At any rate for those who are interested on Monday at noon east coast time, I will be participating in a webinar on teaching Writing as Information Arts (sort of a way of thinking about teaching digital literacy).

So here is what I am trying this semester for my EMAC 4325, Privacy, Surveillance, and Control on the Internet . . .

The focus of the class is on semester long research projects where each group has a public website/blog covering one aspect of the class. So for the whole semester groups have to work together to produce their project. The project is designed to require a range of skills, design, writing, coding, image manipulation, video and audio editing etc.

I came up with two basic rules for this project:

1. Everybody in the group gets the same project grade (which is 50% of the final grade).
2. If you are unhappy with a member of your group, i.e. feel that they are not sufficiently contributing, you can fire them from your team.

I put together these two rules from different projects I saw others do, although neither project put them together. On the first day of class I explained these rules and then handed them out the long detailed sheet which contained all the information on the project. Part of the project, indeed the first thing they had to do was come with community rules which described how the group was going to function, what initial responsibilites would be, and finally what the means by which they could dismiss a member of the group would be. In other words they had to write a group constitution of sorts complete with reasons and methods by which they would dismiss someone. (I did explain that in every case a meeting with me would be necessary, but I did this mainly as a way to make sure the group rules were followed, if a group decides to remove someone then I plan to support them.)

If someone is removed from a group then they become a group of one, responsible for their own project (which frankly is quite a bit of work).

Do I think this will solve all of the group assignment problems? No. But I think this probably represents more realistically how groups function outside of academia, they succeed or fail as a group, it doesn’t really matter if you work really hard, harder than anyone else around, you still need the group (ask Lebron James about this). By focusing on the group I won’t get caught trying to figure out team dynamics and what went wrong, assigning blame (like restaurant wars on Top Chef), instead everyone succeeds, or everyone fails. Simple . . . hopefully.

The next thing I did was get them divided into groups.

This was actually the most difficult part of the class, so far. I wanted students to be able to have a say in what group they joined, so that they were working on a topic that interested them, but I also wanted to avoid people just pairing up with people whom they have worked before and are friends. I also wanted to make sure that each group got a diversity of talent. I contemplated having them pick teams (schoolyard style) but thought that would end up being a bit ridiculous and isolating to the people who were not picked. Instead I had each student write on a one side of a notecard their name, on the other side they wrote the three topics that interested them the most, and then the three skills they would bring to the project, creating anonymous mini-resumes. I then selected one person for each group, and subsequently that person got to pick from the notecards one person for their team. On the whole this worked out, everyone got in a group that interested them, and the talent in every group is pretty diverse, and groups were picked based on talent not prior relationships or popularity.

Overall, three weeks into the semester, I am happy with how the groups are progressing. I have started to give them weekly feedback, always directed at the group rather than individuals. You can see the complete details of the project at the class website, along with links to all the ongoing projects.

I’ll write about this again at the end of the semester . . .

In general I think it can be a productive activity to encourage students to take a step back from relying on social media. I say this not because I think social media is a bad, or even harmful technology, but rather because I think that changing behavior can lead students to certain realizations about whatever it is they are studying. Showing students is usually a better pedagogical method then telling them. I won’t go into all the reasons in detail here, if you want you can check out the longer article I wrote for Flowtv.org on the student saturated media environment, but in short I would say that what seems strange and unfamiliar to us, is normal to most of our students. That is there is nothing particularly strange or unusual to them about Facebook, texting, Twitter, YouTube etc. As an educator one particularly effective tactic, I think, is to take the familiar and make it look strange. Or as Siva Vaidhyanathan explained on Twitter recently, students are like fish swimming in an ocean of media, my job is to get them to notice the water.

So it might seem like I would support Eric Darr, the provost of Harrisburg, and his plan to cut off social media for a week. Except I don’t. Actually I think it is a bad idea (maybe with good intentions, but a bad idea nonetheless). Let me explain.

