Is it OK to be a Luddite?

The title of this post is inspired by an essay by Thomas Pynchon, which I'm including a link to at the bottom of this post. So often in our discussions of online education and teaching with technology, we jump to a discussion of how to use technology without pausing to think about why we use technology in the first place. While I certainly wouldn't advocate that we should usher in a new era of Luddism in higher education, I do think it's important for us to at least ask ourselves these questions.

Certainly, we can use technology. Technology seduces us and the students with its graphic interfaces, touch screens, and attention-grabbing visuals. But should we use it? What are the drawbacks of tech? Are there situations where tech shouldn't be used or where its use should be made as invisible as possible? How does tech reconfigure the learning environment, both literally and figuratively? When a classroom (virtual or otherwise) revolves around tech, what shape does it take? How is this shape different from the configurations of classrooms that don't revolve around tech?

To help us think about these questions, I'm also including several other resources in addition to the Pynchon essay. The first is a short film made by students about how student life and and the boundaries of the classroom have changed in recent years. It ends with a very moving ode to the chalkboard. Then, I've included some links to various clips from the animated television show Futurama. They offer a critique (both silly and profound) of how we interact with technology in contemporary society.

"A Vision of Students Today": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Clips from Futurama:
http://business-news.thestreet.com/link/?http://mashable.com/2010/07/02/futurama-apple-twitter/;;;http://business-news.thestreet.com/technology-news/2010/07/02/a/655426209-futurama-critiques-modern-gadget-and/;;;http://business-news.thestreet.com/technology-news/2010/07/02/a/655426209-futurama-critiques-modern-gadget-and/

Pynchon, "Is it OK to be a Luddite?"
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

On "Books in the Age of the iPad"

I thought I would go ahead and include some thoughts on one of the other readings I recommended a couple of weeks ago. In “Books in the Age of the iPad,” Craig Mod makes a very good case for why the death of the book (or, rather, the death of certain books) is not such a bad thing after all. He writes, “We’re losing the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books.” He also makes a good argument for why publishers of works on the iPad should reimagine how they conceive of the page as an aesthetic constraint for their content.

Mod writes, “Put very simply, Formless Content is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only text. Definite content usually has some visual elements along with text.” I find Mod’s points here (and elsewhere in the piece) inspired; still, I’m concerned with the phrase “Formless Content,” because it seems to me that content is never formless. However, when Mod says “Formless Content,” he means that the content of the work is only arbitrarily (not integrally) linked to its form. While the meaning of Formless Content is influenced by the form it takes, the meaning of Definite Content depends on its form.

So, books with Formless Content can be easily (and losslessly) translated to digital media devices like computers and Kindles, because the shape of the page, the font used, and the size of the text is irrelevant. (I’m not sure I entirely buy this, given how many books I’ve stopped reading when I found the physical character of the text unwieldy.) However, he argues that the iPad will make it possible for us to (losslessly) read/view even Definite Content on a digital device.

Mod writes, “The seemingly insignificant fact that we touch the text actually plays a very key role in furthering the intimacy of the experience [of reading on the iPad].” This seems crucial to the success of something like the iPad as a replacement for printed books. Part of the problem I have with reading on a computer screen is that the text loses a good portion of its physical character. Words on a standard computer screen might still have texture (a shape they take in our mouths or brains), but they have no weight. Words (and images) on an iPad or Kindle, on the other hand, do seem to have both texture and weight.

So, my question is about the potential of devices like the iPad for online courses and Learning Management Systems. Courses in D2L or Blackboard or WebCT would not be incredibly user-friendly on an iPad. However, the iPad does seem like a perfect device for online courses (given that it would make learning tactile and even more portable). It would, though, require us to rethink the way we build and navigate online courses. And, while devices like smart phones and the iPad do make reading and interacting with digital material much easier, they make producing digital content more difficult. So, the challenge with creating courses that could be taken on an iPad would be to make sure that the learning experience didn't become passive with the student and their device a mere receptacle for information.

Has anyone attempted to encourage the use of smart phones and/or iPads in their online classes? Are there activities we can devise for using these devices in education? I know that if I were teaching a science class, I would love to assign Elements, an interactive periodic table for the iPad, and one of the most beautiful and revolutionary e-books I've seen.

On Grey Matter

Still thinking about this quote from iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Gary Small writes, “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology–computers, smart phones, video games, search engines like Google and Yahoo–stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones. Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now–at a speed like never before.”

We often note that rapid technological advances are changing the way we live our lives, the shape of our days, the way we read, the way we learn. Generally, we describe this process as a social change. I’m fascinated by this excerpt from Small’s book, because it suggests that we are changing in a far more profound way, at a cellular level. The neurons in our brains are literally rewiring themselves in order to create pathways to accommodate our increasing interaction with computers and digital technology.

