Rocking some old-school "Academic Technology"
I recently had an interesting discussion with a professor about a post I had made on the college’s Strategic Planning website. The thread topic was how professors can use teaching and learning to further student learning. My response is rather negative, and the professor was somewhat taken aback and concerned that I was critiquing a WordPress site he’d created for our class. In the course of that conversation, I realized a couple of things.
- As much as I may try to dress like a cool kid, I’m really just a giant tech geek.
- I think Academic Technology is a really important field, but one that most of its users aren’t at ALL involved in.
What’s the stereotypical image of an “Academic Technology” professional? Probably male, white, geeky, mid thirties? He might be a teacher or professor, but he also might not be. His contact with students is uncertain. He is better informed about students’ browsing habits than those students realize, but also sufficiently removed from their lives that his best estimations aren’t quite on the money.
From the outside, it is easy to fall into a judgmental mindset and assume that the technologist may be more interested in finding efficient solutions that ones which would offer the greatest benefit to student users. This is the overly-cynical thought that I posted about for strategic planning. One of the most common bits that professors have put into their classes is the use of closed, online discussion boards within the course’s blackboard sites. Discussion boards like this are pretty easy to create and maintain from the technologist’s viewpoint–but in my own experience the discussions that students have there are never as fruitful as the ones that students have when they engage one another face to face. Mostly, they’re just a series of disjointed, one-off posts that students make and then never think about again. This may be a flaw in the way such posts are assigned; professors don’t mandate participation in a conversation, but simply that students post something (anything!) to prove they did in fact prepare for the class meeting. In the case of small classes, where discussions are easily facilitated between students, why substitute this weak device for a classroom activity that already works well? This to me represents the most frustrating misuse of academic technology: using technology just because it’s there.
I’m actually a huge fan of how we’re using our class’s public WordPress site. As we research and construct our final papers, our drafts and updates will be accessible to both our classmates and the public. (Or some fraction of the public, depending on how our final privacy settings are set.) Students can peer-edit one another, paragraph-by-paragraph, with no wasted paper. The WP platform allows for comments to be attached to specific portions of text, rather than a longwinded note at the end of the post that would be harder to attach to specific passages. In other words, useful! This is what I’m into. How could we extend that? Could we use it for WA (Writing Associates) conferencing? Do we need to print so many copies? (I haven’t printed a paper in years because my high school was so digital.)
Academic technology seems to fall into two categories: tech that makes old tasks easier, and tech that creates the opportunities for new tasks that would be impossible without it. Most of the AT that I see seems to fall into the first category–programs that scan for plagiarism, automatic MLA bibliography creation, digitized versions of readings. But what about this much-ignored second category? Isn’t that the more exciting playing field?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Mare — your post gives a lot for folks like me (i.e., professors) to think about. I’ll push back a bit, if I may. I use discussion boards on blackboard a fair amount and there are ALWAYS a few of those students who NEVER speak in class, who post effectively. They respond to one another cogently, bring in key ideas from other aspects of their lives, etc. Unless classes are quite small, and very carefully managed, in class discussion just does not work for everyone. So sometimes online is better! I like having both options because I can have a sense of what more of the students are getting from the class, and what they are concerned with at least from their live and online comments.
That said, I’d love some tips on other ways to do this online discussing more effectively. I may have a very different experience than you — nearly all of my students have significant time commitments apart from school – work/family/both… and so they, like me, want to have technology be VERY efficient. Many have expressed to me that they do not want to have to track something that is too frequent (e.g., twitter may not work that well for many), nor perhaps have too much a learning curve. But I know there have to be better situations than the threaded blackboard discussion too. I’d love to see the WP option.
Sometime I hope we can talk more about all this stuff! I’d love to have a more direct, student perspective!
You make a great point about the role that a discussion board can play in a larger class–I should have specified. One of the classes using the discussion board is 10 students; the other is 12. Because people can’t “hide” in a class that small, people are well-prepared for class and typically have insightful comments. The posts are pretty much seen as a burden, though, and people put a minimal amount of effort into them. I think if posts of this type were the only way that students felt they could share or get feedback, they might choose to do more with them.
The WP option is, in my opinion, a newer (if somewhat kluge-y) way to share the writing process. It’s definitely NOT what the platform was designed to do–but it is a way to organize a fairly large volume of student-generated content in a way that is logical. Since the point is to share drafts, I’ll be interested to see how well this platform stands up to our making a lot of revisions to the things we post. (AKA it’s logical now but will it stay that way?)