In short I think this sort of experiment needs to be done carefully at a local level not globally with a broad brush. As Eric Stoller characterized the decision, having the Provost decide the matter for the whole University seems a bit “heavy handed” (Note: the “heavy handed” quote which is attributed to me in the Chronicle article originates with Eric, although I agree with it.) In this instance it becomes an abstracted authority telling his subordinates, what is and is not healthy, or at the least creating an experiment where the participants have no say in the matter. Whether or not it is Eric’s intent the message easily becomes “students cannot live without social media, they should try it for a week.” And again whether or not this is the Provost’s intent, it ends up coming off like a “kid’s these days” situation. Try substituting another “batch” of technology to see how problematic this becomes. For a substantial portion of the faculty, dissertations were written on a typewriter maybe we should ban all computers for a week and make graduate students work on typewriters, or we used to communicate in handwritten letters, for a week all communication must be handwritten, or people used to walk everywhere before there were cars, maybe we should have students practice a car free week.

This is not to suggest that anyone of the above couldn’t be a productive project, but I think they would only be productive given the right context. If you were studying urban planning it might be useful to have students not use cars for a week, or if you were studying linguistics and machine technology maybe only letter writing would be appropriate, but without a context I think the experiment is bound to fail, probably creating more frustration and anger than anything else.

In essence Harrisburg (or Eric, it’s difficult to tell) has grouped together a wide range of technologies and banned them all, without really recognizing their difference, and recognizing the differences between these technologies is one of the crucial things we should be teaching. On the first level who decides what is “social media” and what is not, is foursquare blocked? what about last.fm? World of Warcraft? or discussion boards? or heck even blogs with comments? I am not sure that I could decide what is and what is not social media and I am supposed to be an expert in it, how is a school going to decide? Second on the practical level it is near impossible to block all social media sites. Even if you could create a working definition of social media it would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of sites, there are simply too many to count.

Furthermore, how does one even go about enforcing this? A University wide ban is not likely to stop students from using social media, rather what it is likely to do is teach students how to set-up proxies and route around the IP blocking the University is planning on doing (not that this wouldn’t in and of itself be a good thing for students to learn. I wonder how many Tor downloads will happen that week?) Or students will likely just go off campus to access the net, making the ban an inconvenience but not an experience in giving up social media. What is more is that it is likely to disproportionately effect students over faculty and disproportionately  effect some students more than others. Faculty members who go home at night, or students who live off campus will be less affected. And what is worse is there is likely to be a class divide here as students who can afford to work at places like coffee shops will access the net there, or students who can afford Smart Phones will just rely on those devices for social networking.

There is one other concern here worth noting, one that I tried to raise in The Chronicle article but which unfortunately came across probably too soft. I think we should start by recognizing that social media isn’t an online form of communication, rather social media is how students communicate. In other words Eric isn’t asking students to give up communicating online, he is asking them to give up a large portion of the way in which they communicate. Imagine if the experiment was to have no one on campus talk to each other? There are actually fairly serious concerns here that shouldn’t be treaded over lightly. For many students their social media networks of friends are crucial to their daily lives, whether as the primary means by which they stay in touch with people or at the most significant level as a medium by which they connect with their support groups. Asking students to give up social media is not just a technical ask, it is a social and psychological one as well, one which I think those who don’t use it as a primary means of communicating probably underestimate.

But it is all to easy to critique without offering a solution. So, here is my solution, how I go about asking students to go on a social media fast.

1. I do it within a specific class context, making it an assignment. Since I teach social media, media is both the object and means of study, any ask I make is within the context of the class. In the same way asking students to give up cars for an urban planning class would make sense, asking students to give up a particular social media site within the context of class makes sense. This also presents the opportunity to discuss and process the experience.
2. Create buy in. Just telling students to live without social media seems to authoritarian, explaining to them, again within the context of the class is a far more effective way to handle the situation. If students are bought in to the assignment then they are more likely to do it. An assignment like this cannot possibly be monitored, so you need students to want to willfully do it. Do all my students follow through? No, but a majority do. (Incidentally the person who commented on The Chronicle that I would leave it up to a class vote, sort of missed this point. You can demand a lot of things from students, the one thing you can’t demand is that they learn. Their mindset going into any assignment will greatly determine what they get out of it.)
3. Make the assignment after, or during studying the object. This again creates context. After discussing Facebook and the way students use it, asking them to give it up for a week will make more sense.
4. Pick specific social media, not all social media. When I assign students to give up Facebook for a week they are still free to use email, discussion boards, even Twitter. By being specific you get students to pay attention to the specifics of each site rather than treating them all as equal, which they are clearly not. I might have students give up search engines for a day next semester.
5. Have a specific timeline and a reason for the duration. Make it a challenge.
6. Recognize that students will be differently affected by this assignment, especially if you are asking them to give up their support networks.
7. Join them. I never ask students to give up something that I am not also willing to give up.
8. Have them write about it, during and after. I want them to process the experience, they learn more this way and learn more from each other this way.

