teaching

I’ve been thinking of the future of higher education with the advent of Web 2.0 for some time now. Will new technologies be a “game changer” for colleges and universities and what are the stakes? Currently, there is the issue of legitimacy that accredited schools and programs afford to both students and employers, taking a narrow and pragmatic view of higher education, and web 2.0 education alters the higher education business model. While costs are reduced, particularly with the use of online adjuncts, there are questions of quality. Technologically-mediated instruction still needs to be refined so it affords the same educational experience of face-to-face instruction. I’m interested in the specifics of this, with respect to the use of newer video codecs and interfaces that foster engagement, as well as the use of both synchronous and asynchronous modes of instruction and interactivity.

Online lectures are interesting, as they reduce education to digitized content. The instructor, lecturer, and professor are in the same boat as the photographer, music artist, film producer, and journalist. The digitization of what drives value allows it to be readily obtained, retransmitted, repurposed, remixed, etc. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a recent piece on whether or not lectures should be online. Most of the article focuses on what I see as side issues, but this hits on what I think is one of the key points::

“And lectures might just fall out of popular use in physical classrooms, because professors could just point to their past recordings or those of others and assign viewings for homework. To keep students interested in the classroom, some professors would focus more on discussion or group projects and things that can’t be easily captured on video.”

I think moving away from the “canned lecture” rehashing the text is a good thing. Way back when I was an undergraduate, back when dinosaurs roamed and PC meant pre-Cambrian, the best courses were those which built upon the readings, not parrot them. Fast forward a few years when I taught my own “preps” at the University of Oregon. I felt that my teaching was at its best when there was limited lecturing and more discussion of the material and the derivation of knowledge, particularly with the use of cases, articles, or blog posts by myself or students. Sometimes, I felt that being a good talk show host was what I was striving for.

I feel for what I teach, marketing, strategy, methods, economic sociology, consumer behaviour, etc., the lecture isn’t the true value added. It’s the moderated discussion afterwards, face-to-face and online, synchronously and {to a lesser extent} asynchronously. Web 2.0 can help universities rethink curricula, in terms of::

1. What is optimally offered online given current technologies?
2. How to address courses with different types of content/knowledge?
3. How can courses be tailored towards students with different learning styles/abilities?

An old boss of mine scoffed at students claiming “alternative learning styles”, using quotation fingers, but over the years I’ve seen students who flounder in other classes come alive with thoughts and ideas just by allowing them to use different modes of expression, both online and face-to-face. While the Chronicle of Higher Education ponders issues of intellectual property, copyright, and even professors subject to ridicule, the weightier issue is how will universities offer courses, certificate programmes, and degrees in the context of lifelong learning that deliver value for its students and other stakeholders?

Future posts of mine will examine issues of Research 2.0 and a possible future for technologically savvy professors that understand how Web 2.0 and beyond can leverage efficiencies in teaching, move towards better learning outcomes, and foster a research agenda. Is this pandora or panacea?

Twitterversion:: Blog on the professor’s role as teacher w/advent of Web 2.0. Will digital content kill the teaching stars? #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: Belle & Sebastian-“Family Tree”

and I’m not sure how I feel.

With apologies to REM and to Bill Paxson in Aliens “It’s all over man!”  No more stodgy tweed-jacket with the patches lectures! It’s gonna be quick jump-cuts and machine gun guitar solos! Whoooo! Don Tapscott says so:

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

I take a backseat to no-one in my pedagogical “web utopianism.” Just in the past year I’ve used blogs, wikis, twitter, diigo, ning, slide rocket, netvibes, and any other Web 2.0 tool I don’t have to pay for. All this in the service of the “engaged classroom.” And when it’s good, it’s good. Students take control of their learning and blow me away with what they produce. But when it’s bad…look out!

But to me the more vexing question is whether we’re losing something profound when we lose an appreciation for the art of the lecture. I had a class this past semester where students had to sit through a lecture beforehand and to a person they came in jokingly desiring to “kill themselves” after having to sit through such drudgery. The faculty, on the other hand, loved it.

Throughout my life, I’ve gotten a lot out of lectures. I subscribe to a number of lecture based podcasts including UChannel and Big Ideas. To me, there is no substitute for someone who has mastered their subject area and can walk you through a topic in 60 or so minutes.

In all of our haste to embrace the learning styles of “digital natives,” we’ve haven’t adequately stopped to reflect upon what doing so means to education in general. For me, I’ve spend a lot of time emphasizing engagement…. but I don’t want to lose the challenge.

Image by Juliana Sohn / www.julianasohn.com

Courtney Martin in Utne Reader writes about Dennis Dalton, a political science professor at Barnard College who opens his class up to the residents of the Harlem neighborhood in which the school is located:

Many Harlemites have turned Dalton’s courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to “I’m not telling.

This article has me reeling. I spend my day as a social scientist trying to get people (mostly young people) to wrestle with social issues, to reflect on why they occur and to consider how we might address them. But we do these things within the confines of these tightly consigned boxes. New technology allows us to expand beyond these boxes to bring images and ideas to our students, but even then, their presentation is tightly controlled and structured.

We can bring students the reality of the world “out there” via service learning or study abroad, but the institution remains untouched. We send our students out to gain information about humanity and bring it back to spaces that we tightly control for the purposes of organized, structured learning. They and we are better off for the study abroad experience, but why should we stop there.  A real engagement with the world “out there” requires students to experience it where they live.  I think Martin is on to something when she says writes:

If Dalton’s lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God’s children but as Plato’s philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.

There may be practical reasons for why universities don’t just let anyone enter their campuses to take courses (fear of lawsuit, monetary incentives). But as long as universities see themselves as distinct entities from the publics they serve, they will only partially fulfill their mission.  And I’ll have students looking at their watches when it’s five minutes ’till.

As I try to get out from under the mass of “green books” (the blue book is a casualty of campus greening efforts), I thought I’d give a shout to my Race, Multiculturalism and Politics students at California Lutheran University. I’m a pretty mild mannered person in general, but for some reason, I often perform “high wire acts” with untested assignments.

This semester, I asked my Race classes (mostly first-semester freshmen) to create Wikipedia entries for books from the suggested readings section of my syllabus. I was a bit nervous about this assignment. Particularly as students began coming to me reporting that the “the crowd” on Wikipedia had decided to delete their blog entries.

Today, some of my students presented their Wikipedia pages, and I was blown away. Other than the occasional typo here or akward sentence structure there, they exceeded my wildest expectations. Here are two examples:

Wikipedia page for Multiculturalism Without Culture, by Anne Phillips
Wikipedia page for Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau

I was impressed with my students ability to synthesize pretty heady stuff. I wonder how presenting material in such a public forum changed the work product. Has anyone given a similar assignment? How did it work out? I was stunned by the zeal with which many of the students approached this project. I’d love to hear your thoughts.