Fear the Blogs

17. June 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

So, my project for the summer is to restart, for about the umpteenth time, a book project about facing fear and anxiety over social media tools. Thankfully, I have two wonderful colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill helping me out. We decided to dive in after our latest presentation on the topic and have set ourselves a fairly ambitious deadline to get something written. I suggested that we start with topics and ideas that we feel most close to, which is different for all of us, and see where that takes us. Since I wrote a whole dissertation on blogs, that’s where I started.

On Monday, I was at a social event with some folks I hadn’t seen in quite a while (hey, to any of you reading this!) and they, of course, asked how things are going. I told them that I’d just returned from a conference where I’d given a presentation. They asked, on what?, expecting me to say on something to do with technology in education. I said fear. They did a double take. I explained that my colleagues and I had decided that the underlying reason for much of the resistence to social software was fear. They said, oh, and I thought it was because I didn’t want to share my personal life with the world. I corrected them briefly that we weren’t talking about fear of setting up your Facebook profile, but of using social software in teaching and research, which can be done in a private setting or with other kinds of parameters that reduce exposure. We’re talking about using these tools professionally, in learning, not to talk about what kind of pajamas we’re wearing.

Only 9% of the population has created a blog, so I don’t expect creating and maintaining a blog to appeal to everyone, but just as very few students continue writing or doing math or thinking about sociology after they leave college, the experience of blogging can have lasting effects. I’m sure that students exposed to sociology look at the world differently than they would have otherwise. But, given the small number of people who do blog, I decided to start by writing about reading blogs. My husband has been a consumer of blogs since the dawn of Slashdot and he reads only a handful of blogs regularly, and he *loves* them. When he spouts off about something he read on a blog and starts making connections, I tell him he needs to get his own blog, and he agrees, but then he never does it. There are many more like him.

When I gave my talk at University of Mary Washington, it was reading of blogs I started with first. When I described my argument to my husband, explaining that I wanted to dispel the myth that all blogs were stupid, he said that would be simple, just have them read Tim Burke or Janet Stemwedel and you’re done. Of course, the problem is, that even showing them these blogs isn’t always enough to dispel their disdain for blogs. Those are outliers, they say. The rest are rubbish. And I wanted to take the argument a bit further. I wanted to say, hey, blogs are just as good as some peer reviewed material. Heresy! And I think they are in many cases for many situations, even within academe. At the very least, we can surely say that peer review is not above reproach. (See Janet’s blog for stories of cheating and tragedy in peer review.)

So I shouted out to my twitter faculty friends a question about whether they allow their students to read blogs. I got some funny responses about how much power faculty have to “allow” their students to do anything. So I rephrased it to ask if they’d let their students use blogs in academic work. Faculty on Twitter are necessarily more open to social media than many others, and so I got the expected answers. Many, in fact, required their students to read blogs, and many encouraged it, and used blogs as a way of teaching digital literacy and critical thinking skills. Which is what I usually say to the skeptics, and now I can point to actual real live faculty who use blogs in just that way.

Journalists are afraid that blogs are going to put them out of business and I started thinking, wondering, whether faculty had that fear as well. Despite my saying that blogs can be just as good as peer reviewed material, I think that unlike journalism, the audience for the two media are different people. And, I think, that students don’t actually read many blogs. But the faculty who do resist, the ones who ban not just blog reading, but using the Wikipedia, they seem to not trust their students to be able to make good judgements, and rather than teaching them how to, they keep them away from “bad” material. But what else might be at work there? That seems somehow too simple. Any skeptical faculty out there, or any people who work with skeptical faculty who have thoughts?

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Support for teaching digital natives

08. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Thomas Benton once again writes about issues in teaching the digital natives. I’m going to leave aside the argument about whether we’re getting more stupid. I’m not entirely sure we are.

I want to comment on two things. One, he mentions the problem of college students not being exposed to different generations (more true for K-12). Most of college students’ socializing and work happens among people their own age. I would argue that students who have active online lives have greater potential to be conversing with people of a variety of ages. Someone who has a blog (outside of Live Journal) or who plays online games is likely to interact with some older and some younger people. In my own online experience, I know this variety of generations is both a challenge and a delight.