P.S. You should also read Eric Stoller’s take on this from a student life perspective.

University administrators and faculty should pay attention to the message of Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators.” Students need to ask themselves, as Brown does: “What does it mean to receive an education?” Brown’s most important observation is how the university, as an institution, is failing to change in ways that make it relevant to what he describes as “a very real revolution.” He notes that technologies popular in higher education today—like email, on-line databases, and blackboard—represent minor adjustments that fall woefully behind the curve of the real sea changes threatening to undo “the University” as an institution of learning. Brown, moreover, correctly identities how shifting class relations challenge the current structures of higher education. I agree that the internet has, in many ways, proven itself a democratizing force in our society and many others. Brown’s limited insight, however– contained as it is in his box of “information”–prevents him from seeing numerous other layers to this problem. I will talk about one.

The university, as a concept, could very well disappear just like Brown predicts…for many Americans, but not for all.

As institutions of higher learning seek ways to economize by eliminating and devaluing the spaces of learning that have been so central to “the University,” they are coming to resemble exactly what Dan Brown sees in them—exchange sites of information, marketplaces easily replaced by much cheaper flows of information accessed on the internet. As they pack more students into lecture halls and fill the rosters of on-line classrooms, universities save billions of dollars in the short run, but diminish the value of their degrees. Classrooms and other spaces in the university lose their meaning in this race to the bottom. The competition for more bodies per professor, however, does not threat the university as a concept. This is where Dan Brown’s class analysis could use some help. The “State University”—specifically, the notion of affordable education is eroding. Financial and intellectual elites (rich people and academic-types) tend to be suspicious of each other, but one thing they seem to agree on is what the space of the University represents, and they will not stop paying for it…they will continue to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to ivy league universities and small private liberal arts colleges. Princes and sheiks in foreign countries will continue packing their children off to the United States for higher education. These spaces, since they come at a very high price, are rarified worlds that diverge ever more from that of state universities. Administrators of these universities know that parents aren’t paying to send their children to these expensive schools for “information.” They are sending their children to become the producers, manipulators, and interpreters of information. When university classrooms, libraries, courtyards, and student commons are designed and utilized to their greatest effectiveness, they become spaces where students learn not for the sake of absorption (passively), but for the sake of generating new knowledge, developing new conceptual models, discovering new worlds of meaning not introduced by their professors. The professor to student ratio is critical in this respect, because the professor-as-critic-and-listener is just as important, if not more important, than the professor as instructor. I therefore recommend that viewers heed Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators,” but think more carefully about what is disappearing with the university.

And for what it’s worth here is the video that sparked this conversation.

Click To Play

The Internet has fundamentally changed not only the means through which we communicate, but also how we communicate and how we think. It has, in turn, altered what others expect from our writing, what employers look for in applicants, and how we conceive of work that used to be private. One need only look at the blog explosion to see how the ability to disseminate our thoughts cheaply and quickly, and to develop a dialogue with others empowered thousands to believe their voice was/is worth sharing.

