I’m sure you’re wondering what it’s like teaching in Korea. It’s great! Thanks for asking.
I’ve structured my first Western Civilization course ever entirely around Milestone Documents. I have a big list of documents over on their course page and we go through each document in class in order. I say a few words at the beginning. I help them with the really tough English words. Then we talk about each document.
Everyone seems to like it because most Korean professors, they tell me, talk at their students rather than with them. Come to think of it, most American professors tend to do the same thing. Here’s a special post at Mother Jones from a professor who knows Kevin Drum:
Ivy League students sometimes complain that most of the discussion-leading and careful paper-grading — they call it “real teaching” and they’re right to do so — is done by grad student teaching assistants, since seminars with professors are scarce. But at the University of California these days — and I’m told it’s been like this at Michigan for decades — graduate and undergraduate funding cuts mean that most upper-level courses have no discussion sections and no teaching assistants. In other words, the real teaching doesn’t take place at all. Papers, if they’re assigned at all — and increasingly they’re not — are graded by “readers” paid so poorly that they can only spend a few minutes on each paper, are not available for writing assistance, and can’t even be required, given their meager pay for long hours, to attend the lectures in the classes they’re grading for. There’s no way readers can grade papers carefully in such circumstances: they put check marks in the margin when something of substance is mentioned, and pass pretty much everyone through. As for professor-led seminars, never that plentiful, they’ve all but vanished: they simply cost too much.
This is not a good thing for anyone involved. When one of my Korean students asked me whether most American professors teach the same way I do, I said I doubt it. However, I also said I couldn’t imagine teaching any other way.
I don’t want to stand in front of 400 people who have to listen to me talk. Likewise I don’t want to be a mere tender of machines. A discussion or even a lecture during which a discussion might still break out guarantees that nothing about my job will ever be boring or routine except paperwork and meetings.
Mark Bauerlein argues that adjuncts put up with poor pay and all the other crap that goes with their status at the bottom of the academic hierarchy because they expect to move up the ladder someday. I don’t presume to be an expert on the adjunct mindset, but I’d guess most people in that position do it more out of love than any dream of future improvement in status.* Real teaching at any level really is interesting and rewarding (at least in the emotional sense). All of us accept varying degrees of crap thrown our direction because we like what we do and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Real teaching creates bonds that can last a lifetime (whether we recognize it or not).
Well, I’ve got news for everybody. Our glorious online future is going to break the chain between us and our students that makes modern academic life bearable for all of us.
So what are we going to do about that?
* Of course, the fact that you love what you do is no excuse for your employer to exploit you, but that’s a subject for a different post.
I’m delighted that while I’m not back to doing this blog thing quite yet, the ever-popular Britney Titus has sent another excellent post. Like any pushy editor, the title of the post is mine (as she is far too young to come up with the Jimi Hendrix reference).
For my student teaching, I was placed at a junior high where they assisted with online classes. During that process, I learned, once again, what it means to be a student.
One of the first things that caught my attention was the number of students who were in fact taking a portion or all of their classes online. As many of schools are now focused on standardized multiple-choice testing as formative assessments, I became even more surprised when I learned that nine times out of ten, the online students outperformed students that were in the classroom. However, before all of the online education charlatans out there rejoice, the face-to-face students completely outshined them when they were in the classroom itself. I think that’s because the missing piece of the puzzle for online students is socialization.
I began to think what exactly these online classes are preparing them for and I unfortunately could not think of anything. They will not need intense fill-in-the-bubble skills once they graduate. Furthermore, how will they survive a seminar-style classroom if they are not receiving the necessary socialization skills? They can know all of the content in the world and be able to take a multiple-choice test every single day, but if they do not understand how to use that information to reach a higher level of critical understanding then these students will not survive in a higher education environment. I may be coming off as an intense critic, but I just fail to see how an online environment transforms a child into a complete and well-rounded student.