The second, and more important, issue for me, comes in the last section of the essay:

If digital technologies are a cause of “stupidity,” it is because we have spent freely on computers — among other things — without also giving comparable support to college teachers. The students have been left to negotiate a cultural paradigm shift, comparable to the print and industrial revolutions, with inadequate support from the institutions created to help them.

And that strikes me as unambiguously stupid.

This is a pet peeve of mine. There are two directions this increased support can go. One is to provide faculty with the time and financial resources to learn and develop new teaching strategies that take advantage of technology. This might mean course releases, internal grants, or extended workshops in the summer. The main thrust of this kind of support is giving faculty new knowledge and skills that they can apply to their teaching.

The second direction, one that seems to be more popular, is to offload that work, to have a model I call “digital Kinkos.” In this model, the faculty member might bring their course materials to a team of technologists, who, after an hour-long meeting with the faculty member, produce a digital version of the course, complete with multimedia lectures. I have not seen this happen quite so wholesale, but I have seen it in small one-off situations. When a faculty member asks for video clips or for configuration of a Blackboard course or digitization of images for a lecture, that’s a form of digital Kinkos in my book.

I’m not saying we can get rid of digital Kinkos entirely. Digitization is often a tedious and time-consuming process and a knowledgeable technician is often better at it than a faculty member. But simpler things, such as using the features of a course management system or a blog, should be taken on by the faculty member. As I try to tell my faculty, there is no right or wrong when it comes to using the tools available. It depends on your teaching goals and you know those better than I do.

I would advocate, then, a hybrid model. There will be a need to provide digitization services, but more importantly, faculty should be allowed the time and encouraged to take the time to discover the possibilities of new technologies for teaching. A summertime workshop of a couple of weeks strikes me as a good place to start. A course release in a semester in which a technological overhaul of a course is taking place makes sense too. Financial support in the form of internal grants for hiring staff or students to aid in digitization or for travel to technology-related workshops. And, of course, appropriate credit for technological innovation when it comes time for tenure review. Without these latter rewards and support structures in place, digital Kinkos means nothing. It means you have faculty using materials they didn’t create and know little about. It’s akin to teaching from a book you haven’t read or just skimmed.

What I wonder about is the role of the Instructional Technologist in all of this. It’s clear what the role is for the digital Kinkos model. They make the video clips and the PowerPoint presentations and build the Blackboard courses. In the second model, they can be the person to run the workshops, provide advice during the semester, and do some (but less than in the first model) of the digitization work. But I think the ideal scenario is not to have an IT person per se. The ideal scenario is to have a tech-savvy faculty member providing the workshops and the advice. Perhaps they get a course release for this administrative work. Perhaps they have a team of students to do the digitization. In this scenario, the faculty member who, by virtue of their being “one of them,” immediately garners more respect than an IT person. To me, this makes a lot of sense. Of course, I just wrote myself out of a job.

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Welcome to my world

28. July 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

I found this article by Paula Krebs to be quite revealing about faculty vis a vis collaboration. Everything I do is like the Institute Ms. Krebs ran. In fact, I direct or co-direct an Institute every summer. Many staff do these kinds of things here because most faculty won’t.

Any project I do has to go through committees and involves at a minimum of 4 people, all of whom have wildly diverging views at times. I almost never have the benefit of getting to work on a personal project or a project where I “get my way” so to speak. I rely all the time on the good will and expertise of the staff around me. Unlike Krebs, I don’t have a personal assistant to manage all of my details, but I do parcel out work where I need to–to our department secretary, to our purchasing agent, to our system administrators. I couldn’t do anything without them.

Ms. Krebs ends with this paragraph:

I still value my autonomy in the classroom and elsewhere. But I think I have a much better grip on how truly collaborative the educational enterprise is. And that’s bound to be good for me, as a faculty member, to remember.

I wish other faculty would learn the same lessons. I’m not sure those that have similar experiences come out of those experiences with the same realizations that Krebs had. Many faculty I know still operate in a kind of “independent contractor” mode. If we had a “we’re all in this together” mentality, we might get somewhere.

