I remember smoking in class. I remember teaching in class when people still smoked. For me, that's the answer.
But, because it seems there hasn't been a Thirsty around here in ages...
Q: What is the biggest change you've seen in academe since you started college.
I've been teaching college for ten years next week (where's my pin???) and the biggest change has been in the way that we handle files and turning in papers and such.
ReplyDeleteWe were still very floppy dependent and most everything was turned in by hand and I thought I liked it that way. Floppies did indeed fail pretty often. Some classes required a zip disk to save stuff too. I had personal server space and tended to leave stuff there that I needed for class on a hidden folder on my massive personal website.
For a brief period, everyone carried flash drives everywhere they went. And then, somehow, at the same time they got much cheaper and easier to buy we've started to switch into Cloud-like systems.
About half my students (and hell, myself) now store stuff either on Blackboard, Dropbox, or somewhere available everywhere. The books I read on Kindle are available everywhere I go even if I forget my iPad so long as there is a computer nearby. My Kindle app can export notes and annotations I take in it. All my other files that I need for class are available everywhere there is a computer terminal.
And then there's the phones. It's possible to write on them now, but it's not a good idea. It's hard to convince the students it's not a good idea. I try to model good practices by showing how the Kindle reading app can be used with digital books and pdfs to take/export notes, but NOT to write, but I don't think I'll completely convince them that writing a whole paper on a tiny keyboard is not as convenient as typing faster on a big one. I suspect the next ten years will see a major shift to making it easier to produce on phones. We'll see.
I do all my library research without going to the library. I don't spend hours paging through the bound copies of chemical abstracts and then wandering through the endless shelves of journals to find the volume which somebody already took off the shelf and left laying around on another floor.
ReplyDeleteIn the lab, we don't dump our waste down the drain. The solution to pollution is (no longer) dilution.
Life B.C. (before computers). While idea generation has not changed all that much, the realization of those ideas has. Computers have completely changed my discipline.
ReplyDeleteAttitude. Education used to be considered a privilege and a degree was something you earned, rather than something you were entitled to.
Hype. The advertising for furnishing dorm rooms is staggering. I stayed in a small room with two single bed and two beat-up desks. I squeezed a rented piano in and also brought a plastic record player. Oh. And a desk lamp. I had no TV - there were no TVs in the dorm, period. Phones were in the hall and one phone served the entire floor.
Oh my. Yes, the smokers. I used to take a water gun to class with me an squirt at them.
ReplyDeleteWe had a big fight those days about whether people could use calculators in exams or not, since not everyone could afford one.
The library was open 24 hours a day and research was a pain. Now I'm like Beaker Ben, do everything from my chair. And I am now much, much fatter than I was way back then...
Standards: college was once seen as a privilege for the top few percent of high school graduates and now over 70% of them go. High schools in the U.S. are under more stress than ever, though. The result is that the average college graduate today can't read or think and certainly can't write as well as I could in 8th grade a generation ago, and the very notion of today's students doing math at any level is laughable.
ReplyDeleteAttitudes: Everyone seems to assume this is my fault.
The epidemic of the allergy to personal responsibility. Taught my first class in 1994 (albeit at a military academy) and when students fucked up, I'd tell them "you fucked up" and they'd say yes sir, what do i need to do to be better. Took a break for more military service and a couple of wars, then went back to the classroom in late '04 and 05 and was appalled at the whiny sacks of shit that my students turned into. I decided that I was out and had no desire to deal with that crap, so I returned to my military career. I retired from the mili
ReplyDeleteFuck I hate this iPad at times ... I retired from the military, worked in the MIC for a while, and decided to teach again, for pleasure, and because I missed the intellectual exchanges (let me tell you, the military industrial complex is an intellectual desert and the people really are vampires). That was a mistake. I had a grade student just today formally protest his grade. This fuck is in a history program, and he can't properly create a footnote, run the spell checker, to say nothing of comprehend the readings and make an argument about history or historiography. He really is a zombie who We should just shoot in the head. Instead, because he's a stupid and ignorant motherfucker, I'm going to have to spend time justifying why I failed his ass.
