Warning: Ludditism ahead

Oh. My. God.

You may want to put your sarcasm detectors on alert.

Did anyone else see the latest piece on education technology in the Chronicle? My apologies to those of you who aren't subscribers, because this is a subscriber-only piece. But such is its particular brand of genius that I feel compelled to reproduce large chunks here, for your edification. Geeky Mom, I know you'll love this one.

The author, Patrick Allitt, begins with guns blazing:

American universities have spent billions of dollars on teaching technology in the last decade or two. Are undergraduates correspondingly better educated than ever before? To ask that question is to answer it -- in the negative. I find some teaching technologies helpful, but all too often they make teaching worse rather than better, distracting professors and students alike from actual education.

The opening suggests a kind of cause-and-effect between teaching technology and uneducated undergraduates, which, while pretty much under control in this paragraph, is going to run wild in subsequent portions of the article.

Allitt continues to talk about his experience visiting a colleague teaching in a "smart" classroom, with all the relevant technologies at his command, and students sat in front of PC screens.

Throughout the class the students took notes on the computers, creating a ceaseless keyboard clatter and making it difficult for anyone to hear the teacher's voice. Worse, as they faced their screens they looked away from the professor and away from one another. The class had no sense of communal purpose, and some students scarcely gave the professor a glance.

The PowerPoint remote control didn't work quite right at first -- tinkering with it caused a delay -- and students periodically whispered to one another about technical problems when they should have been learning the day's topic. One rogue was covertly checking his e-mail messages; another was browsing supermodel Web sites. As the class ended another student swore a horrible oath when he realized that, by pressing the wrong key, he had accidentally deleted everything he had written in the previous hour, and that it was gone beyond recall.

How much better the class would have been with no more than a blackboard and a few sheets of paper! Note taking would have been silent; students would have talked to the teacher and each other, would have concentrated on the substance rather than the technology, and would have had more time -- not less -- to devote to their work. Best of all, a warm atmosphere of collective endeavor would have displaced the anonymity and chill that the machines created.

Let me repeat that last line: a warm atmosphere of collective endeavor would have displaced the anonymity and chill that the machines created.

May I just say: WTF????

First, this is clearly an individual who finds machines off-putting. Just because he does, doesn't mean that everyone will react this way. (H pointed out that my experience online with all you bloggers has definitely been cold and anonymous, far distant from any warm atmosphere of collective endeavor.)

Second, the logical fallacies at work here are staggering. If you remove the computers, students will therefore work together, talk to each other and the professor, and concentrate on the substance of the course? So these things happen automatically, in the absence of machines in a room? They won't find any ways to distract themselves from the task at hand if you don't have computers present? Interestingly, my students don't seem have received this memo.

Now, I agree that for certain activities, sitting students in front of a computer screen is probably not the best way to go. But is that the fault of the technology itself? Given that computers don't send out tentacles to drag students to sit in front of them, it seems hard to blame the machines. Faculty don't always choose the right tool for a specific task, but that hardly seems to be the fault of the tool.

Allitt continues:

I talked with the professor afterward, and he acknowledged that technology could be a distraction as well as an aid. He added that, although his was a writing-intensive class, the students didn't like to write, and that they wrote badly. Every college teacher knows it. The current generation of students has devoted thousands of hours to mastering computers but hasn't learned how to maintain verb-tense consistency in a sentence, hasn't learned not to follow a singular subject with a plural verb, knows almost none of the more-advanced rules of grammar, and uses apostrophes with chaotic caprice.

Yet again, there's a real problem of logic here. The professor uses technology; his students don't like to write and write badly. Is there any causal link demonstrated between those two things? Or, another syllogism: students learn computers; therefore they can't write. Leaving aside the fact that students can in fact use computers to learn to write, this again suggests a causal link that's entirely undemonstrated. While I'm fairly impatient with the idea that students have gone to hell in a handbasket, their abilities have gone all to hell, and back in the day students were MUCH better writers/readers/thinkers/whatever, even if you buy this, it seems to me that the problems with student writing today are complex and derive from a wide range of factors, not simply the introduction of technology.