This dovetails into Dean Dad’s commentary today on service. Part of why, it seems, that faculty don’t want to or don’t know how to collaborate is because it’s so obviously not valued. What’s valued are individual contributions, either to teaching or research. And the us vs. them mentality that occurs between faculty and staff (esp. administrators) means there are a precious few opportunities for staff and faculty to work together. What that means is that while faculty contribute to decisions about curriculum or tenure and promotion guidelines, they don’t often contribute to decisions that effect them daily–how to make certain kinds of purchases, what software or cms to use. They are often asked, but they don’t want to do the hard work of attending meetings and making evaluations. I’m not saying this is their fault, by any means. If I were in their shoes, looking at what gets me tenured or promoted, I wouldn’t attend a meeting to discuss possible email systems either. But then, I’m not sure it’s fair to complain about those decisions either. When faculty ask me about such things, I tell them how to contribute or when they had (past tense) many opportunities to have a say. They shrug. They would be heard if they had their say, which is more than I can say for some staff members.

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The Dilemma of Service

11. June 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Yesterday, I shouted out via Twitter my frustration at having to do some menial labor on behalf of a couple of faculty. I actually didn’t mean to shout that to the world, but most people sympathized, even empathized. I’ve been trying ever since to analyze the reasons for my frustration.

I’ve had the experience in the last couple of months (although really this has probably happened for years) of having people say something along the lines of “I just don’t get this technology” or “My brain just can’t grasp this technology stuff.” This from people who hold Ph.D.’s. Like a lot of things people say when it comes to technology, I think this is an excuse and it frustrates me. Yes, it takes some time to figure things out, and no, it doesn’t always work perfectly and yes, when that happens, it’s frustrating. But I want to ask, do you give up if you don’t understand something you’re reading? can’t solve a formula? can’t find the right way to frame an argument? Would you let your students throw up their hands so easily?

And then there’s just the personal frustration I feel at doing something I consider below my pay grade. Even though what I might be doing involves technology, it really falls into the category of what one might ask an administrative assistant to do. And maybe that’s my own personal issue that I need to get over, but some of the stuff I’ve been asked to do (and in some cases have actually done) are things I did as a first-year grad student and got paid $9/hr (a hefty sum in those days). So I think I’m justified in feeling that my talents are wasted when I’m doing these tasks and that in some ways, it’s a waste of college resources. The time I’m spending doing these things is time I’m not spending working with my students, developing long-term plans, working on projects that benefit the entire community. And I’ve had the experience of having to table projects because I just didn’t have the time to devote to them. And it takes much longer–around a year to a year and half–to bring a project into production, because I only have a small amount of time to devote to it.

And here’s the catch-22. If I had more time, I could develop more materials that might help faculty do more of these things themselves. Instead, it just becomes easier to do it for them. Sigh.

It’s difficult to say to a faculty member, I’m sorry I can’t do that for you or I won’t do that for you. I mean their work is important. It’s often time-sensitive in a way that mine sometimes isn’t (though this is debatable).

Further, I think my frustration stems from a disconnect between my understanding of my role and theirs. I see myself as a consultant. In that role, I sit down with them. We talk about their goals. I make some suggestions for directions to go and tools to use and I may then teach them how to use those tools. I may follow up and see how things are going, make suggestions for improvements or talk about how to rethink something for next time. And there are faculty with whom I have this exact relationship, but it accounts for about 1%. For the great majority, I am an encyclopedia to get answers from about *any* technology, whether it’s related to education or not (how do I sort folders in email? what is blu-ray? how do I set up wireless?).* Or I am the digital kinkos–scan this document, copy these video clips or audio files. Or I am TA/admin assistant–add this student to my Bb course, upload this document, copy these files from my other class. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the need to have someone else do these things. Some of them are not easy. Some of them are time-consuming. I just don’t think we are currently resourced for having me do all of that for over 200 faculty. As a colleague of mine often says, there’s one of me and 200 of you, you do the math.

The dilemma is, I do want to help people, but I need to know where to draw the line. And once I know that, I need for people to respect the line and take some responsibility for their own work.

