previous post, continued

From the Washington Post:

Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn't necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard — essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America — locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.

"There is hardly any research that will show clearly that any of these machines will improve academic achievement," said Larry Cuban, education professor emeritus at Stanford University. "But the value of novelty, that's highly prized in American society, period. And one way schools can say they are 'innovative' is to pick up the latest device."

(I thought a whiteboard was, you know, a white board. But anyway.)

the teacher's dilemma

No thinking person can simply be for or against digital technology. You have to be able to use your critical faculties and evaluate any particular technology in an independent way, trying to balance the plusses (which there will be) against the minuses (which there will also be).

In my job as a teacher I use some recent technologies and avoid others. I assign blogs for some of my classes; I ask students to submit papers as PDFs which I then annotate. This kind of thing makes some of my colleagues think I am very cutting edge. On the other hand, I don't use Blackboard, not because I am philosophically opposed to it but because I think it is really terrible software — though admittedly not as terrible as it used to be. I think I can get at what Blackboard tries to do in other ways, some of them electronic, some not. I make a good many handouts, often with very sophisticated software like Omnigraffle, because I think such handouts are almost always better than PowerPoint. As I say, I evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

I just learned the other day that the classroom in which I usually teach — maybe three-fourths of my classes are there, the others in seminar rooms — will be transformed this summer into a “smart” classroom. This means that an enormous console will be hauled in, to enable a range of digital audio and video stuff, online and local. But the size of this console, and its accompanying projector and screen, will in turn require that the rectangular room’s seats be rotated ninety degrees, so that they will now be oriented lengthwise — that is, broad and shallow instead of long and narrow.

But this means (a) the space will be much more crowded, leaving me little room to move, and (b) it will be impossible to rearrange the seating. Now, as long as I have been teaching in that classroom I have arranged the seats in a two-desk-deep semicircle. This has enabled me to move among the students, to lecture when I need to, but also to get them talking to each other about the books we read. I have, I realize, adapted my teaching style to the characteristics of that space — I use the space as one of the tools in my pedagogical toolbox. But from now on the space will be significantly altered, and everyone in it will be in neat rows, facing the same direction, so that they can all look at pictures on the screen — and spend less time looking at books.

I think this is a bad trade-off, because what we have here is the facilitation of a particular set of technologies at the expense of others. It’s a net reduction of pedagogical options — or at best an even trade — and the pedagogical options it does enable are ones poorly suited to teaching students to read books with care.

So now I have a choice: Do I try to get my class reassigned to another room, almost certainly in another building? (One major advantage of this room is that it’s twenty feet from my office.) Do I try to adapt my teaching style to this new environment? Or do I try to persist in my old teaching style, fighting this new environment?

teaching people how to use books

David Parry at academhack, in a post called “Teaching in the Age of Distraction,” writes, “Let’s be clear: I think wireless access in a classroom is at this point a necessity, any space which purports to be about the sharing and construction of knowledge that does not have access to the internet seems to me to be a severely crippled space.” (Parry is a PhD in English, but his grammar and syntax are shockingly bad. He’s especially prone to run-on sentences. I don't understand or approve, and I wouldn't trust him to grade a student paper, but hey, in other respects he’s a smart guy.)

Anyway, it’s just silly to make such a blanket statement. I spend a good deal of time talking to my students about technological resources available to them, and trying to get them to use those resources well and wisely. I think it’s pretty clear from this blog that I am anything but a Luddite or techno-skeptic. But I do not want any internet access in my classrooms. I forbid laptops in the classroom altogether. I teach literature, and I believe that my primary job in the classroom is to instruct students in better use of the technology of the book. There is no more evidently false assumption than the assumption that people — even academically successful people — are comfortable with books and use them well.

Every class I teach is focused in one way or another on helping people understand how books work and how to get the most from them. We can unplug for three hours a week or so in order to pursue that goal, can't we?