Allitt then devotes a paragraph to trashing physicians' use of PowerPoint - they just read what's on the slides, it's boring, yada yada yada. The usual anti-PowerPoint rigamarole.

But then - then he goes on to attack e-mail! E-mail, apparently, is bad because it discourages personal contact:

Besides classroom computers and PowerPoint, college teachers now confront the mixed blessing of out-of-classroom technology, especially e-mail. It has the effect of discouraging personal contact between students and teachers; my advisees send me e-mail messages rather than visiting me as they prepare for the next semester.

E-mail also fosters in students the belief that their professors are always on duty. Last year I turned on the computer about 8:30 one morning to discover that at 1 a.m. a student had e-mailed me a question. At 5 a.m. he had sent another e-mail message, indignant about my slowness to respond when he was in urgent need of an answer.

Again, I say to you: WTF????

To tackle the second paragraph first: yes, some students treat e-mail this way and expect faculty to be on-call 24-7. That's certainly true. However, it's easy enough to tell students in your syllabus that you are only online between the hours of (fill in whatever you prefer). Or to specify that you don't guarantee immediate turnaround; that you'll answer e-mails within 48 hours but not necessarily earlier. Or whatever. To say that because students don't always know how to use this technology appropriately, we should get rid of it, is patently absurd.

The question of "discouraging personal contact with students".... I also disagree with this, intensely. First, the majority of e-mails I receive are from students who want to set up a time to meet with me, face-to-face. Therefore, e-mail helps facilitate personal contact, not discourage it. Second, I am quite sure that there are students out there who are too shy or intimidated to come see me, one-on-one. E-mail gives them the chance to ask me individual questions without having to deal with me face-to-face if they don't want to. In the absence of e-mail, I don't think they'd come see me in my office; I don't think they'd ask their questions at all.

But third, and most important, Allitt completely disallows for the possibility that e-mail contact is personal contact. I'm not going to argue that it's the same as face-to-face; there are all those problems with getting across tone, nuance, etc., and reading people reactions in their faces. But it's still a kind of personal contact.

As a last coda to this section, it also seems to me that railing against e-mail is about as productive as tilting against windmills. I know that my college (and the last college I worked at) declared e-mail one of the official venues of college-student communication; students are responsible for knowing information that the college disseminates via e-mail. Whatever Patrick Allitt thinks of it, e-mail is certainly here to stay.

The most honest passage in Allitt's essay comes next:

I'm an old geezer. I was born and raised abroad (in Britain), and educated in a now all-but-forgotten world of chalk and fountain pens. Perhaps the faintest whiff of nostalgia taints my laments about teaching technology.

Hmmm. You think? But he continues:

I stand by them, however, because the most important issues in education have not changed: Students still need to learn how to read critically and write well. Most, even at a highly selective university like mine, read naïvely and write badly.

I won't necessarily argue with this. Nonetheless, the presence of teaching technology in conjunction with poor student reading and writing does not mean that teaching technology causes that poor reading and writing.

Computers are no help here, and they do more harm than good in other areas, too. The Internet tempts students to do their research without so much as standing up, whereas they used to have to go to the library, and it exposes them to a mass of sites with no quality control. Software encourages a lazy approach to editing by appearing (but failing) to do it for the student. Spell-check programs don't catch "there" when "their" was intended, and grammar-check programs can't point out that a paper lacks thematic coherence.

Again, Allitt is conflating the technology with its use. The internet may make it easy for students to "do their research without so much as standing up," but it doesn't send out technological tentacles keeping students in their chairs. Moreover, because students used to have to wander into the library doesn't mean they knew how to use the library effectively, either. In both cases, students have to be taught how to do research, how to find sources, and how to evaluate them. Faculty may fail sometimes to teach students how to use the technology appropriately, but that's been the case whether the technology is the internet or the library; in each case, the technology itself is not at fault. Students learning how to evaluate the quality of internet sites is little different from students learning how to evaluate the quality of a printed document.