Some questions: Does taking or teaching an online class require that we first rewire our brains? Have our brains already been permanently rewired? How is the experience of an online class different for a so-called "digital native" vs. a so-called "digital immigrant"? Does our experience with online classes (as a student or teacher) change the way we approach other more traditional classroom-based classes?

A Few Suggested Articles, Books, Etc.

Here are some essays/books on digital life that I've found extremely useful in thinking about my pedagogy for both online and classroom-based classes. The first two are books that can be found on Amazon. I'm including links to the rest:

Gary Small, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/)

Craig Mod, "Books in the Age of the iPad" (http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/)

Also, here are some fun short stories that touch on issues relevant to online pedagogy, digital life, virtuality, etc.:

Ray Bradbury, "The Veldt" (http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm)

Philip K. Dick, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (www.dvara.net/HK/IHope.rtf)

Questions about Student 2.0

Here are some question I've been thinking about this week related to my last couple of posts:

1. How has the physical space of teaching changed in the last 15 years, since the rise of the internet? How do students and teachers occupy this space? Are we more mobile while learning or more stationary than we once were? Are we more or less likely to use our bodies while learning?

2. What different instruments do students 1.0 and students 2.0 use? How do these instruments change the way we interact with the subjects we study? For example, do we write differently (in a qualitative way) with a pencil than we do with a keyboard?

3. How about teachers 2.0? What different instruments are we beginning to use in the classroom? Do students interact differently with information on a blackboard than information on a computer screen or Powerpoint? Is teaching as much (or more) of a learning experience for us than it once was? Do new technologies enhance our engagement (as teachers) with our subject material?

4. How do new technologically enhanced or virtual classrooms address themselves to students with unconventional learning styles? Are we able to reach more students than we once were? Can online learning be made effective for any kind of student?

5. How do non-traditional students fit into the classroom 2.0? As our teaching methods evolve, how do we continue to address our pedagogy to student 1.0?

6. Finally, how have the relationships we create with our students changed? And how have the social dynamics between students in the classroom changed? Is classroom 2.0 more communal or less communal than classroom 1.0?

On Student 2.0, cont.

For many teachers, the increasing disembodiment of our students leads to a pedagogy that is even more fundamentally disembodied. In the classroom 1.0, the teacher lectures to a roomful of mute brains and eyeballs, the students’ physicality relegated to a waggling hand, a mere medium between the drone of the expert and the scrawl in their notebooks. Now, shall we forget these bodies altogether, turning instead to their virtual doubles? No. I would argue that, in the classroom 2.0, we must turn simultaneously in two directions. As teachers, we must engage our students at the level of 1s and 0s but also at the level of flesh. Even as the classroom moves more and more online, we must make efforts to make learning ecstatic again.

While the Kindle and the iPhone certainly offer compelling alternatives, the material object of a book or a film will never be fully extinct. Books have an odor, a certain weight in our hands, a tactile pleasure at the turn of a page. The film strip has an audible clack as it moves through the projector, and the emulsion dissolves sweetly before our eyes. And, even if these mediums are rendered mostly intangible, books and films will always have a physical impact on us, causing us to recoil, sigh, bristle, and scream.

And student work has the potential for all these same qualities. It has heft and gravity, meaning and substance. Its production requires their bodies, or at least requires them to have bodies. The best academic and creative work is rooted in experience--the experience of a world, a book, a film, an idea, a self. The best learners let this world take root inside them, and they engage it, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally. So, we must bring our subjects to life for both our students and their digital counterparts. Learning must fire every neuron--must touch students at the highest levels of consciousness and at the cellular level. We must look in a way that only bodies can do, the sort of looking that breaks its subject and object to bits and melds them permanently together. No matter where it happens, this is what learning must do. It must evolve--and revolt.

On Student 2.0

Students are evolving. The student 2.0 is an altogether different animal than the student 1.0. And our classrooms are ecosystems, an environment all their own, where we each must decide how to engage this new species of student. But the walls of our classrooms have been breached. The front of the classroom lies in ruin, and the teacher standing behind a lectern has become an anachronism. The entire system has suffered a swift and certain decay. Now, we teeter at a slowly disintegrating threshold, one foot in a physical world and the other in a virtual one. I feel some brief nostalgia but scrabble eagerly, hopefully from the rubble.

