-touted new building with a tech-heavy 500-student classroom will be called the Teaching and Learning Center.

How good can even the best available technologies be when used in such a massive room among 500 students? While electronic clickers seemed like a pretty viable solution at one point, most students disapprove of these devices and find them an outdated waste of money.

Officials understand the importance of small classes — especially ones that are specifically tailored to the learning objectives of students in them — and have proved their dedication to bringing these types of innovative courses to the university. This editorial board is then left puzzled by plans to construct large auditoriums …

Well, but small’s a matter of degree… The University of Arizona has a 1,200-person lecture hall. So maybe administrators at the University of Maryland think a 500-person lecture hall is small. It’s certainly smaller.

And what was that about clickers? I’m sorry, but UM students are jumping the gun on that one. We still have one or two academic years to go before that backlash. We’re well-launched on the PowerPoint backlash, and of course the backlash against laptops in class is in full swing… But type CLICKERS UNIVERSITY into Google News and eighty percent of what you get will still be faculty, tech staff, and administration peeing their pants with excitement over them.

Students? Yeah, students have been bitching about clickers from the word go. But we’re still in the students? huh? lalala i can’t hear you phase on clickers.

This is how its author writes.

Two seismic forces beyond our control — the advent of Web. 2.0 and the inexorable influx of tech-savvy millennials on campus — are shaping what I call the new digital shoreline of higher education. These forces demand that we as educators reconsider the learning theories, pedagogies and practices on which we have depended.

The book, whose clunky mixed-up title I’ll let you discover at the link, wants us to know that it’s all good — all the twittering shit our students trail into class is all good. And even if it isn’t, it’s… what’d he say? It’s a seismic force, so you can’t do anything about it anyway sucker. It’s Nature, baby! Beyond our control! You think you can keep The Tumblr Temblor out of Classroom 25A Soltan Intro American Lit? It’s fucking inexorable! I’m not gonna argue the thing ’cause we all know it’s just a … a …. thing and you can’t do anything about things.

Nor can you do anything about pretentious writers. Look at this paragraph, with its pseudo-urgency and its self-importance (what I call) and its we as educators …

Huh? Educators? What’s wrong with educators, SOS?

I dunno. I can only report the following. Every self-respecting professor I’ve ever known has at some point said to me something like: The worst dread I have about dying is that my obituary headline will call me an EDUCATOR. It’ll say LOCAL EDUCATOR DIES.

I mean, maybe they haven’t said something so strong. All have, however, expressed contempt for the word educator, and have shuddered at the thought of it being applied to them.

Is it because we’re cynical lazy shits who don’t truly educate? No. Au contraire. There’s something about the word. Again, I don’t really know. I only know it’s embarrassing. And it’s totally not surprising to find it here, in this empty pretentious paragraph, the guy patting himself on the back for being an educator.

And – you know – those teaching practices of the past… We haven’t just used them. No: We’ve depended on them. We’ve been in a co-dependent relationship with them, and we’re terrified of losing them to those uncontrollable seismic millennial things.

Mobile apps, content sharing and these tech-savvy students can become a professor’s best assets in the classroom, even if they sometimes seem threatening.

Threatening? It’s a fucking Phuket coming right at me! And there’s nothing I can do. I, Educator, have lost control of my classroom.

But here’s the good news:

These students are helping us — teachers at all levels — with new ways to communicate and they’re motivating us to truly see the potential of the vast, shared and co-created information resources that exist within interconnected nodes. We’re being challenged to rethink information creation, storage and delivery. They are time-slicers, shape-shifters, creators and mobile connectors. The playthings of our students’ youth are becoming the tools of their future.

I haven’t encountered language like this since my late lamented hippie youth. We are da yout! The last sentence is positively Cultural Revolution boilerplate: THE PLAYTHINGS OF OUR STUDENTS’ YOUTH ARE BECOMING THE TOOLS OF THEIR FUTURE. GLORIOUS FUTURE! DON’T BE SCARED, EDUCATOR! JOIN OUR YOUTH. TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE.

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Send this guy a copy pronto.

“In the past two decades, the interest in educational technology has developed into a full-blown obsession,” notes Jack Schneider in Education Week. Citing evidence that all the bright shiny computers at every level of the American education system don’t seem to be improving anything, Schneider suggests that all the money goes to computers because

it can be easy to credit technology for what makes a class “work.” Head to a thriving school where every student has a tablet computer, and you might be tempted to think that you’ve stumbled on a solution: Tablet PCs help kids thrive! You are also likely, however, to be on campus at a well-resourced school with lots of other things going for it. Working to pinpoint a particular practice that makes a good school work, in other words, is to deny the deep complexity of the educational environment.

The other reason that the reform elite loves technology is that it can be taken to scale. Great teachers, after all, are also easy to credit for a school that works. But how do we get one in every classroom? The iPad, on the other hand, requires only a checkbook.

He concludes:

[M]oney that goes to technology could just as easily have been spent on other approaches that, though perhaps not scalable, are directly connected to the processes of teaching and learning. Funding projects to improve teacher training, development, and retention, for instance, is less sexy than cutting the ribbon on a lab full of lightning-fast computers. But it’s also more likely to help kids learn.

