Teaching unplugged

During my lunch date with the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, an article titled “Why all humanists should go to prison” caught my attention. The author, Alex Tipei, describes how teaching at a women’s prison in Indiana has made her question if the high-tech model of higher education that incorporates social media, PowerPoints, YouTube, Google Maps etc. into nearly every class has trapped us in a technology driven, money spending, training intense model of education that has lost the essence of good teaching and learning somewhere along the way. She writes:

“At the prison, however, technology-driven pedagogy wasn’t an option. I had to eliminate the technologies I already relied on, rather than introduce new ones. I began to question why I had used specific tools in the first place. Had I depended on lecture slides to help my students follow along? Or were they there to keep me on point? Did videos add to the course content or simply fill up discussion time? If they did augment the material, were there other ways to arrive at the same place — means that refrained from directing everyone’s attention to a screen rather than to one another?”

Do you know why you use certain classroom technologies? Sometimes I feel like the PowerPoint slides that I recycle from year to year with a few updates here and there are a crutch for both me and the students – I use them to keep the lecture on track and students know that all the most important information that will be on the test can be found in those slides. Does my reliance on this simple tool prevent me from developing more interesting, interactive, engaging, and thought provoking discussion tools for the classroom? Maybe I would be a better teacher if I chose to unplug every now and then and instead tried to focus my energy and prep time to be ready to facilitate classroom discussions that encouraged participation by all students. 

What would it look like if all the money we spend on technology and training for how to use that technology was instead spent on true faculty development that helped us become outstanding teachers that could teach anywhere - unplugged or connected to the world?

What does your teaching look like? Is it unplugged or do you rely on technology in the classroom? What are the advantages and disadvantages of either approach?

Problem-Solving Leading to Self-Renewal and Change

Guest Blogger: Dana Flint

Thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.

Not long before his tragic death in 1951, Albert Barnes sent a couple of pages of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (pp. 177-178 of the 1916 edition, if you want to know) to his good friend Horace Mann Bond. Those pages emphasized the central role of thinking as problem-solving, and highlighted some educational emphases that Barnes hoped Lincoln would adopt. He highlighted the now familiar problem-solving steps of an initial sense of a problem, observation and investigation of factors, construction of solutions, hypotheses, and conclusions, and testing those constructions. In the spirit of Dewey, he understood that this process of problem-solving towards more “intelligent” adjustments (to use Dewey’s term) would be repeated again and again in the constant self-renewal of human living, and, Barnes hoped, in the self-renewal of the educational process at Lincoln. That was then. Nowadays, it seems that this is what we commonly do in our instructional approaches. Here are a few examples from my FYE class this semester:

• I wanted students to come away with a usable skill associated with each subject area in the course, for example, the module on Research. Previously, I brought students to a Library computer lab to receive instruction on searching Library databases. This year I continued in an analogous manner with an in-class demonstration using my laptop and a projector. But somewhere along the line I had a “sense of a problem.” Do students come away from such demonstrations with a usable skill? How could I know? So I got them to define some problems which were of interest to them: abortion, war and technology, global warming, and violence and Grand Theft Auto. Then I showed them a web site that demonstrated the format of annotated bibliographies, and asked them to submit an annotated bibliography, with five varied references, as a demonstration of their skill in doing research. Well, I am still in the process of “testing” (that is, assessing) this solution.
• Second, I thought the usable skill associated with the Speech module would be pretty easy: Let the students make speeches before the class and have another group of students evaluate them. I have done this before, but this semester I got a surprise. Instead of speeches, the students did PowerPoint presentations with the lights out and which ended with a movie, of course. The trouble was that there was a lot more high tech and a lot less speaking. So I went with the flow and found a web site containing a PowerPoint presentation on how to do PowerPoint presentations, and I presented this PowerPoint presentation while instructing the student-judges to critique the PowerPoint presentations of the students, using what they had learned about PowerPoint presentations. This seemed to represent a double process of self-renewal going on at instructional and learning levels.

Am I right in assuming that nowadays we commonly see the process of teaching and learning as a process of facilitating ever more educated adjustments to ourselves and world? Would the “Fitness for Life” course be another such example of this process, or would it not?