Our students are no longer just bodies in desks; they are no longer vessels. They have become compilations, amalgams, a concatenation of web sites. They are the people in front of us, but also their avatars in Second Life and the World of Warcraft and the profiles they create on FaceBook and MySpace. They speak with mouths, but also with fingers tapping briskly at the keys of their smart phones. When they want to “reach out and touch someone,” they use VOIP, AIM, and Twitter. Shouldn’t student-centered learning address itself, as fully as possible, to this new breed of student? Shouldn’t we understand our students as more than just inert flesh?

Shouldn’t we, ourselves, evolve into teachers 2.0? After all, the expert is dead, murdered by the all-knowing Wikipedia. Students now hold an encyclopedic wealth of information literally in their hands, available to them at the press of a button or the swipe of a finger across a haptic touchscreen. The teacher is no longer just a depository and depositor of knowledge. Our job has become altogether more complex. Now, we are in a position akin to that of a juggler, provoking, reflecting, interpreting, a deft act of balance and patience. Too much of our teacherly voice, and the learning shuts down, degrading into a stilted game of bounce the idea off the professor; not enough, and it atrophies. The teacher 2.0 must shift the focus from individual learners to the community of learners, drawing new boundaries that reflect a much larger hybrid classroom. Now, our work in the world must be done also online.

On the Rewiring of Teaching

Here's a quote I find fascinating:

“The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology--computers, smart phones, video games, search engines like Google and Yahoo--stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones. Because of the current technological revolution, our brains are evolving right now--at a speed like never before.” ~ Gary Small, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

There are quite a few other recent books about this subject. Another one I'd particularly recommend is The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. There's a great essay by him from The Atlantic that formed the basis of this book. You can find the essay here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/.

He raises some really fascinating points about how the internet is changing the way we learn and the ways our brains function. His ultimate point is that Google (and computers and the internet) are not making us think less; rather, they are changing the way we think. Likewise, I would say that students don't learn less than they once did; they learn differently.

I didn't grow up with the internet. I didn't have a network connection until I was in college. My brain is being slowly rewired by the internet; however, many of my students have had internet access in their homes as long as they can remember, so their brains were wired (not rewired) by the internet. A question for me, then, is how must I change or adapt my teaching strategies to address my courses to newer generations of students. If newer generations of students learn differently, must I also teach differently?

Questions About the Teaching of Writing

After thinking further about my last post, on technology and the teaching of writing, I immediately began to wonder what it's relevance would be to a non-composition instructor, which led to a flood of questions that I'd like to throw out to anyone reading this blog.

To what extent is it the responsibility of every teacher (no matter what subject) to teach writing? Is writing a discipline in and of itself, or is it a tool we use to work and learn in various disciplines?

My approach is to teach writing as a tool we use for critical inquiry; so, in my class, grammar and rhetoric are never abstracted from content. In order for students to have realistic encounters with writing, I have them working with specific subjects, using their writing to engage with and reflect on those subjects. A composition class focused only on grammar and rhetoric seems almost as strange to me as a class focused on pens, pencils, and looseleaf paper. Still, I think writing-intensive courses are important, because they offer a place for students to reflect (in a second order way) on the writing process (and on the grammar and rhetoric good writing employs).

More questions: Should every course be writing-intensive? Is writing essential to learning? It seems like these questions are particularly relevant with regard to online courses, where writing is the primary mode of interaction. How do we (or should we) work with (and encourage) student writing in non-composition courses?

On Technology and the Teaching of Writing

From all the jails the Boys and Girls

Ecstatically leap—

Beloved only Afternoon

That Prison doesn’t keep

They storm the Earth and stun the Air,

A Mob of solid Bliss—

Alas—that Frowns should lie in wait

For such a Foe as this—

—Emily Dickinson

Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in our word-processing programs (so much that they’re quickly becoming a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed and even handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and IMs. For example, if Emily Dickinson were writing today, the poem I've quoted above would likely be stripped of punctuation altogether and reduced to something like, “frm jail bfs and gfs leap and luv l8r to prty :-( w8 ttyl E,” or some such seeming nonsense.

For many teachers and writing pedagogues, this is a travesty, a torturous fact of modern life that we all must contend with and defend against in our classrooms. However, I would argue that we are at a moment in the history of the English language where the capacity for something wondrous is upon us. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been other wondrous moments in the evolution of human language, but there has not (and may not ever be again) a moment just like this one, a moment where the very fabric of how we speak and how we express ourselves through language has become so tenuous that every new textual utterance threatens to either devolve into gibberish or reinvent the very way we speak and write.

The evolution of written language is speeding up at an exponential rate, and this necessitates that we, as teachers (and particularly teachers of writing), reconsider the way we work with language in our classrooms. We can no longer be the staid old-school grammarians that taught so many of us how to write, nor can we simply dismiss or overlook the teaching of grammar entirely. Rather, we must think consciously (and practically) about how our student’s conceptions of (and contexts for) writing are changing, and we must approach the teaching of grammar in new and innovative ways.