As for the software encouraging lazy editing - yes, we've all run into the "there/their" spell-check conundrum. This is the least of my concerns about student writing. If students don't proofread their papers while writing on computers, I hardly think they're going to proofread papers generated by any other means. The American college system encourages students to write their papers at the last minute, late at night, printing them out five minutes before class starts. That encourages sloppy writing, and it has nothing to do with the use of computers.

Allitt even goes on to lay the blame for multiple-choice exams on technology - before we had the technology to read multiple-choice exams on the computer, he argues, we made students write, instead, and they were all the better for it! Now, someone who teaches in a field that uses multiple-choice exams regularly will have to tell me: what's the Scantron machine like? Is it actually a computer? I know that when I took my last driver's license test, it was multiple choice, and the woman graded it by putting a piece of paper with holes punched out where the correct answer should be over the test, and looking to see if I'd marked all the spaces I should have. This seems pretty low-tech to me. It seems to me the cause for the use of multiple-choice exams is increasing class sizes and increasing faculty teaching loads, so that faculty members don't have time to read student writing. I've given multiple-choice tests in a class of 70, and grading them by hand is still a lot faster than grading essays. I don't think technology has a whole lot to do with this particular issue.

But it's his last two paragraphs that really kick me in the gut. First:

What can we do? Professors, stop your engines. Take to class only your wits. Make yourself the center of attention. Let the students look at you, not at a screen, and let them discover the pleasure of learning as a communal activity. Let them watch and listen as you speak. Make them read aloud, regularly and expressively. Have them do not multiple-choice exams but full essays, based on research done in the library, among books. Have them hand in their work on sheets of paper. Grade it rigorously, and speak to them about it in person.

"Make yourself the center of attention"?? "Let the students look at you...Let them watch and listen as you speak"?? What about the students speaking? How is learning really a "communal" activity when the professor is the center of attention? I'm not trying to argue that lecturing is bad; good lectures are better than bad discussions. But what about active learning techniques? Creating engaged student learners? This paragraph suggests that what Allitt really dislikes about technology is its displacement of the professor from center stage - which is an entirely different matter than its failure to improve student learning.

FInally, he closes with the following:

Experiment with a no-Web, no-e-mail semester. You'll love it, and your dean will love you, as she realizes that some of the money previously allocated to buying unnecessary new devices can now be devoted to scholarships and salary increases instead.

WHAT?!?!? Does Allitt really mean to suggest that the problem with using technology is that it takes money away from faculty salaries? I'm flabbergasted.

As H points out, I suppose it's useful to have an article that so concisely and efficiently distills all curmudgeonly anti-technology views into one convenient package.

But I guess I'll just close by reiterating the main problems I have with this piece: he assumes that because educational technology can be found in the presence of poor student learning, the former causes the latter. More to the point, he assumes that because technology can be used badly - which it certainly can - it is inherently inimical to student learning. Any teaching tool can be used badly. Lecture can be used badly; class discussion can be used badly. No one suggests that we should dispense with those tools just because some of their practitioners aren't very good at what they do. Why do people make the same suggestion about technology?

(Postscript: Patrick Allitt is professor of history and director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum at Emory University. Wonder what that Center looks like...)

Comments

[Celandine]

The notion that money saved on technology would be spent on faculty salaries is fallacious in any case - certainly at my institution the students pay a "tech fee" which must be used for technology, and not just anything, but specifically technology that directly benefits students, e.g. smart classrooms, computer lab upgrades, etc.

Making the professor the "center of attention" - emphasizing lecture - doesn't that also cater to the idea of education-as-entertainment? Where the students sit passively and absorb (or don't) what the figure at the front is saying?