Teaching, Technology and the Liberal Arts

Guest Writer, Nancy Evans

The 1990s was, among otherthings, the decade of the "change agent" in education. Change was tocome from the ground up, starting in classrooms, and for many, technology wastouted as the change agent of choice. This was back in the time when instructional technologists and "early adopters" were trying to lead the way and the unstated goal in many cases was to change the way students were taught under the guise of using technology. In other words, technology was one way to get rid of the"sage on the stage" and replace her with the "guide on the side." But the technology itself was a big obstacle. It was new and complicated and made for a lot of uncomfortable moments — losing documents, breaking floppy disks, crashing operating systems.

Technology was not yet wellfunded and granting agencies tended to focus on training; that is, training inhow to use the darn thing. All-in-all, the focus was on the technology (and, tosome extent, still is). We needed to know what is new, how do we get it, how dowe use it. Instructors have been particularly frustrated with this approach since it hasn't left much room for the art of teaching or even to ask "Why?"

But today is different. Jose Bowen is on to something new in "Teaching Naked" and it isn't the technology or even the information that is new. It is learning that matters andteaching that facilitates it. If a liberal arts education encourages communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, expanding one's thinking, and making connections between subjects, then technology opens the world for students to ask questions and discuss with students elsewhere, to experience the lives of others in other places, to pick the brain of an expert,and put it all together with other students in a variety of ways. It's agreat big open library where we are all curious. A bit of the old with the new. (see Laura Blankenship, "Technology as a liberal art" for more on the liberal arts and technology.)

Much of the next generation of technology is found in Web 2.0 which refers to web development characterizedby communication, collaboration, and shared resources; nothing solid and tangibleat all. Examples of Web 2.0 tools are blogs, wikis, shared documents, studioprojects, and the plethora of web-based, free tools to organize and sharestudent work (see tech tidbits on the ATS web site). Technology has never been more conceptual. Web 2.0 is notjust the Web technology. It is a way of using the Web as a gathering placewhere students can create, cooperate, and experience the world. This technologydoes change how one teaches.

Web 2.0 is not really veryscary. It has something in common with drinking wine (or a beer) and with your colleagues and talking about your favorite research topics. (Don't be cynical, it could be lively.) If we are all curious and creative and have a natural desire to learn, then given facts and guidance from professors and some quiet moments to take it all in, perhaps students can allow their natural curiosity to take over as they collaborate, create and share.

Teaching with, and, or vs. Technology

Guest Writer, Linda Stine
Discussions of academic excellence, it seems to me, start and end with the teaching/learning environment. How are we presently trying to make sure our students learn well? How can we do it better? Does technology help?

In June the Department of Education published a scientifically rigorous meta-analysis of studies comparing online vs. in-class learning in a wide range of settings and populations. The two main conclusions:
* students learn just as well online as they do in face-to-face classrooms
* hybrid classes (ones that combine online learning elements with face-to-face instruction, such as a WebCT-enhanced course) are more effective than traditional in-class instruction alone.

Having spent much of my summer researching the problems and promise of online learning for my adult writing students, I’m still unsure what kind of educational technology to use and how best to use it. I would love to hear what the rest of you are doing. Are you using technology (WebCT, Smartboards, websites, clickers, multimedia, etc.) to do things that you couldn’t do otherwise or that you couldn’t do as effectively? What have you tried that proved to be more trouble than it was worth?

And how much technology should be used during the class period itself? Should we all be teaching naked?

No, no—not that kind of naked! “Teaching naked” is how the president of SMU describes reserving technology for the purpose of increasing student learning and engagement outside the classroom, creating online activities that require students to learn the content before coming to class and thus freeing up the actual class time for the kinds of personal interaction that only work face to face. His belief:

Coming to class has to ‘add value,’ and reducing the technology and increasing the human interaction is the best way to create something interactive that cannot be duplicated online.

He’s not arguing against educational technology, just against using it during classroom time when he thinks we could be more effectively engaging our students in conversation. (I’d be interested in your reactions to the article—it’s brief but quite thought-provoking.)

So, any thoughts on the complex technology/teaching/learning issue?