*Sadly, these are real questions I’ve gotten.

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More on "Get out of my way"

09. April 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

The quote came in response to a question from the audience about how to create more faculty like Michael Wesch. Michael said, “Get out of my way.”

This is just my perspective, based on my 5 years’ experience in this specific role and my over 10 years’ experience in higher ed. Many IT people and by IT here I mean the truly technical folks, the ones who do user support, server support, programming, etc., have no idea how the academic side of the house works. The policies and procedures that they often propose or implement are often driven by a need to reduce workloads or make systems more efficient or reduce costs. Often these decisions create unintended consequences that affect faculty in ways that prevent freedom and innovation.

For example, I’ve seen places try to restrict use of “external” software, some not even allowing use of curricular software outside of the course management system. At one place I worked, I could only have my own web page if I used FrontPage. There was no way for me to create pages at home (I had no office and thus, no access to “college-owned” software such as FrontPage) and then upload them to the college server. I ended up going off-site. We almost implemented a similar system out of the good intention of making managing web sites easier for both us and the web editors until I recalled that faculty don’t use the software tied to this system and thus, we would have inadvertently cut them off from creating and editing course web pages.

Another thing I’ve seen and heard a number of times is FERPA being raised as a reason for faculty not to use social software of any kind. And while it’s important to respect certain student information–grades, personal contact information–it’s not a blanket reason to not let someone use a particular teaching method. It’s often a fear tactic. And this is bureaucratic rather than technical, but because they often get spoken in the same sentence, it becomes the IT people’s problem. And it often comes from the IT people, not the academic side of the house.

Putting these kinds of restrictions on faculty only keeps those with trepidation about technology from trying anything new. For the Michael Wesch’s of the world, it means they turn to other resources–netvibes, Google, WordPress, etc.

For me, this response and discussion raises the question of what role the Instructional Technologist should play. Is our role to cultivate innovation for the cutting edge faculty? Is it to get those middle of the road faculty to go to the next level? Is it to help the folks stuck in the age of the typewriter find their way in this crazy world?

I would lose my mind if I had to spend all day helping faculty use Blackboard. And though I’m always happy to move some middle of the road folks a little ways up the road, it’s the innovative faculty who really make my day. These are the ones who often find things on their own, but often turn to me for ideas about how to use things or for other possible tools. Conversations with them are often about education and learning, not about how to use things. I can often get the motr folks to this point but it’s work, work I’m willing to do, but work nonetheless. The typewriter people wouldn’t be an issue if they didn’t take up soooo much of my time. If I really felt that I could just ignore them, I would, but they’re quite in my face. They have a tendency to panic more so than either of the other groups. So it takes a lot of energy to manage the panic as well.

I asked Michael after his talk what we should do to create more faculty like him. He had some good ideas such as bringing in speakers, providing a page with resources, etc. Although I think there’s a fair amount I can do to serve as a catalyst for change, I think there are things that need to happen that are institutional (changes in tenure and promotion, work loads, etc.) and changes in attitude (gatekeepers of knowledge, blogging is bad, etc.) that need to happen that I have very little control over.

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More on irrelevance

31. March 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

In addition my own recent posts, there have been several others discussing the relationship between technologists and faculty. I’m also leading a discussion with a mixed group of faculty and staff tomorrow that may touch on (I hope) some of the issues raised by the online discussions I’ve been reading. Just as the issue of tenure seems to come up over and over again in the academic blogosphere, the issue of teaching and technology seems to come up over and over again in the academic IT side of the blogosphere. I think the issues are raised again and again because there’s a feeling that something isn’t working quite right and we feel a need to fix it. And, too, I think there’s a sense of a struggle, of an us vs. them mentality that we all seem to get bogged down in (myself included).

Let me start by relaying a couple of incidents that occurred over the weekend. At a social event, a faculty member whom I don’t see very often came up to me and said that a bunch of faculty had been talking about me recently. My heart swelled. I thought a great and insightful question or comment or suggestion was about to issue forth. But here’s what came out instead: We were talking about blu-ray and we all said, that’s what Laura should run workshops on. I won’t say how I responded, but suffice it to say it wasn’t pithy enough and obviously the comment has stuck in my craw.