(Oh, btw, take a look at my blog - there's a survey on blogging from MIT that you might want to take/post the link to yourself.)

[MommyProf]

That article rankled me, too. Having the students have computers can be a problem, but you can always have them turn them off when they aren't needed for instruction. I find having PowerPoint for lectures really helps the majority of my students who are visual learners. I do think the Internet has diminished research skills, though.

[Sofia]

Significant, isn't it, that LEARNING doesn't feature anywhere in the name of the centre he directs? - I thought these days 'Teaching and Learning' went together like peas in a pod, but apparently not at Emory!
S

[La Lecturess]

GREAT post. I couldn't agree with you more, especially about e-mail. When it comes to paper drafts, I think my communication with students is often better over email than in person. If a student shows up with a draft and says, "what do you think?", it can be hard to pinpoint, on the spot, the major issues that are working or not working and give sufficiently clear advice, in a way that they'll remember once they leave my office. Over email, I feel as though my comments are more lucid and detailed--and better yet, written out! Email also allows me to fit this work into my own schedule, and although writing can eat up more time than meeting in person, the amount of time it takes is easily scaled back.

[Jane]

Arrrrgh. What a frustrating article! What the author fails to grasp is perhaps the issue is not that we should outlaw technology in the classroom, but that we should do a better job of helping people *effectively* integrate technology into their classes. How and when should powerpoint be used? How can class blogs foster or continue discussions outside of class? And so on.

I've actually had the opposite experience...some of my *best* classes with the *most effective* student-to-student interactions have occurred in the computer lab. If used correctly, technology can have a tremendous impact on student learning. (Of course, as a technologist I may just be biased on this point....)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

MommyProf, I wouldn't say so much that the Internet has diminished research skills, as much as the Internet highlights the deficiencies in the way we teach students research skills. Students who make sloppy, ill-informed use of the internet don't know what they're actually supposed to be doing; when books were the only option students didn't quite have to have as refined research skills, because the library had already done quite a lot of selection of sources (if that makes any sense). I still don't think it's really the internet's fault.

But I'll definitely agree that a lot of the use of the internet is abysmal.

[PhDing]

Indeed, this article seems anachronistic, but your counter arguments are cogent. (I am, in fact, reminded of a review of e-book reading devices that Harold Bloom wrote for the NY Times several years ago.)

I must admit though, word-processed writing does pose new challenges for teachers. While I agree that "If students don't proofread their papers while writing on computers, I hardly think they're going to proofread papers generated by any other means," the spell-check and grammar-check functions of MS Word can lull the student into a false sense of security: running these "checks" IS proofreading for many students; it gives the students the impression that their papers are fine, though they know the software doesn't catch every mistake. It becomes good enough and doesn't encourage them to look critically at their own writing.

Similarly, students aren't learning to vet electronic sources well. Once upon a time, students could get a book from the library, assured that the author had scholarly credibility. Right? Of course not. There are plenty of "scholarly" books in print that are authored by crackpots. We all know this. Perhaps the internet will force us to teach our students to evaluate sources based on the content of the source instead of on it medium.

[yankee transplant]

Wow. Seems to (unacademic)me that one of your most important points is that he confuses the existence of technology in the lives of some lousy students with technology's being the CAUSE of their poor performance. How many poorly written, poorly researched papers has this person read? I would bet several. Because some students do lousy research at the library, would he ban reference books? Pshaw.
This is a great post.

[Tina]

NK -- I know this was a minor point in the midst of many other great points about this article, but I just wanted to thank you for being dismissive of the old "students were better in my day" chestnut. That one drives me nuts, too. Often it's accompanied by "*I* would have *never* done X," which is the really telling point. The impression these profs have that students were better when they were students is based on their own experience. Of *course* they themselves were conscientious, excellent students -- *they* became profs! Duh! I think we should all call people out on this one.