Hi Marian,
I’m the director of the academic technology group at your College. It’d be nice to meet you sometime. I am interested in your perceptions and experiences of academic technologies, but I would also like to represent a broader perspective on what our field really is.
I think most academic technologists I have met–and I know a lot of them across the nation after nearly 20 years in the field–are more motivated by implementing enabling technologies in support of excellence in teaching and learning. I think you’re right that the exact nature of what we know and what we’re promoting is hidden from students. The reason for this is that we can’t enter into a classroom and influence the use of course-related technology without an invitation from a professor. For that reason, we end up talking more about the teaching teaching and a little less on the learning.
I think we only care about the efficiency side of academic technology to the extent that something can be supported by the faculty’s own effort + the support that we can confidently provide. We’re definitely game to going on adventures.
That said, the faculty are warming up to the possibilities of technology. From high performance grid computing in the sciences to digital storytelling in the humanities and social sciences, there has been quite a bit of exploration in recent years. The uptick in the use of WordPress blogs is partially because we’re supporting and promoting them. Professors who have been mildly technophobic until recently are starting to come around and give new techniques a try. We certainly take every opportunity to offer creative ideas and support.
But I will also say this: online discussion forums and other kinds of asynchronous discussions do have their place in education. The quality of the interaction varies, often in conjunction with the value that the class places on what goes on there. I have taken part in online courses where we talk on discussion groups, and the quantity of discussion far exceeds what would even be possible in face-to-face settings. And there are some people who don’t participate in class discussions who suddenly become conversational superstars if they have a chance to reflect and write out their thoughts.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment! It’s really interesting to get pushback on this. As I re-read my post, I realize that I may have also come across much more negatively than I originally intended. I referred to my post on the strategic planning website as a cynical one, and my intention was to point out that I was not just being cynical but being overly cynical. (I think that key shade of meaning got lost in translation somewhere.) Looking over the post, I can see that I mis-spoke and over-generalized in a few places…to the point where I may have been inadvertently offensive, I think.
I think that in the right context, discussion board posts can serve a meaningful role. As we were discussing earlier in the comments, they’re a very good alternative for larger classes where a face-to-face discussion might not be feasible. Since the largest class I’ve had at Swat was 28 people (and a discussion class!) I have a harder time finding the use of the discussion boards meaningful within the context of my specific classes.
In the case of one of the professors, I think that the discussion boards are being mis-used to help her feel assured that she “cultivates discussion” while sticking to a lecture format–but because she does nothing to direct the discussions online and rarely follows up on them in class, it feels futile trying to put effort into them. (Those discussions are also set up with each reading as a “topic,” and instead of posting together in a single thread underneath that topic, students tend to create individual threads–making the posts completely disjointed. It has been this way from the beginning, and the fact that our professor has not commented on it suggests to me that she does not check on those threads, does not have a genuine interest in fostering discussion, or doesn’t know better.) Since the discussion board isn’t integrated into the rest of the course, it’s easy to fall into a cynical mindset and wonder whether she’s using this portion of her Blackboard course because it seems flashy or allows her to say that she’s technologically forward-thinking. Clearly, this issue is not strictly an “Academic Technology” issue–the board would work fine if it were used correctly! But somehow it’s not being used to its full potential.
My high school background was very tech-heavy, and I think I take that for granted. I think I mentioned earlier that I hadn’t printed a paper for a course in years before coming to Swat–all of my papers were either uploaded to Blackboard or sent by email. To be honest, I’m still baffled why Swat’s culture is so print-heavy, particularly with regards to the WA program. I know that professors’ comfort level with technology has a role in the question, but beyond that I can’t see why more professors aren’t transitioning to marking papers up digitally.
Again, I can’t speak for the entire community–all I can do is extrapolate from my own experiences. But even the professor who is helping our class use that WP site–and who maintains a very active blog of his own!–still had us submit all of our papers in hard copy. Perhaps a better question is not just how to make technology more appealing, but also finding what there is in Swat culture that makes professors averse to changing habits? I’m sure that a lot of inquiry has already gone into just that question. Perhaps more than anything, I’m reacting to how little I know as a student about how these issues are considered?