ReplyDeleteI think you meant "grad" student, even if he does act like a "grade" student.
DeleteThe back flips we have to go through for students is an amazing change. Too much time spent bolstering the morons' self esteem and not enough time being allowed to teach them. And I teach only graduate students. No undergrads for me. I'm seriously considering just punting on the whole thing, going back to part-time consulting, and in the fluff time, writing another book.
ReplyDeleteSerious Answer: less smoking, computers, personal phones, the www, and campuses seem quieter probably because i-pods replaced boom boxes and huge stereo speakers in windows.
ReplyDeleteflip answer: girls are a lot less mysterious than they were when I was 18.... 8-)
The treatment of women. I remember things being really hostile when I was an undergrad, with comments about women getting their MRS degree and sarcasm about why they were even trying to get an education. I recall really struggling through a dense fog of disrespect. This eased up slightly in grad school. But today, there is a genuine expectation that colleagues will treat me with some modicum of respect. Sexist jokes usually rile up a meeting rather than maintain a norm. I didn't see that when I first got into school.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Female students are in the majority at almost all universities now (in the U.S.). Certainly didn't used to be that way. It's easier to treat people like shit when they're the minority.
DeleteIn regards to technology: When I started teaching, portable phones existed but were large, cumbersome, and fairly ugly things that only a few people carried. Then, suddenly, a year or two later, everyone had one of the damned thing. Or so it seemed. The internet did exist, and so did the WWW (which we still called "The World Wide Web" in full). We were *just* starting to use it in the classroom. I remember being told I had to teach a certain number of classes in the goddamned computer labs, which was always a murky and confusing disaster, because there was absolutely no reliable tech support, or any idea how the hell I was supposed to make my class fit a computer classroom. I literally had to teach some students how to double-click, and a significant portion of traditional students didn't use email yet. I had to lecture on how to use Netscape (and I was still using gopher and lynx, myself). There also wasn't any nanny software on the computers, so more than once there was someone looking at porn in class. Thank God I rarely have to deal with that anymore!
ReplyDeleteThe students have mostly stayed the same, but then, I went from a very large university to, to a community college, to a SLAC, so it's hard to compare the different populations. I notice that in the last two or three years, my students have begun reading a bit more often than they used to. Still not enough, but they no longer treat it as a joke when I say "when you read this, make sure to mark the parts you want to talk about in class in the margin." They don't do it, but at least they don't openly laugh.
I like my job a lot more, and am much better at it, than when I started. So that's good. I also spend less time obsessing about how my students -- or my colleagues, for that matter -- regard me. Tenure will do that.
I'm in one of those fields that, without the existence of time travel, isn't likely to change much. But how we approach it changed a lot from when I started. A lot less bullshit critical theory, thank God. Library research rarely involves getting my butt over to the library, and I haven't touched a physical, print journal (other than the ones I subscribe to) in years.
Oh God I wish this were my answer. Actually, it nearly is. Wonderfully said.
DeleteBen, Froderick, and Frank have all hit on the biggest changes I've observed.
ReplyDeleteThe research--shifting from nearly all hard copy sources to mostly electronic sources--has been the single biggest change in terms of pedagogy. Teaching research is a whole different animal now. It's not just that information is available digitally. Millennials are handicapped in many ways when it comes to research. First, they believe they know how to find anything, because they've grown up with technology. Teaching them how to use actual academic resources is particularly challenging. Second, they refuse to believe that the majority of information on this planet still exists outside of the realm of their particular kind of virtual reality, not available through online means. Third, they have been raised during strange times, brought up to believe that nearly every utterance is valid--especially because of the availability of information electronically. They seriously do not know how to distinguish good sources from bad. Fourth, their attention spans are nil and they believe that spending half an hour researching any topic is an eternity and a big waste of their time.
