Geeky Mom

I’ve been interviewing students for a technology-related internship this week. On the application, I had asked them to describe their worst technology experience in a class. Almost all of them have described a faculty member fumbling around with the projectors and computers and lights in the room. They have explained how this takes up class time and how annoying they find it. On the flip side, I’ve recently heard faculty complain about how hard the equipment is to use and that it often doesn’t work.

When I press the students, I ask them what they think should be done. Their response is to provide more training. To which response I laugh and say that we offer such training, but no one comes. Every semester we recommend that faculty go into their classrooms with or without someone to help them and make sure they know how to operate the equipment. I’m certain this happens about .0001% of the time. We have laminated, fairly clear instructions in most classrooms. Still the struggle. The students also say that often a student will finally raise their hand and offer to help. They find nothing wrong with this scenario. Remember when teachers picked students to run film projectors and turn the filmstrip? Same thing, I’m thinking.

The students have no problem helping once. It’s when the faculty member seems to not retain the information that they begin to have doubts. And all of them say that the equipment may look difficult at first, but once you know which button to push, it’s not that big a deal.

I do think the equipment should work and should be fairly easy to use. But when you have data projectors, dvd players, vhs players, and computers all piped through the same system, there’s complexity there. In most cases, the process has been simplified as much as possible. It’s then up to the faculty member to learn how to use it. Honestly, we’ve had people who’ve wanted someone to show up and turn things on for every class. Not going to happen. I’ve also had people want to know if their presentation, which includes images, video and/or sound will work in classroom x. I don’t know, I say, go try test it out. It has to work, they say. I’m not clairvoyant, I say. In what scenario is it anyone else’s responsibility other than the faculty’s to make sure that whatever presentation, whether for a class or a conference, works? Why is it that when classroom technology is involved, it suddenly becomes someone else’s problem?

Yes, the equipment should be functional and the complaints are legitimate if it’s not. Beyond making them functional, however, it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to learn how to use it. Or, just don’t use it. That’s legitimate too.

I’m going to guess that most of the people who commented on my last post about office hours are conscientious about their time, trying to be available a reasonable amount of time and trying the balance the time needed for attending to student and the time for prepping, research, committees, etc. These people, I’m going to guess, are not the faculty who swoop in for a class and one office hour (held right before or right after class) and then disappear.

I’ve been hearing a lot about the issue of faculty time lately. It came up in the planning committee meetings I’ve been participating in where we got input from faculty about their concerns in addressing the topic of the conference. They almost all said, “Not enough time.” I’ve heard it from individual faculty: “I just don’t have time to deal with that.” At a workshop on blogging I ran a while back, I heard, “This is great, but I just don’t have the time to really learn this.” And at a day long workshop on gaming yesterday, that was a big factor in whether or not to investigate the potential of gaming for teaching.

I think the issue is mostly not really about the amount of time available, but how that time is prioritized. It’s really about how faculty choose to spend that time. I’ll be the first to say that some of those priorities, especially for t-t faculty, are forced upon the faculty. A junior faculty is not going to get tenure based on integrating blogging into their introductory courses. I know that. But I also think that for some of the technology that we’re talking about, it doesn’t *really* take that much time to learn the basics. What does take time is figuring out how to use the technology effectively and if that’s what faculty are wanting to take time to do, then that’s great! But that’s not my sense about 75% of the time. Most of the time, I think either a) they really think it takes years to learn the technology or b) complaining about a lack of time is an excuse and that they just really don’t want to use the technology at all. And that’s okay. Really, it is. I’m okay with people being skeptical about the usefulness of particular tools.

Except that I’m not okay with that in some ways. In part, it’s because the faculty who are often skeptical haven’t even tried. They haven’t assessed at all whether something is hard to learn, easy to learn, would add a new element to their class, would add excitement to their class, would achieve a learning outcome more effectively. I think if someone said, “You know, I spent a few days poking around with this thing, trying to see ways it could work for me and I just couldn’t see the point” I’d be more likely to accept some skepticism. But saying, “I’ve watched you do this and I’ve read about it for five minutes, and no thanks” makes me believe that that person wasn’t really interested to begin with. And that they, in fact, think this whole technology thing is a load of hooey.

I guess what I’m saying is that it kind of feels yucky to realize what you are passionate about is just not a priority for a great many faculty. I suppose this is what people who teaching “dying” subjects feel like. My sympathies.