Teachers cannot ignore this communication shift. A Kindle is more than a paperless book: it changes how we read, how we define reading, and how we perceive intellectual ownership. As society continues down a path toward ever-increasing mobile communication, our conceptions of how we persuade will also change. I think few Rhetoric instructors would argue with the idea that students should be able to not only consume information, something they’ve been doing their entire lives, but also to produce it. But as it stands now, most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment – practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself. It is with this spirit in mind that I designed my special topics Fall 2009 freshman rhetoric course at the University of Texas at Dallas. I wanted to transform the traditional rhetoric class with its standard textbook into a more relevant, new-media oriented course that focused not only on writing and speaking, but one that also looked at rhetoric in film, photography and music.

To that end, I designed the course to include a live WordPress blog on which students could speak to each other and anyone else in the world who cared to listen. A website containing copies of their larger papers coincided with the blog. This made the assignments more communal in nature and reinforced that writing is meant to be shared. In a more traditional classroom environment, students write only for the teacher, an approach that makes assignments seem less relevant to the students and devalues the very idea of rhetoric. Requiring students to blog, contact people outside their classroom, and post writing on the Internet teaches them to engage with the community, gives their writing more significance, and supports rhetoric – a term that, by definition, implies community.

While this public exposure to their work can be intimidating for some students, it forces them to take more accountability for their words while teaching them the power of communication. If they embrace it, students can develop a sense of freedom and power that resides in someone who feels comfortable with both the tools of communication and also the arenas that currently dominate the conversation. Right now, a majority of the conversations are increasingly happening online. Students must know how to navigate these waters. It is a direction more and more university rhetoric departments are going toward, including Ohio State University, which has some excellent examples of class blogs.

A strictly digital approach is not for everyone. I will always prefer a paper book, believe memorizing grammar rules is essential, and don’t think everyone needs a blog. Nonetheless, these are issues students should be aware of. Creating work in a vacuum delegitimizes it. When the goal of your course is to teach students to persuade, and you don’t include what is now the most influential tool for disseminating your argument, you are crippling your students.
Writing and reading online is different than performing those same tasks on paper. We communicate differently on the Internet, and as more and more people read from their phones and portable e-readers, our understanding of communication will change further still. As technology shifts, so does our means of persuasion; if students do not explore this, they will find their skills quickly out of date. Rhetoric is more than just learning a standard structure for an argument. Students should be asking themselves: “How does what we write and what we think change when we know that in ten minutes we can create a blog and broadcast to the world? How does this change how we see and portray ourselves?” These are the deeper rhetorical questions students need to grapple with. It is this focus that will make them stronger readers, writers, and citizens.

The second media-based aspect of the course was centering the writing assignments around a film that the students would produce. My goal was that this would provide continuity between assignments, while reinforcing one of the fundamental ideas underlying this class: rhetoric is found in a variety of media, not just writing. Many rhetoric programs devote time to “visual rhetoric,” but it is often cursory at best and culminates in a short essay examining a film or piece of art. While I do not object to this method, I was always bothered that writing was still given precedent over the image. We tell students that pictures are a viable means of persuasion, and then we as them to write about it. This hardly reinforces the message. So I thought: “Why not have the students work with the mediums they study, including film?”

I “hired” each student for a position in the “company” based on his skills and interests with the idea that this would not only hold their interest, but also be quite germane to their course of study. Everyone had to apply for their job, writing a cover letter and resume, and having a personal interview with me. Students were never entirely on their own, as the positions were part of large groups: pre-production, post-production, marketing, and web design.

Throughout the semester we discussed the various rhetorical aspects that comprise a film – including text, images, music, and sound effects – focusing on how and why creators made the decisions they did. Always, the emphasis was on these crafts as rhetorical devices. The end result was a website and corresponding film, created by the students and comprised of their work throughout the semester. Overall, I have found it a fun, effective approach.

An added benefit of the film was that it captured the students’ interest, as did broadcasting their work on their website, www.rvuentertainment.com. They became so invested in the film that the writing pertaining to it took on new meaning. The first essay required them to identify an issue in their local community and write about it. From these, the students voted on which would be made into a film. The second major writing assignment was a visual essay in which the students each described how they would make the film, supporting their paper with images they found online or took themselves. In addition to these, smaller assignments were given to each student based on his role in the company, including reports, marketing letters, short essays on artists who inspired them, and storyboards. All students were also required to blog weekly. The students really took to the project and, barring the procrastination that is a given for many college freshman, they handled it well. Weekly student-run meetings in class kept everyone on the same page and let me know where things stood. There were also individual meetings in which I worked one-on-one or in small groups to help them with their respective roles.

