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 }
