Sunday, October 7, 2012

"It's time to hit the off button."

Kudos to the CMer whose Peter Parker alter ego authored this treatise on unplugging the digital classroom for the Toronto Star.  (And Doug Mann, if you aren't a contributor to this blog, you should be!)

Illustrating why the "Strengthening Ontario's Centres of Creativity, Innovation, and Knowledge" Ontario government 2012 white paper on education would be far more useful if it came in rolls in a bag with fluffy kittens on it, Mann, a media studies prof at UWO, writes:

"The real question is how computers, smartphones and iPods are used, and whether these uses contribute anything to the main goal of higher education: to improve students’ minds and characters by helping them to learn facts, debate ideas and understand the world better. The answer, for the most part, is no — study after study shows that digital technology has dumbed down higher education. They may make education more “fun” and “engaging.” But that’s only saying that they’ve turned education into a form of entertainment. Writing essays, reading difficult texts or figuring out complex mathematical problems have never been “fun” — and never will be."

In related news, the sky is blue...and Bubba and I like bourbon.

So today, when we here in Canadia are supposed to be giving thanks, I will raise my glass of bourbon to the rest of you. Sometimes I feel like we're playing our instruments on the deck of the Titanic...but at least I'm not bowing alone.

Cheers.
DiaMC

14 comments:

  1. Cheers back at you, DiaMC, and Happy Thanksgiving!

    I'm beginning to think that tablets *might* have a future as reading and note-taking devices, once the annotation and hand-writing recognition features get good enough (some colleagues seem pretty happy with iAnnotate). But they're only useful as long as they stay flat on the desk, which facilitates old-fashioned face-to-face meeting and seminar communication styles.

    But I do *not* want to try to have a discussion -- at least not very frequently -- in a classroom with one computer per student, or where most of the students have laptops open. One computer at the front of the room to show things now and then is handy, but, even then, I want somewhere to sit while leading discussion that *isn't* behind a monitor.

    I think it all comes back to the issue that many people who are hung up on the newest and bestest delivery systems just don't recognize: a college education is only secondarily about communicating information. It's mostly about learning how to make new knowledge/information for oneself, often by realizing how others have done so and/or practicing the skills involved. Although digital tools may play a role in both (and our students will need to know how to communicate ideas in digital formats), the process cannot be simplified. (It also can't be scored/measured/coached by a machine, but that's another subject).

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    1. "A college education is only secondarily about communicating information. It's mostly about learning how to make new knowledge/information for oneself, often by realizing how others have done so and/or practicing the skills involved." <-- THIS.

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  2. "Writing essays, reading difficult texts or figuring out complex mathematical problems have never been “fun” — and never will be."

    I love it. That is the problem in a nutshell. Somehow the flakes grew up thinking that everything should be fun, and in eighteen years no one has dispelled that notion.

    I also applaud Cassandra's last paragraph. Some things in life take effort.

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  3. When did Education change to suddenly needing to be fun???

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    1. In 1969, with the premiere of Sesame Street. That's right, Big Bird is partly to blame. I hate it when I find myself in agreement with Mitt Romney.

      In his 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman discussed how television has turned education and most other aspects of society, including journalism and religion, into entertainment. With the advent of a galaxy of other electronics since then, the problem has become much worse.

      Whenever anyone claims that things aren't so bad because the older generation has always complained about how little the younger generation knows, I point out that there is something new under the Sun: digital electronics. Often, arguments like this point out that the Ancient Greeks complained about what their kids didn't know. I find this particularly unconvincing: Ancient Greek culture was conquered by the Romans, partly because of too much fighting among themselves, and then became completely extinct after the Fall of Rome, remember?

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    2. But without digital electronics, Frod, you never could have taken this beautiful Milky Way photo.

      :-)

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    3. While I buy part of Postman's argument, I wonder how much has shifted now that people have more choices of entertainment (they can choose to change the channel or switch to another website if the one they're on isn't interesting).

      And would we be able to show that photo in class and inspire awe from the 18-year-olds? Or would they expect the photo to do something animated or be in 3-D?

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    4. @Bubba: Digital electronics were much more fun when they were still indispensable tools of the physical sciences, and not much else. But then, I like most things when they're still my little private joke, before they're spoiled by mass marketing.