(In fairness to the youngsters, I encounter students older than the Millennials who were not brought up from birth with information technology but who have been made lazy by it.)
Frank and Froderick are actually addressing symptoms of the same root cause (in my humble opinion): college as a commodity to be consumed. Since our students are now our clients who have paid money for their grades, they do not see that they are responsible for anything--they have no accountability because they have paid for college and are therefore entitled to service--and the entire consumer model of education, K-12 through higher ed, has corrupted the actual process of learning to the point that standards are all over the place and academic rigor is optional (even discouraged) at many places.
Now everyone can go to college, right? We all know that not everyone is capable of genuine college-level work, but because everyone is being encouraged to attend college, we'd better give them what they need--a diploma, whether it's worth anything or not.
I'm really sickened by the cheapening of higher education in the course of my lifetime. I had to work my ass off to earn my degrees; I needed real discipline to excel in addition to the intelligence I was lucky to have been born with. That just isn't the case any more.
So, succinctly, it is:
DeleteEvery year, our students get more, and more, and more IMMATURE, and we are expected to do more, and more and more about it.
First, they believe they know how to find anything, because they've grown up with technology.
ReplyDeleteConnected to this is the problem that, even if they can find the specific thing that they're looking for, what they often fail to realize is that academic research needs to be systematic. Grabbing the first few results of a keyword search often doesn't really help you find the evidence you need, or help you draw valid conclusions. They expect to be able to write a paper with a few randomly-selected sources, and often have very little sense of how to do the type of detective work that proper research often requires.
Yup. Excellently put.
DeleteYes, OK, the internet. Fine. I went to college in 1985 with a computer and got online from the central library there, but the internet really didn't enter my life until about 1992 or 93.
ReplyDeleteBut beyond the obvious, it's this, solving for differences between the various institutions I've been part of: when my college friends failed, got put on academic probation, or flunked out, I never heard one of them blame someone else for it, even privately. Now *everything* is someone else's fault. It's gotten to the point where, when a student takes responsibility for something in a genuine way, I write them an e-mail thanking them and letting them know that it's a rare and valued act.
As pretty much everyone else has said, one of the biggest changes -- mostly positive, from my perspective -- is the shift from print to pixels. When I was young, I used to wonder what is was like to be my grandparents, who were born in horse-and-buggy days, and lived to see cars, planes, and moon landings. It turns out that the shifts during my lifetime have been just as dramatic (and that, at least in one's first half century, one adjusts as one goes along).
ReplyDeleteThe considerably less positive change is the one in the academic employment structure. Even when I applied to grad school in the late eighties, the prognosticators were still predicting a *shortage* of Ph.D.s Of course we don't really have a glut, but we certainly don't have the full-time, TT jobs they were envisioning filling, either. In fact, the change may already have been well under way at the time, but it was pretty invisible to a graduating senior at an elite institution.
I actually haven't seen the degree of increase in student entitlement/lack of responsibility that others here have. That may be one of the advantages of going from elite institutions (with more than a few "legacies") to one with far more first-generation students.
Have you seen the remake of "Total Recall?" Unsurprisingly, it's not as good as the original, mainly because Arnold was a more amusing entertainer, say what you will about his personal life and government service.
ReplyDeleteSeeing it motivated me to read the short story on which both films are based, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," by Philip K. Dick, in "The Philip K. Dick Reader." The story was written in 1966. Good science fiction is supposed to be an exploration of how new science or technology affects people, and in this story, it's memory implantation and erasure. Others included practical passenger transport to Mars (in the remake it's Australia, and they go through Earth), implanted electronic tracking devices, hover cars, and robot-driven taxis.
What surprised me were the technologies that Philip Dick assumed wouldn't change, but did. For example, when Douglas Quail (in the movies, Quaid) senses that his extra-factual memories weren't implanted right, he sits down to write an angry letter to Recall, on a typewriter.