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.