UD thanks Bill for linking her to the article.

… writes at length, and writes well, about the whirling words of the university technoworld. An excerpt:

In the old days, professors would come to class and lecture; it was like watching a live performance. Students would interact with each other through conversation guided by the professor. Thanks to the wonders of technology, students now sit in a darkened room and watch PowerPoint presentations. Posting to an online forum to respond to posted comments your classmates have made is in no way the same as having a actual conversation in the classroom.

… Face-to-face is now my preferred method of communication …

Like so many others – professors, administrators, and students – she has come ’round to the shocking proposition that the best way to exchange important ideas with other human beings is directly.

In an opinion piece, New York Times editor Bill Keller worries about what UD calls Click-Thru U. He cites a distance-friendly but cautious Stanford professor:

… [Sebastian] Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling…?

UD has noted the personal identity/cheating problem mucho times on this blog. She would add to Thrun’s comment a related problem: How do you keep an invisible professor from cheating? The same business of handing the course over to someone else pertains for the instructor. Who is actually running discussions, grading assignments, presenting material?

If the course is merely the professor being filmed teaching, with all interactivity handed to teaching assistants, why shouldn’t the professor merely re-run her performance, with occasional updates and tweaks?

Stanford’s president also has some questions.

… [John] Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.

Right. Click-Thru U. presents one private, discrete, online experience after another. You learn these skills (how to speak Italian, say) with this software; you learn those skills with that. Or you sit silent and alone in a room and watch some dude talk about the Civil War. You get absolutely no sense of the coherence, ongoing contentiousness, and value of a liberal arts education. Because you’ve perceived no model for higher education, no comprehensive structure for the disciplined inquiring life, you don’t learn why or how to keep learning.

In fact that abstraction – liberal arts education – means absolutely nothing to you. This is what Hennessey’s getting at with his how to keep learning worry. You haven’t claimed your education, as it were; you haven’t been able to grow the acquisition of this or that particular skill into a larger narrative – a narrative shared in real time with others on a real campus – having to do with the life-changing business of gradually coming to know what truly educated people know. What they sound like. What sorts of people they are. How they argue. Why they argue. How serious knowledge shapes personality, morality, politics. Why certain people passionately value intense thought about important things. All you miss with online eduction is the entire deep structure, the entire drama, of culture as it’s carried, struggled with, and articulated, by compelling embodiments of it at universities.

Keller concludes:

Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.

During one of the first staff-training days, the district superintendent tells us that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, the implication being how close to obsolescence our methods and we ourselves have become. No one ventures to ask what would seem to be the obvious question, which is what sort of high school education Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had and what they might have failed to accomplish without it.

The first sentence of this University of Idaho student’s evisceration of the classroom laptop says it all. Technology has defeated the classroom. Online is the wave of the future; and the only question is what universities are going to do with those howling spaces all over campus.

A good lecture or seminar has its foundation in words but gains its texture and flow from countless other subtle cues and interactions in the classroom. These include the body language of the students that an alert instructor will observe and use in modulating the pace and content of the discussion, the pauses and inflections in student questions that would escape capture by a microphone, and the dynamism that occurs because each student, sitting among different neighbors at a unique location in the room, experiences and engages with the class slightly differently.

A course is also made effective by the unscripted interactions that occur as students gather before and after the class, and by the simple fact that the physical act of getting to class requires at least some investment of time and energy.

A UCLA professor says the obvious about trashy online ed.

We are paying to go to class, not to use a computer. We are paying for textbooks, not to print out documents we find on discussion boards… [My] grades drop when I bring my computer to school; I stopped taking it to prevent the distraction. Technology at school is simple: it sucks.

Rachel Ellis, University of Minnesota, Duluth

Yet another advantage of online teaching: During his probation, Professor Larkin will develop online courses. After that, I gather he will teach them.

Even at high-tech schools like Case Western Reserve, the techno-divide between professors and students widens. The campus newspaper notes the scandal of faculty running counter to the technolust of the IT people.

One of the IT people exults that “Twenty-first-century learning allows us to be immersed in a digital landscape.” She, like the student journalists, seems confused by growing numbers of professors for whom the phase immersed in a digital landscape doesn’t correlate at all well to what they want students in their classes to be.

I suppose we can anticipate an alliance developing between IT and students at some universities, in which these two groups sort of gang up on faculty as it bans the classroom laptop.

… by money and other goodies from technology firms.

Clicker devices make it easier for students to cheat off what other classmates press into their device, or [to] answer… for another student if he or she was unable to attend class.

The Chronicle of Higher Education also believes clickers give students more opportunities to cheat and abuse the system.

In a Sept. 4 article, the Chronicle’s Jie Jenny Zou writes, “Students purchase remotes and register the devices in their names. Those who choose not to attend large classes can simply ask friends to bring along their clickers and get whatever credit the instructor assigns for showing up.”

But hell. That’s nothing compared to how you can cheat when the whole course is online.

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Editorial, The Baylor Lariat