I admit, I had my doubts. Coming from a traditional writing background, and considering the departments goals, I felt the focus of the class should remain on writing aptitude, and the one constant question rolling around my head all semester was: “Are you doing the students an injustice? Are you taking time away from writing skills to focus on film, sound, and these “alternate” methods of persuasion?” I think my fears were reasonable, but ultimately the class worked out well. Because so many rhetorical devices remain constant across mediums, teaching students how pacing working in screen cuts or music only reinforces how it could be employed in their writing.

Overall, I think the class was a success. It taught the students to work with a variety of mediums and to always consider their work as something to share. It is this final point that the entire course hinged on: community. The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology.

Here is an interview about the project with Barbara.

So as most of the readers of this blog know, we launched a new major here at the University of Texas at Dallas: Emerging Media and Communications. (Sorry the website is not as informative as it ought to be, yet. We have been busy getting the program structured and have not had time to work on our public persona, but we will soon.) At any rate, what is exciting about this program to me is that it is built from the ground up. That is, we did not take an old media studies program and add in a digital studies, we started quite literally with a blank slate (okay not slate but computer screen). This has its advantages (and its disadvantages) primarily with course design and major progression. I am sure that we got a lot of things wrong, and will need to change a bunch of things, heck who knows what is going to happen with the media landscape in four years, it could require a whole host of classes we can’t even imagine right now. But, for now I am pretty pleased with what we have worked out: a variety and progression of courses that cover a range of media (audio, video, text), that incorporate both studio creation type classes and theory of media classes.

You can read the official language of the program over at the main site, but before I discuss the specifics of the syllabus and course design I thought I would post some of my personal thoughts on the program, what I see the goal of the program to be. I thought this would be 1) A useful exercise for me to try and concretize what I think the program is about. 2) Useful for students in the program and those thinking about majoring in it (practicing transparency). 3) Useful for others who are thinking about starting a similar program. 4) A way of generating feedback, opening a conversation about what these types of programs ought to do, need to do.

I tend to be a reductionist, not in terms of writing (although I do like twitter) but in terms of thinking about a “core organizing principle” for things. I try to take a “what’s the goal” approach, and that goal better be only a paragraph long. In designing this program, indeed before I even came here to UT-Dallas I think I spent a lot of time mulling over in my head the following quote from Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:

A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don’t.

Now Rheingold wrote this in 2003, so we are over half way to his projected ten year horizon. And so, this is what I lie awake at night thinking about. There is a new type of literacy developing, one between those who will understand the digital network media landscape, and who use it to produce, to organize, to take ownership over their lives, responsiblity for their community, to be critical of it, to engage with it . . . and with those who merely consume it. A divide between those who will be passive consumers at best, victims at worst, and those who will be active participants. There is a lot of nuance in this argument that gets glossed over when I reduce it this way, but I think it is essentially true. We are at “the changeover” a moment when culture is changing, will look completely different than it does now. What that is I have no idea, but I am sure it is going to be profoundly heterogenous to what we have now (think printing press change but on steroids).

And so this crosses with my other goal in education, (as much as I rant about the shortcomings of the University system I do think it can serve a purpose): education, specifically higher education is one of the best ways for an individual to increase their life chances and choices. Sure if you go to Harvard, or Princeton, or one of those other top ten ranked schools, the prestige of your diploma will carry you pretty far, sans having learned anything. But, for other institutions, I think we out to be seriously concerned that both our mode and content of education is going to be, perhaps already is, irrelevant. And that we are educating our students for a world that no longer exists instead of educating them for the world they will inherit. This strikes me as irresponsible.