Earlier, I’d gone to hear a talk in which the idea of tradition was lauded and commended and put on a pedestal. I found myself squirming and thinking, isn’t tradition for tradition’s sake a bad thing? Shouldn’t we be fighting against traditions that hold us back? The speaker went on to discuss the web and the wonders of the digital age, all the while reassuring his audience that books will always hold an important place in scholarship, perhaps even still the most important place, but that digital work should be considered as well. (Note: the commenter above attended this talk as well.)

I don’t think there was any maliciousness in the comment. It was a true misunderstanding of what it is I really do. It was also an indication that the commenter has not really investigated the application of technology to teaching or research. He/she very well could have asked me what I thought about the talk that we both attended and especially about the comments on digital scholarship. But no.

I think it’s hard not to feel irrelevant in the face of such comments, but I also think the “protests too much” nature of the talk also indicates anxiety about the future of academic work. What is to become of books in the web world? What about publishing articles? What about our students and their horrible Googling habits? The sad thing is, I’m here to help answer those questions, to help scholars and teachers find relevance in the web world. If only people would stop asking me about blu-ray.

I think, too, there’s a little bit of snobbery or something about some of us here in well-resourced schools. Our students and faculty have access to lots of rich materials because of location, because our library has such a great collection, and because our institution has the financial means to send students and faculty to places where they can access materials or to bring those materials to them. Not so at many other places and here, the web offers many opportunities. One of the first images I really looked at online was a digital version of Beowulf. Lacuna took on new meaning for me as it should for many students upon seeing something like Beowulf in the flesh, so to speak. How about accessing images of Shakespeare’s work? Or access to scholarly articles freely? The web has the potential to level the playing field and we have the opportunity to define the field. Will it be about quick, fast, surface-level work? Or will we put our work out there so it’s more about depth and breadth and access to great scholarship and creative work?

So, here’s what I might say to faculty. When you have those panic attacks in the middle of the night and you’re thinking that the Internet is ruining the academy, call me and talk to me about it the next day. I’ll talk to you about how the Internet is actually making the academy even more relevant but only as long as it doesn’t shut itself inside the ivory tower. I’ll help you figure out what to do to make your work relevant. You can share your goals and I can help you find ways to reach them. I won’t give you nuggets, mind you. I’ll teach you how to fish. Just whatever you do, don’t ask me about blu-ray.

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Faculty and Classroom Technology

26. March 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

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.

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On Time

11. March 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

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.

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Teach the students (faculty) you have

07. February 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Yesterday, I read an article in the Chronicle by James Lang where he urges teachers to dispel the myth that freshmen will be transformed by their first year of college. Faculty tend to believe that students will have their minds opened and change their worldviews (usually in response to their own classes). He says this idea comes mainly from the fact that most faculty actually did have their minds opened during the first year of college and so they expect their students to do the same. However, Lang argues (based primarily on a book by Tim Clydesdale) that most students just learn to manage their lives during that first year and they hold their views fairly sacrosanct.

I also finished watching and listening to Michael Wesch’s ELI presentation where he, too, talks about the 21st century student and how we’re not reaching them or providing them with meaningful learning experiences. He says that we need to provide not just content but make that content significant by personalizing the content. We need to help students understand where they fit in the world and why the material their studying matters to them personally. He then describes how he does that in his own class. And it’s really amazing.

So, I got to thinking about these two pieces together and it occurred to me that I might apply these ideas to faculty. First, it’s true that I want faculty to appreciate and care about learning with technology with the same passion I do. I found using technology in my classes so rewarding for my students that I pursued a career in helping others work with technology. However, faculty mostly just manage their lives the same way the students do. (I wonder if students don’t mimic some of the behaviors of their faculty.) They manage prepping for classes, working toward tenure, writing articles and books, serving on committees, and of course, juggling the rest of their lives. So, like students, their questions are bad. Students ask (as Wesch points out), “Will this be on the test?” Faculty ask, “Can you put these readings up for me?”