      @CC: But they have no real choice in entertainment. It's all crap!

      And yes, they do like that photo when I show it to them in class.

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  4. Technology is so pervasive at my university (and in my field in general), that one must never seem to be anything but all-smiles about the various ways students "use" technology in class. Now we even have all-laptop sections and entire classes taught in computer classrooms, even when the class itself has nothing to do with digital media or technology. If you ask your students to put away laptops, turn off cell phones, and open up their books--well, then you're a neoluddite who refuses genuflect at the altar of digital studies, and you will not get a job with that attitude.

    I've failed to grasp why techology is so important to what I teach, other than the fact that it looks good on the CV. Is it really necessary that all my hamster fur binding students keep a public blog? Upload pictures to the class website? Post on the class message board? They already know how to do these things because they've been doing them since junior high. What they don't know how to do is sit and read for a sustained amount of time. Or write a paper that goes beyond surface-level observations. Or tell the difference between a scholarly and non-scholarly source. Or use the library's resources to do research. Or even find their way around the library.

    That's what I find so backward about the obsession with technology. We're not really teaching them anything they don't already know--and we're using technology on an insultingly rudimentary level (post to a message board! Google something! Blog about it!). These are things our students know how to do like breathing, and they pretty much do them on an hourly basis. Our use of technology mirrors our students' writing--all surface-level, no real content.

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    1. So true, GG. And another thought that occurred to me just this morning, (in the shower, of all places): couldn't it be seen as cruel to compel students to put so much on the Interwebz for course credit when it's a technology that doesn't know how to forget? I, for one, am insanely grateful that all the mostly-paper-based crapola I produced as an undergraduate is gathering mold in a landfill somewhere or languishing on a backup CD somewhere (Heavens, remember saving things to CD?!). Otherwise, it'd be strewn all over the Internet, there to haunt me and those who Google me for time eternal.

      This doesn't even address the even more problematic idea of requiring an active Twitter/Tumblr/whatever account just for the honor of class "participation." I have had colleagues try to propose such things and all I can do is stand agog, dying a little inside.

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  5. Hi, hurt student here,

    Learning Illustrator, HTML CSS, matlab,...etc is just as complicated, if not more, than the course material itself.

    Additionally, hiking out to a State Park to photograph drumlins and Eskers, cataloging "hard" problems/essays from a particular course into html files, is fucking interesting and fun. And if these particular problems/essays appear to be trivial, then so what. I've got nothing to prove.

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    1. Hi, Kugel--

      You're talking about developing some serious technology skills (i.e. knowledge of the engines that underlie all the pretty user-friendly interfaces), and using them in creative, productive (and, yes, truly fun, not just mindlessly "entertaining") ways. That's not trivial; it's serious intellectual work, and I think pretty much everybody here respects it. But, sadly, it's not what most of our students are doing in supposedly "technology-enhanced" classes. Often, they aren't even using the pretty interfaces in particularly thoughtful and creative ways (also a skill they'll need).

      If all students who are supposedly immersed in technology were doing the stuff you're doing, I'd be a very happy camper (and I'd be scrambling to keep up, rather than teaching people many decades younger than I how to do very simple tech stuff, because some of them don't seem to have the patience to do what I do: keep fiddling around with the interface until I figure out how to make it do what I want it to do -- or confirm that it won't -- knowing I'm unlikely to be able to break it).

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    2. Hi CC. Doug Mann here.

      Yes, this is a bitter irony of being a techno-skeptic in classes of students who think you're a Luddite if you don't own an iPhone. I often have to explain simple computer apps and aspects of programs like Word that I've used for years. For example, most of my students can't properly use grammar and spell checkers, know what the VLC media player is, or how to edit or convert simple video files, all things I learned just by trying them out or Googling them. Some don't even know how to do a library search for essay-related articles! I've had students claim there's no articles on a given essay topic, so I bet them (zero dollars) that I can find enough articles in 5 minutes or less on a good computer - and I do. I had a couple of seminars where fourth-year student presenters struggled to use YouTube and Power Point, and were puzzled when their Mac files didn't work on a PC. I think the claim that the pre-digital generation "doesn't get it" is hollow. To paraphrase Bart Simpson, I know how to use Facebook, I just don't want to.

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