Direct Teacher/Student interactions in the digital classroom

Between Clark and Warnock’s advocacy for the digital classroom and my own experiences, counting iLearn, Elluminate, etc., I must say that I’m totally convinced of the utilitarian benefits and think we should all switch immediately. There’s just one problem: that last clause was sarcastic. Here, let’s try it again: “I must say that I’m TOTALLY convinced of the utilitarian benefits, and think we should ALL switch IMMEDIATELY.” Catch the sarcasm that time? It’s ok if you didn’t; you’re not alone.

Embodied in that sarcasm is my overall issue with the digital classroom; while it offers many obvious benefits in both education and cost, it also has significant problems in terms of direct human interaction. First and foremost is the communication problem inherent in text-only conversation. Many studies have purported to tell how much of our communication occurs through non-verbal channels. One which said that only 7% of the message is carried by words is exaggerated by most who reference it, but even follow-up studies with more robust methodologies still state that nonverbal cues are somewhere between 20% and 80% of the message when we talk to each other.

While that’s a pretty big range, it is still helpful in that it’s very clearly not zero. The above sarcasm demonstration is just one small example in a very big problem. Even the perennially sarcastic RFC guidelines warn that sarcasm in text form “doesn’t travel well.” It’s taken us nearly 50 years of AI research to teach a computer to understand sarcasm sometimes, and if we can’t even expect a computer to always understand the intent of a message in text, how can we expect students to do better?

This simple problem has knock-on effects: studies have shown that if the primary mode of communication is text-only, authority figures appear more intimidating. For teachers and students alike, dealing with another human through text alone dehumanizes them. With students already in a position where they must appeal to an authority figure – say they’re behind on homework, or not understanding a key concept – might this additional hurdle of having to do so through a digital-only medium with all the potential for misunderstanding that brings be the straw the breaks the student’s back?

One final example: a longitudinal study once showed that after you normalize everything else about students, including their socioeconomic class, race, family history, literacy, grades in high school, and so on, after correcting for all those factors, the biggest single difference between college freshmen who graduated and college freshmen who dropped out was a single interaction with a teacher, usually outside of class. It could be office hours, or a brief chat before or after class, or even a chance meeting on campus between classes. If we remove the teacher and the student from sharing a campus – or even sharing a zip code – how will they have these interactions that save college careers? And if they don’t have them, is the digital classroom with all the benefits and savings worth all the students who might have had a degree if we hadn’t economized?

Technology and Moral Panic

Technology is making us dumb. Or at least that’s the premise of a recent NYT story about “Your Brain on Computers.”  Apparently, all of this exposure to computers and gadgets is “rewiring” our brains, making us less able to focus and engage in discreet tasks. According to the article, there’s all sorts of research to back this up.

There are two things worth keeping in mind, though. First, in his op-ed, “Mind Over Mass Media,” Steven Pinker does a nice job picking apart this idea that the brain can be “re-wired.” I’m not a neurologist, but it sound like it comes down to this: yes, the brain is dynamic, but there are limits to its plasticity. Instead of saying that Twitter, for instance, is “re-wiring” the brain to react to short bursts of information (as opposed to sustained engagement), it might be more proper to say that such emerging media technologies simply connect with other ways in which the brain has always operated. That is, maybe the brain is both a fast-twitch and slow-burn muscle, but there’s just more fast-twitch stuff for it to do these days. (For those of you who were in 708 last spring, this reminds me of Mark Kelly’s presentation on attention.)

The second point Pinker also alludes to, which is the moral panic underlying all this. The NYT story anecdotally blames technology for all sorts of ills — a potential lost contract, declining school grades, general disconnectedness. Nowhere is it acknowledged that these might have other causes, nor is there any questioning of the values lurking behind them.

I guess I’m just losing patience with deterministic arguments about technology, of both the “gadgets ate my brain” and “computers will save mankind” varieties. Yes, we’re changing, and technology is part of that. But we should be careful making claims about what causes what, and more clearheaded about what is being lost and gained in the process.

The impulse of teachers shouldn’t be to try to put the genie back in the bottle, but instead to prepare our students for the kind of world we’re creating.

Better Spaces, Better Thinkers

I don’t know how I missed this the last few weeks (or maybe I did notice but did not pay much attention to it), but I think it’s funny that after each blog post here, there is a list of “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated).” Who generates these posts? How do they determine what are related to the blog posts? Much like MS Word’s grammar check, these automatic posts seem arbitrary and make one wonder how much of what we do here on these digital media platforms are structured and determined by these “unseen” forces. McGee and Ericsson’s article starts out with a quote from Mark Weiser that warns us of the “most profound technologies” that “disappear… and weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” This is the age that we now live in, where the ubiquity of digital technologies directly impacts how we communicate and perform literacy practices in ways that we don’t necessarily think twice about.

The connections that I was able to gather from the readings this week and which struck me as salient are