Something else that the online students are missing inside the classroom is the idea of teaching life lessons through history. One of the lessons that I taught involved reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to understand the conditions of slavery. Interestingly enough, many of my students came back with their response papers that specifically said, “If I have to read this again I will not come back to class.” After my fit of frustration, I looked at this as a teaching opportunity and simply asked the class the next day how they were ever going to understand the good if they fail to understand the bad? How could they ever fathom what the Emancipation Proclamation or Civil War meant for this country if they did not understand the ruthlessness and barbarity of slavery?
Even more so, there are things in life that they have to learn about or go through in order to remain humble and respectful. I explained to the class that if they do not go through bad things, then they would never be able to appreciate the good. We had about an hour-long discussion about this topic and related it to the rise of abolitionists and the reform movement prior to the Civil War. After the class finished, I just found myself thinking how do online students ever get this kind of instruction? Sure, you may be able to Skype or instant message, but does that really provide the type of atmosphere where students feed off one another and debate topics back and forth?
I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be placed in a school with two Social Studies teachers retiring at the end of the school year. I interviewed and after about two weeks I got a phone call saying I did not get the job. Surprisingly, I was not bitter, but more critical of the bigger ideas in play. I have a crisp resume full of honors and community service, an impressive transcript especially in the Social Studies fields, and I had multiple student work examples that showed my various skills as a teacher, such as having the eighth-grade students reading and understanding college-level texts as well as writing complete six-paragraph essays in a forty minute timed period. I always said I am not perfect, but I thought I embodied a well-rounded teacher who would in fact teach the students to think at a higher level.
So why didn’t I get the job? I came to find out that at least one of the teachers who secured the job had more years of experience than I did as she had been an elementary school teacher in the years before. This makes me question what is more valuable: rigorous forms of education and study or an extended amount of experience? In my case, the latter came to be true, which brings me to my overall point. Why are we drilling over and over again the necessity of going to college if experience is going to be more valuable at the end of the day? I once got into an argument with some of the fellow teachers in the graduate program about students feeling entitled in this day and age to a job when they get out of school. They believed that nobody should feel entitled and should have to work at it like everyone else. Yet, I fail to see what motivation exists for working hard if it is not going to pay off in the end?
The hardest thing about student teaching was the student who just did not care. If he/she got an F, they got an F and it did not matter. I was so frustrated with these types of students, but can I blame them? If they just get pushed into high school even if they fail, why try? I feel like this is a problem that certainly needs to be addressed in the educational system given that thousands of students procure debt every year (including myself) to go to universities or graduate schools and that it starts so early now. I do not think students should be pushed to go to college or graduate school if it is not going to do what it is supposed and set them up for a career.
I am 22, graduated with two undergraduate degrees in history and Spanish (in three years) and am halfway through a Master’s Program, yet I fail to secure a job at a junior high school? What does this say about the value of education and the future of students altogether? I think I finally figured out why my master’s thesis is taking so long to even get off the ground and it is because a small part of me is very scared that in the long run all my work and dedication is not going to matter any more than it does now. That, for a dedicated master’s student who wants nothing more than to write well, is one scary thought.
I probably am being a little skeptical as this is my first job hunt experience, but I also see this happening to my friends outside of the educational field. One of my best friends just graduated from nursing school, yet received the same response when interviewing for a job: you need more experience. The fact that this is happening to graduates from multiple fields of study is what worries me the most and makes me think this is bigger than just myself in the educational field – that this is happening to students in fields of all kinds.
Thus, even though this post probably comes off as a critical temper tantrum, life experiences are not biased. Unfortunately, mine forecast a grim and dark future for education as a whole.
When I was in Santa Barbara at that op-ed workshop last month, my contribution about adjunct faculty began by comparing them to workers at Apple’s Foxconn plant in China. Both groups produce a beloved product. Both are treated badly. Understand these conditions, and moral observers should be outraged. Yes, I know that adjuncting isn’t really life-threatening (at least in the short-term) like at Foxconn, but I still thought this analogy was a pretty good hook for the essay.