And thanks for the hilariously sarcastic critique! Lord knows, as medievalists, we have great teaching tools now with technology that *improve* teaching and learning. In my smart classrooms, I'm always pulling up online images of manuscripts and art, pictures I've taken of medieval sites, sound files of Old and Middle English, etc., etc.

[Jason]

Actually, since you asked, albeit sarcastically, the Center is a pretty interesting place, and does all the things you would expect a Center for Teaching to do. Even technological things like videotaping faculty for peer- and self-critique, providing training in Blackboard, etc. And while I never had him for a class (different disciplines, etc.), his reputation was as a scintillating, if demanding, teacher.

I also think that there's a slight misreading of Allitt's affect here: Comic hyperbole is at least part of his method. (For example, I'm confident he is aware that no administrator will ever stop buying technology and plug that directly into salaries. Likewise with the bit about putting oneself at the center of the classroom.)

[Laura (geekymom)]

Thanks, New Kid, for pointing this out and doing such a fine critique. The problem, Jason, with comic hyperbole in this case, is I have heard these arguments word-for-word before. One of the more senior profs even argued the salary thing, saying that if we didn't buy the technology, we could get rid of the tech support staff thereby freeing up salary for faculty. He said this to my face. I also have had two professors very recently complain about e-mail, not about the 24/7 access, but the fact that it is impersonal. It's a misunderstanding of how students view e-mail vs. how the faculty view e-mail. the students grew up with e-mail. For many of them, it is as personal as a face-to-face interaction (IM even more so). E-mail and IM can be used as a way to encourage students to visit.

Many, many faculty use technology ineffectively. It's not their fault, really. It's usually because the administration has poured money into the hardware and software and didn't think about teaching faculty how to use it and when, and anything about best practices. Most of the technology I encourage faculty to use enhances what they're already doing and encourages collaboration among students and greater contact with faculty.

I just recently ran a writing workshop via Blackboard where the students posted their papers in the discussion board and then students commented on those papers, following a specific rubric. They're still making comments, a day later. There are 73 posts altogether. Though we spent a class period modelling what can/should be done, further peer review can continue outside of class.

Also, I'd like to point out that chalk and chalkboards are technology. Plato did not use chalk.

[ppb]

Good comments. I thought the article was silly, myself, and I do love Yankee Transplant's comment as well.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Jason, thank you for the comments about the Center/article. I have to agree with Laura (geekymom) - I have heard these arguments made with a straight face before, too. It makes it very hard to recognize that any of this essay is intended as humor (I can buy the last paragraph as comic hyperbole, but not the rest of it). I may be misreading his affect, but if his affect is that easily misread, then perhaps he needs to indicate it more clearly.

And I should say that while I was (and am) happy to snark in the post, obviously I don't know anything about what Patrick Allitt is like as a teacher, nor intend any of this personally.

Thanks for calling our attention to this ridiculous "argument"--your critique is right on target. Of course there are problems with the ways some profs use technology, but he uses the fact that such problems exist to conclude that the technology itself is problematic (maybe I should bring this article in to my critical thinking class next year and have my students identify all its flaws!)

And to end the article by saying that the dean will "love you" if you give up on technology for a semester--that was the most absurd thing I've read in a while!

[helenesch]

Thanks for calling our attention to this ridiculous "argument"--your critique is right on target. Of course there are problems with the ways some profs use technology, but he uses the fact that such problems exist to conclude that the technology itself is problematic (maybe I should bring this article in to my critical thinking class next year and have my students identify all its flaws!)

And to end the article by saying that the dean will "love you" if you give up on technology for a semester--that was the most absurd thing I've read in a while!

[Camicao]

Alas, I sympathized with Allit! I think you make good points, but I've been on the end of one too many PowerPoint presentations to not get some satisfaction out of Allit! Granted, there are good ways of using technology in the classroom, and Allit is a bit too extreme. But I got a perverse satisfaction out of it!!