On E-mail and the Cascade Effect

A friend/colleague of mine recently tweeted: "what a drag responding 2 e-mails only breeds yet more e-mails - I remember the days when it was thrilling 2 send/receive these cursed messages". I think it's particularly interesting that she uses the word "breeds" here, which suggests that an e-mail can at least figuratively copulate and reproduce--that e-mail has a life of its own.

I think there is definitely something to this. When my iPhone is in my pocket, an incoming message actually tickles my leg, as though a critter is climbing into my phone. We think of e-mailing as a disembodied mode of communication, but it is becoming increasingly embodied. The touchscreen on my iPhone also allows me to use my fingers to interact with my e-mail, flicking it back and forth across the screen in a flurry of text.

Another thing I've noticed is that the number of e-mail accounts we maintain is increasing rapidly. I used to have a single e-mail account, but now I am juggling inboxes on Facebook, other social networking sites, my educational e-mail account, my Yahoo account, my Mobile Me account, and the messages within my online courses. Not only are individual e-mails reproducing, but so are e-mail accounts. I'm surprised that I rarely struggle to manage all of these accounts.

I love e-mail. It is, by far, my preferred method of communicating at a distance. But I recognize that I'm reaching a limit, where my brain is no longer capable of keeping track of all the virtual threads that connect me to my friends, family, students, and fellow teachers.

What does all of this mean for teaching online: E-mail is our voice in an online classroom. It's the primary way that we have one-on-one interactions with students. When we go silent on e-mail, it would be like staring in prolonged silence at a student sitting in front of us during office hours. For me, I think of responding promptly to e-mails as my first priority in my online classes, followed closely by participating in discussions, then maintaining the course (so that students can navigate it efficiently), and then grading.

I'm curious. How does my ordered list of priorities line up with how other people approach online teaching?

On Technological Panic

My first entry for this blog is coming a little late due to technical difficulties, so I thought it was a good time to think further about the role technical difficulties play in online pedagogy. I've always been of the mind that the computer and the LMS for an online class are merely its medium. Still, so many online instructors and students spend the majority of their time grappling (and coming to terms) not with the content but with the delivery device of online classes. We struggle to log in, to format our work correctly, to find the information we're looking for in an endless parade of contextual menus, and to bring some semblance of ourselves into the interactions we have in online forums and chat tools.

When we gather to discuss our experiences as teachers and students in online classes, we often end up talking more about technology than about the subjects we're studying/teaching. It would be like sitting down to write an essay with pen and paper and becoming distracted by ruminations about the nature of No. 2 pencils and recycled college-ruled loose-leaf paper. (I have always had a particular fondness for No. 2 pencils, even though I rarely find the occasion to use them anymore.) Likewise, discussions of online pedagogy usually become entirely preoccupied with best practices for using technology in teaching and not with best practices for teaching more generally. Thus, we so often allow the bells and whistles of new-fangled technological tools dictate our pedagogy, rather than finding ways to use those tools to implement our own pedagogical choices.

When technology fails us, as it so often does, our impulse is to become even more preoccupied with it. I often encounter students and fellow teachers in a state of utter panic about the failures of technology in their online classes. For example, I very frequently get e-mails from my students about their inability to upload an assignment to the course. It goes something like, "I've tried and tried to upload my assignment before the deadline, but I can't because of . . . and . . . and then . . .," which includes a sometimes endless narrative about their experience of technological failure. The e-mail ends with a plea: "What should I do? Is there any way that you will still accept my work?" Exclamation marks are quite common in these e-mails, which is just one of the many indicators of the student's ensuing panic.

I respond to these e-mails quickly and calmly with something like, "Of course, I'm happy to accept your work for full credit. Feel free to e-mail it to me when you can. My hope is that technology will not become a barrier for learning in this course. When it does, just assume that I will be understanding." My goal is to have students focusing on the quality of their work and the integrity of their learning experience. When technology fails, there is always a fallback. Certainly, a secondary goal of online coursework is to help students become more proficient at working online; however, the primary goal is for students to engage with the subject-matter of the course. In my mind, the secondary goal should never trump the primary goal. If a student is unable to upload work to the course and unable to submit it by e-mail, I could (though have never had to) ask them to mail their work to me via postal mail. The point is that I want them to spend more time thinking about their work and less time thinking about its delivery device, which is ultimately arbitrary.

So, while it took longer than I expected to upload this first blog entry, it did eventually get here, and it is no better or worse for having floated around briefly in internet limbo. And, even more importantly, I haven't yet felt a moment of technological panic about my not-yet-but-soon-to-be-working-brilliantly blog.