Harold Meyerson disagreed. Well, disagreed might be a little strong, but he thought this comparison was too provocative for a newspaper essay in which I wanted to bring people over to my side. Even though the rest of the room split about 50-50, I changed the analogy anyway. That does not, however, mean that I won’t make it again in the (mostly) friendly confines of this blog.
This is from a columnist in the new issue of Fortune magazine*:
The infotech revolution is great for high-wage workers because it turbocharges them; an executive with three screens on her desk and an iPhone in her pocket is enormously more productive. Infotech doesn’t much hurt low-wage workers, many of whom do place-based work (cooking in restaurants, pouring concrete) that can’t be done elsewhere. But infotech makes middle class jobs disappear; software takes over routine back-office tasks, and infotech coordinates supply chains, so manufacturing jobs can be done by lower-paid workers abroad.
Could my job be done by a low-wage worker abroad? I’m an American historian, so I doubt that the pool of people like me in China or India is all that big. Perhaps if I were a math professor I’d be slightly more worried. [Of course, I'd also be paid better.]
Irrespective of discipline, however, I would argue that good teaching is place-based by definition. Teach over the Internet from across the country or across the world and you lose something. At the very least, you lose the distinctly personal relationship that good teachers have with their students. I communicate electronically with people I wouldn’t know otherwise if not for Twitter or this blog, but as much I like so many of you out there we don’t really know one another. The teacher/student relationship, on the other hand, should be a much more personal relationship. How else are you going to understand precisely what expectations you have for one another?
As Sherry Turkle repeatedly suggests, the Internet is so seductive because it allows you to separate yourself from real people who carry the baggage of real world problems. If you don’t like how things are going with your Internet-based relationship, you can always turn off the computer or just de-friend the offender. Your relationship with your favorite teachers, on the other hand, should be one of the more important ones you’ll ever have because it helps determine how you think about the world. Forging that relationship while learning online is like trying to make friends during a rock concert. It’s not impossible, but is much harder to do than in normal circumstances with all that loud noise in the background.
Factories are also full of background noise. One of the first rules of any good factory is that the workers shouldn’t talk to one another on the job as it saps productivity. Perhaps that also applies to workers talking to the product, for as Mario Savio once said, the students are the raw materials in the factory that is modern higher education and the faculty are a bunch of employees. While the labor force to which I belong might be treated marginally better than the workers at Foxconn in China, we’re all in the same dire need of help from our consumers if conditions at our respective factories are ever going to get better.
* No link, because it’s not up yet. And yes, I do actually subscribe. I got it with unused frequent flier miles. Even if I don’t agree with most of what’s in there, the magazine is still serious and informative (just like CNBC used to be until the Jim Kramer mentality took over the whole channel).
In 1910, the famously liberal Boston Lawyer (and future Supreme Court justice) Louis Brandeis lobbied before the Interstate Commerce Commission against a railroad rate hike under a surprising rationale. Brandeis had just discovered Frederick Taylor’s system of scientific management. He was convinced that if American railroads instituted Taylor’s system, they could save a million dollars a day. That would be enough to keep rates low, profits up and railroad workers well-paid.
Like so many well-meaning liberals of that (or any other) age, Brandeis hadn’t thought this idea all the way through to the end. Most companies who instituted the Taylor system in the subsequent decade kept the profits generated by more efficient production entirely to themselves. Worse yet, once they discovered upon instituting Taylor’s piece rate reforms that their workers could work harder, they lowered wages too. This forced workers to to work harder still in order to keep their total paychecks at about the same level. While highly influential, especially in Japan, Taylor’s system proved so unpopular with workers that it created more industrial relations problems than it ever solved.
I thought of Brandeis when I read this piece about automated grading by John A. Casey, Jr.:
Mark Shermis, Dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, is supervising a contest created by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that would award $100,000 to the programmer who creates an effective automated grading software.