Both Wesch and Lang offer ways to teach students given where they are, and they’re actually pretty similar. Lang explains that Clydesdale has changed the way he teaches to deal with the reality that students are not in his class to have their minds changed:

[Clydesdale] has shifted his learning objectives away from content retention and toward skill development. “Little of the content of liberal-arts courses will be used in the careers of our graduates,” he said, “but the thinking, writing, speaking, and analytical skills these courses hone have enormous utility for the careers and the lives in general of our students.”

He doesn’t lecture and instead students discuss issues in class and work on semester-long projects. Wesch, too, limits lecturing and has his students work on semester-long projects through which they do learn content, but probably learn more valuable skills along the lines of the ones Clydesdale mentions. For Wesch, technology is a key component of helping students gain those skills.

What does this mean for me and my faculty? Well, if I follow Lang and Wesch, I shouldn’t teach content. For me, that means I shouldn’t give them the recipe for how to do something. I shouldn’t hold workshops where all I do is walk them through the steps for how to use software. I should ask them why they want to do that something and engage them in discussion, hopefully moving them toward thinking critically about the technology they’re using. I should let them explore the technology on their own rather than giving them all the answers. (For an example of someone not providing all the answers to their students, see Garnder’s latest post.)

Another thing I might think about is the issue of personalization that Wesch raises. How do I make this stuff meaningful to them in a personal way? I’m not sure yet. Unlike Wesch and Lang, I don’t have a captive audience. I can’t create semester-long projects for them (though I am doing something similar with a few faculty). When people show up for workshops, it’s by choice and there’s often not a critical mass of people in the room to begin a discussion about the whys of using technology. So, I’m going to have to think about how to do this on a one-on-one basis, which is where I have most of my interactions. As least thinking this way gives me a different way to react other than by being frustrated. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

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Broad and deep knowledge

17. October 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I consider myself someone who has a pretty broad knowledge base. By virtue of changing my undergraduate major 8 times and changing my dissertation topic and then going into a technology field related to education, I know a fair amount about a lot of different things. But I also know a lot in a few areas. One of the reasons I was leery of pursuing a purely academic career was the seeming requirement to focus on one narrow area of study. Certainly I know faculty who function this way. They know their area, usually a fairly narrow one, and very little else. Oh, sure, they can contextualize their area, say 19th century diaries, in a broader context of all diaries and of all literature. They know influences and antecedents. In smaller schools, faculty are more likely to have to venture out of their area in order to teach classes in related areas.

But I’m still often surprised by people who don’t venture much beyond their disciplines. They don’t care how history relates to science or vice versa. And forget popular culture. They don’t watch tv or listen to the radio. They don’t know that their students were obsessed with “The O.C.” and were sad to see it go. “Lost” is what they are when they venture into the wrong neighborhood. They know more about things that happened 50 years ago than what’s going on now. This isn’t all faculty, of course. I’ve run into many who share with me a general curiosity that extends to many areas, including popular culture. And I’m no cultural maven myself. I never really liked Lost and my tastes in tv lean toward reality shows, The Daily Show, and The Simpsons, not exactly the intellectual or coolest of fare. I don’t have a craving for mysteries the way many of my faculty friends do nor do I stick to reading “the classics.” I like nonfiction related to my field and in areas I used to study but no longer research–economics, history, cognitive science.

I can appreciate faculty who lament that students have no sense of history or context, no understanding of the complex world around them. But I also think that faculty should appreciate that some students understand their complex world in different ways than they do. Social networking, for example, complicates relationships and identity for students in ways that most of us never had to contend with as young people. TV shows and movies are often more complex commentaries on culture than the shows and movies we watched at their age was. A broad knowledge can provide students with even more ways to contextualize their experiences, but we shouldn’t dismiss certain ways of looking at the world just because it’s not our discipline. Disciplines can inform each other, always have, though we’re not always aware of it.

I can’t imagine not having a broad knowledge, not understanding science at all because it’s so different from English as a discipline or dismissing popular culture because it’s not “intellectual” enough. That seems, oddly, a shallow way of approaching the world.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure
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