[Daybreak]

Nice post! No, technology isn't perfect. Yes, some instructors abuse it. But that's as true of a blackboard as a computer. If I had to complain about instructional technology, it would be that too much effort is spent on bells and whistles and not enough on the basic infrastructure.

\*/

[MommyProf]

I was more thinking of the number of my students who are juniors and have not visited the big box across the street with books in it at all. And my school's not too bad - the kids are bright, but lazy and the Internet can give them an easy way out if I let them get away with it. I completely agree about the value of the library's role in collections.

[af]

I agree with most of your comments, but one thing did strike me as correct: the use of laptops in the classroom is - in every circumstance I've encountered it - a bad idea. Outside of class the personal computer is a great tool for linking the person to his or her classmates, but inside it's another story. The noise is annoying, and it does create a wall of some kind, not only between the students and the professor, but among the students (and not just when you try to get students into discussion groups). It's hard to compete with email/IM, solitaire and web surfing, as well. Although some students can use it just as a notetaking device, for most it's just a way of staying within themselves during class.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

af, I think there are two different things being discussed here - students bringing laptops to class, and holding class in a computer lab where all the students are sitting in front of computers. As for the latter, I can't see it being especially useful for any of the classes I teach, but I think a lot of that would depend on the subject you teach and what you're trying to do. (I don't teach in a "lab" field so I'd have no idea how to run a lab on anything!) As for the former - luckily, I haven't run into many students wanting to bring laptops to class - it's only happened to me twice - and I can see that it can be a problem (the whole IMing while in class thing would drive me nuts). But I wouldn't want to ban them absolutely on that account. (I'm also lucky enough to teach small classes - my largest class is 22 students - so it's a lot easier to see what every student is doing and to try, at least, to engage them in class; if I were lecturing to a group of 75+ I'd be much leerier of this.) Again, though, I wouldn't say it's the laptop at fault, but the student misusing it. (I realize that's a little bit of a semantic difference when the easiest way to resolve the problem is to get rid of the laptop.)

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I hate laptops in class. Try not to allow them, either. I really think it does put a distance between all of the people in the classroom, and I've noticed that it sometimes gives the impression that the laptop-bringers have an advantage over the nons. And sometimes it does -- In a wired classroom, students will sometimes look things up on the internet while I'm speaking and have an answer, where others are fumbling through hard-taken notes. Plus it's kind of disconcerting for a student to look something up on Encarta and then you have to explain why you said what you did, and how Encarta (or usually, the Wikipedia) is not as correct ... or how you're a big dope who can't remember dates!

But basically, I think the problem really is that we do have all this technology and no one has really taught us how to use it effectively in the classroom. I've been leery of incorporating too much simply because I don't always get a smart classroom, and I don't want to do multiple versions of a prep.

One place I do agree with Allitt, I think (and I do know he's very popular as a teacher, or at least he was 10 or so years ago), is that the technology encourages a certain kind of laziness, not just among students, but among faculty -- I think there is more of an attitude of "but here's the technology!" that has made it easier for faculty to assume student know how to do things that they really don't know how to do. They're taught keyboarding and the basic MS programs, but not how to do database searches, etc. And students really don't learn to write, but I doubt that's because of technology.

And I have now rambled myself into oblivion ...

[Dr. C]

Two words for you: Generation Gap.

[joanna]

Amen, sister. I get impatient with whiney people who blame technology, or fear it, and use stupid examples to back up their claims. If a student emails me at 1 in the morning, who cares? All it means is that she was awake and emailed me. I'm not obligated to wake up and respond at once. As for powerpoint problems, I remember, back when I was in school, many film and filmstrip malfunctions, and I can't say that while the instructor was busy trying to repair things that I spent the idle moments discussing literature with my peers.
The issue that always rankles me is the presumption that technology is so powerful and we are so helpless before it that using it in the classroom erases our common sense and experience as teachers running classrooms. And it just ain't true.