Shermis argues that if teachers weren’t swamped by so many student papers in need of grading, they would assign more writing and student’s would greatly improve their written communication skills. He sees this new technology as an aide to the overworked writing teacher rather than a potential replacement.
Once you demonstrate that you can handle 50 essays per week with this new automated tool, they’re not going let you start assigning two essays per week. They’re going to double the size of the class to 100. Why? Because they can, that’s why.
You don’t do this sort of thing because it offers a better critique of written work than a living, breathing person does. You do it because it’s cheaper. Much cheaper. More importantly, the labor cost savings can go to football, climbing walls in the gym or just higher administrative salaries. And Pearson doesn’t make out too badly either.
The goal of automation is not to provide a better education. It’s to save taxpayers and students money.
And if you somehow think that this isn’t headed for higher ed soon, you’re fooling yourself. The Obama Administration’s higher education policy (or as I like to call it when discussing all education matters, Bush III) is to make college as cheap as possible so that more people can attend, regardless of whether there are any jobs waiting for them once they graduate. They’ll never differentiate between an essay graded by a computer program and one graded by a human being in terms of quality because they only care about potential cost savings. Even if this grade-o-matic allows professors to assign more writing, doing so will be impossible in the new age of permanent austerity because that would slow down production.
More importantly, administrators and politicians of all stripes would be delighted to throw any number of professors under the bus if that’s what it takes to keep college costs down. Even adjuncts are more expensive than machines. Who cares if the faculty that remain have to stuff a few chocolates under their hats along the way as long as the production line keeps going?
While this piece from the NYT‘s business section is designed for any worker, it should have special relevance for academics:
These are the kinds of comments I hear in my work as a consultant:
• “I’m overwhelmed, and with all the changes going on here, it’s getting worse. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do my job.”
• “I have new responsibilities that demand creative and strategic thought, but I’m not getting to them.”
• “I have too many meetings to attend, and I can’t get any ‘real’ work done.”
• “I have too many e-mails, and, given day-to-day urgencies, the backlog keeps growing.”
• “I feel like I’m not giving the right amount of attention to what’s most important.”
And here’s a common kicker, for those willing to admit it:
“I just can’t keep going like this.”
To quote the Talking Heads again, “How did I get here?” The answer is technology:
Though one person may now be producing the previous results of three, she’s not being paid three times as much. That’s the whole point of companies using technology and other improvements: fewer people are now needed for the same results.
But the workers who remain also tend to have much more responsibility. And they can’t just comfort themselves with the notion that their companies are more efficient than they used to be, because all of their competitors have the same new tools, and are using them to gain any advantage they can.
While those of us on the tenure-track have not yet been replaced by machines, technology allows our managers to develop new and annoying ways to track our productivity (whatever that means in an educational context). What we have been replaced by are adjunct faculty members who experience all of the problems of our coming all-online higher ed utopia and get none of the rewards. If we had more tenure-track faculty colleagues, there would be more people to share in the bureaucratic scut work that everybody hates. Instead, they get more classes and we tenure-track faculty get more technologically-inspired paper to push.
Yet their problem is our problem for more than just that reason. As this piece about the recent Left Forum conference explains:
“Adjuncts are the people under the stairs” who have lost control over their career possibilities and their lives, said Ms. [Debra Lee] Scott. “We have been deprofessionalized. And by de-professionalizing us, the administration has gained control and silenced the faculty. Now our influence is more managed, and they can keep us impoverished.”
Notice the transition there. They’ve deprofessionalized adjuncts, but have silenced the whole faculty. I don’t think that’s a mistake. While people like me may not be deprofessionalized (at least not yet), the fact that this has already happened to our adjunct colleagues keeps most people like me silent in the hopes that they won’t ever get around to deprofessionalizing us. I wouldn’t count on that strategy working in the long run. What we should be doing is demanding the redirection of productivity gains towards better compensation for faculty of all kinds.
Solving tenure-track problems without solving the problems of adjuncts (assuming such a thing is even possible) won’t make you any happier since you’re still going to get too much scut work because you don’t have enough colleagues who are payed to help you with it. More importantly, your chosen field will never get the respect it deserves as long as there are people who are being paid poverty wages just so that they can break into a profession that is hardly lucrative anyway. Heck, even business professors complain that they don’t get wages equal to what they could earn in the private sector.
I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.
If calls to solidarity have no effect on you, then just think about your own longterm material self-interest. You’ll never earn the salary that you deserve as long as people are doing the same work that you are for substantially less money.
You think it’s hard to find an academic job now? Just wait until machines start grading student essays and students start grading each other. Combine these developments with our glorious all-online higher ed future and they won’t need you anymore at all.
I can hear you now: “Surely you jest, Jonathan. You’ve been reading stuff in the Onion and forgetting it’s satire, right?” Alas, not this time. Here’s part of the executive summary of a Pearson white paper (.pdf) on their automatic essay grading technology:
In the 1990s, the people of Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies group (KT) invented many of the key techniques that enable automatic scoring of constructed language in assessment tasks. In the succeeding 15 years, Pearson has assembled these researchers into an advanced development group with an intellectual property base that is unparalleled in the assessment field. Now, working as a unique stand-alone group inside Pearson, KT has automatically scored many millions of written and spoken responses. KT has measured core language and literacy skills as evidenced in students’ constructed responses. Similar tasks also elicit responses that are assessed for content knowledge. In 2010 KT scored over 20 million spoken and written responses from all over the globe.
You don’t do this sort of thing because it offers a better critique of written work than a living, breathing person does. You do it because it’s cheaper. Much cheaper. More importantly, the labor cost savings can go to football, climbing walls in the gym or just higher administrative salaries. And Pearson doesn’t make out too badly either.
If all of this reminds you of late-nineteenth century industrialization, then you’re not alone. Unfortunately, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of technology in education seem to think that the economic displacement of the industrial era is worth duplicating. This guest post from ProfHacker recounts a recent highered navel-gazing conference at Rice:
Cathy Davidson and John Seely Brown (JSB) articulated learning frameworks for the fluid, dynamic Digital Age rather than the Industrial Age. Davidson explained that many of the practices we associate with education, including multiple choice tests and attention to task, were designed to serve the needs of the Industrial Age for standardization and a regulated labor force. In contrast, the Digital Age calls for mash-ups, customization, multi-tasking, data mining, and collaboration by difference. Davidson suggested that we should ensure that kids know how to code (and thus understand how technical systems work), enable students to take control of their own learning (such as by helping to design the syllabus and to lead the class), and devise more nuanced, flexible, peer-driven assessments.
[Emphasis added]
So let me get this straight: We should turnover the reins in our own classes to machines and social algorithms because the workplace is full of machines and social algorithms? Vocational education for everyone! Better yet, let students create their own vocational education!!! Maybe they can design their own jobs too. I just hope they don’t want to become professors.
As I explained the last time I mentioned Cathy Davidson, I find her total obliviousness to the collateral damage these kinds of changes will cause extremely disturbing. However, I find the fact that so many faculty members are willing to actively participate in the destruction of their own profession even more disturbing.
If I remember my old labor history right, in his A Theory of the Labor Movement the economist Selig Perlman described American workers as job conscious as opposed to class conscious. That means that they were more concerned with putting bread and butter on the table than they were with banding together to overthrow the capitalist system. To Perlman, that was a good thing. If only academics thought that way! Too many professors writing about the future of higher ed don’t seem to care about their own long-term material well-being, which makes me think again about how much we faculty could all learn from the folks who work at Walmart.
I guarantee you that most administrators would never make this same mistake. Their own long-term material well-being is probably why they became administrators in the first place.
Before I forget, I want to blog about what I was doing last weekend. I went to an op-ed writing workshop at the University of California – Santa Barbara organized by the historian Nelson Lichtenstein and sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Our teacher was Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect and the Washington Post.
The format was that everybody writes a 750 word op-ed, then Meyerson and the whole group suggest ways to improve it. Let’s just say that while everyone was treated with respect, it was still a justifiably humbling experience for many of us sitting around the table.
I think the most common mistake was doing what they call in the journalism “burying the lede,” dropping the argument down to the third or fourth paragraph. When I realized that I had done this too, I explained to the group how ironic this was. I spend hours telling students to put their argument in the first sentence of the first paragraph of everything. They protest that their English professors tell them to begin with a hook and bury the argument. I (and I presume many others there) simply figured that since this wasn’t an academic paper, the English professors were right this time.
When I asked Meyerson how to resolve this hook/thesis dilemma, he responded, “Ideally, the hook and the thesis will be the exact same thing.”
There’s your teaching moment for the week.
The other folks around the table with me beisdes labor historians were Walmart workers from an organization called Our Walmart. While sponsored in part by the UFCW, what these folks are really doing is organizing and making demands of their notoriously authoritarian employer outside the confines of a union. [Of course, they had a hand in the video above too because public relations is an important way to make those demands heard.]
In terms of writing about labor issues, the Walmart workers had all us professors beat on the authenticity issue hands down. But more importantly, I think they can actually teach us academics something about how to gain respect in any workplace. While I kept babbling on to them about how brave they were, what I heard back is that they don’t feel scared when they speak up about Walmart because they know that literally thousands of other Walmart workers are standing behind them.
In other words, you don’t need a union to change life on the job. You just need to organize.
Why haven’t most of us in academia figured that out already?
* I know you were expecting Aretha. If you feel cheated, click here.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the Clayton Christensen interview I linked to last Monday, was the explicit comparison between techno-skeptical teachers and Luddites. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read anything edtech-related that was quite this smug:
In the early 19th century, British textile artisans protested the Industrial Revolution with the anti-technology “Luddite movement.” They believed mechanized looms would replace them and make their jobs obsolete. They were right.
Automation in the 19th century was the disruptive equivalent of high-speed digital technology today, which is replacing jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors at astonishing speeds. Self-checkout counters at the grocery store, complete with laser scanners to read bar codes, are starting to replace human cashiers. On the road, the advent of EZPass and other computerized toll machines are replacing human tollbooth collectors. The rise of online education could effectively render terrible teachers redundant, while bolstering the careers of talented educators. There’s a word for this; it’s progress.
But what if it isn’t?
What if education suffers when the technology of pedagogy changes? We can all agree that that’s within the realm of possibility, right? This issue seems especially relevant for online education in its current underdeveloped, often poorly-administered form. Why can’t we wait for online education 2.0 rather than embrace the current extremely rudimentary product that most colleges offer? Besides, who says teachers who don’t embrace every disruptive technology that comes down the pike are necessarily Luddites? Why not accept the ones we like and reject the ones we don’t? After all, it seems as if for every wonderful innovation like Zotero, there’s a Courseload out there too.
Writing at Tenured Radical, Judith C. Brown offers what I think is a pretty good rule for telling the difference between a good edtech innovation and a bad one:
The key to the success of incorporating digital approaches is to know when and how to use them for pedagogical purposes rather than simply to lower costs.
Teachers and professors are undoubtedly in the best position to tell one from the other. Unfortunately, since online education in America is primarily about lowering costs, they don’t exactly get consulted very often. It’s gotten so bad that even Anya Kamenetz, who I have had absolutelynothingnice to say about previously, can write:
Personally, I’d like to see more university presidents making faculty their partners, not adversaries, in the transformation process.
Does that make her a Luddite too? If some administrators actually listened to this advice, educational technology disruption might be a little less…ummmmm…disruptive. Unfortunately this whole line of argument is really just titling at windmills, because the educational disrupters aren’t interested in education. They’re interested in money.
The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.
That’s why campus police have pepper spray. The only disruptions allowed on campus are in the classroom, as long as the faculty and the students aren’t the ones doing the disrupting.
On Friday, at the longstanding suggestion of my friends at Milestone Documents, I started playing with Diigo to highlight webpages, namely theirs. From what I can tell so far, the system is simple. Bookmark webpage with Diigo. Highlight web page (in different colors even). Click on Diigo button on your browser for the highlights to show up. There seems to be more that I can do with this, but I know I’ll be using this during discussion sections of Milestone Documents. Call up the highlights and students can read passages which my questions are based upon. I can even leave my questions there through online sticky notes.
If there’s a downside to using this tool, it’s that I’ll have to bring my laptop into the classroom and plug it into the projector because I can’t leave my buttons on the browser of a public computer. However, this doesn’t faze me too much though because I’ve been doing it a lot lately anyways. Indeed, I’ve been bringing the lovely MacBook Pro that I’m typing this on to work pretty much every day already.
I first got the little plug you need to link an Apple laptop to a projector so that I could use my own computer for book talks. Besides classroom stuff, like when I’m describing Zotero (which is required in my research classes), I do most of my general office work and all my writing on my laptop too. On non-laptop classroom days, I bring a 64GB flash drive to class as that’s enough to hold my PowerPoints and movie clips. The wonders of Diigo, however, remind me of how envious I am of those people who have all their teaching materials stored on their iPads and they can bypass their university computer systems entirely every day with no trouble.
The desirability of doing this should be obvious to those of you out there familiar with tech services at my university. The systems we have are very (I mean VERY) slow, old and unreliable. But that’s not the only good reason to bypass university-provided tech. Even those of you with better tech services than ours should consider greater technological independence because most bureaucratic institutions don’t make very good decisions. Unfortunately, they have other goals besides education.
For example, yesterday’s NYT had a very good article about this with respect to math tutoring software for secondary schools. The existence of Blackboard should demonstrate the same phenomenon for higher ed all by itself. Why should I have to use their course management software? You’d think the way in which students interact with the instructor would be the most important choice any teacher could make. Why can’t I make that decision myself?
Most of us probably can make that decision…for now, but how long will that last? A long time ago, I quoted Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors on precisely this subject:
Using or not using the course management “shell” [course management software like Blackboard] is the professor’s choice to make, and, in the case of literature courses, for example, the professor alone decides what books will be required, which editions students will used, and what other readings will supplement the assignments. This balance of authority could quickly change though, if the course-management company also owned the publishing rights to those required books, as well as to academic research databases. Then faculty would have little choice but to use course management software, as it would be the only means of getting access to the books one wanted to teach.
I wasn’t really worried about this then, but I am now as technology is beginning to determine how education itself gets defined. For example, I read this seemingly banal-sounding prediction last night:
Now, also on the information level, we might ask what the motivation is to learn information in school when you have an all knowing device in your pocket? It even knows more than the teacher who might not have an answer to a specific question right away. In such a scenario, what will the relevance of a teacher be?
Again, the ultimate goal of educational futurists everywhere seems to be a machine that will go of itself so that nobody has to pay allegedly expensive professors to teach. Granted, that’s the long run. In the short run, the result of these closed systems will be to lower the skill level of the people needed to run them. This process may be gradual but the result will be the same: (to misquote Big Bill Haywood through David Montgomery) The workman’s brain under the manager’s cap.
It doesn’t strike me as particularly smart to make that process easier. If not for your own good, keep your craft knowledge under your direct control in order to protect the next generation of professors.
I picked this off the shelves of the Western Museum of Mining and Industry last night before I heard a talk by Philip Dray about his excellent history of American labor, There Is Power in a Union, newly out in paperback. I can’t wait to give it a closer look.
By the way, if you’re in Colorado, you can here me talk about another book I kind of like at the WMMI, which is just north of Colorado Springs, on November 3rd at 7PM.
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