We have somewhere between 30-50 new majors at the undergrad level (hard to tell because many are not “officially” declared yet) and I have been fielding a lot of questions from faculty here, and at other schools about what this major is. Many of these questions are sincere if skeptical, but many are of the “your just teaching a fad,” “you are seriously going to let students major in “Facebook?” variety. So, my quippy response has been: we are teaching digital literacy—offering no explanation because it doesn’t seem to help. But yes this major is a bit like studying at “Social Media University,” but done right I think that is a good thing. And so, the longer more official justification, taken from my syllabus:

In particular, this class will reflect one of the fundamental principles underlying the strength of the internet: None of us are smarter than all of us. Or, if you prefer a slightly different take: Knowledge is a communal process even if we have been taught to treat it as an individual product. . . .

Given all the above, you might ask yourself: “What’s in it for me?” A fair question, since I am going to ask a great deal of you, probably more than any other class you are taking this semester, not just because of the workload, but because I am requiring you to participate in a whole new style of learning. Let me begin by answering the question this way. . . I think we are approaching a critical cultural juncture, where literacy itself is changing. There will develop, perhaps already has developed, a significant divide between those who know how to use these emerging media, and those who uncritically consume them. My goal for the class is to help you move into that first category: to become active, critical producers in this new media landscape.

So I’ll end there and post again later, on the how’s and why’s of that syllabus, the details and the thought process behind it’s construction.

But, what is more striking to me is that otherwise capable intellectuals, ones who are excellent readers, make a career out of analyzing text, seem to have not read the piece by Jeff Young, and instead jump to a conclusion about what it says. Indeed, I would actually agree with Jose, or at least agree with a large part of what he says. The article, and Jose’s take, are not that technology is bad or evil, it is far more nuanced than this. Indeed the nuance is the important part, revealing what I believe is one of the central issues in teaching students today.

Let’s start with the initial premise: Students shouldn’t spend class time looking at boring PowerPoint lectures. Agreed. In fact I couldn’t agree more, PowerPoint is a horrible pedagogical tool, see my ongoing rant. PowerPoint as it is generally used is a poor pedagogical device. Collecting slides, and using PowerPoint as an amped up version of chalkboards and old carousel slide projectors is a really bad use of resources. As with Blackboard though, the issue is not the technology itself, but rather a poorly developed tool that tries to mimic old technology without really considering how the technology might actually change teaching practices.

Indeed as the article makes clear, Jose is not “anti-technology” he is just “anti” the way it is currently used. He uses podcasts and video games to teach. His approach is thoroughly technological. In fact the approach is a really smart one; by using technology he is able to deliver the “lecture” material outside of class time, and save the in class time for discussion and participation. This is not a story about a luddite professor, but rather about a professor who has developed an effective way to use technology in education.

In fact what Jose has done, is allowed technology to thoroughly change the way education happens, rather than just treat it as a supplemental, incremental change. Notice further down the article mentions that it was not that computers were completely removed from the class, creating a “tech free space,” but rather than classroom computers the tech budget is focused on getting professors laptops and helping them create podcast lectures. Bravo! I say. In fact the classroom space described (movable tables and chairs for in class discussion) is precisely the one we are using for EMAC here at UT Dallas.

This is what the Dallas Observer article, and all of those people emailing me this article miss, this approach is pretty close to the one I advocate: use tech to generate more discussion and outsource content delivery. In fact one of the reasons I like Twitter is the way it can foster discussion, especially in larger lecture style classrooms (as the article about SMU doesn’t makes clear they are dealing with 10-15 person classes). Technology isn’t good or bad, but it isn’t neutral either. It opens up new possibilities for engaging students, but if we simply use it to reproduce old pedagogies and student-teacher hierarchies—I’m looking at you PowerPoint and Blackboard—then we fail as educators. Certainly as the article points out there will be resistance, not the least of which comes from the students. Students who have been mostly educated in old instructional ways, sit in a desk face forward, learn the correct answer so you can perform on the test, teach to test etc., will be made uncomfortable by a classroom space where they have to take ownership of their own knowledge production, but that’s the point, to make them uncomfortable, to challenge them to learn better.

But, what really got me about this article is the term “naked,” which actually reveals the problem with the way this issue is being framed. This is probably where I would end up disagreeing with Jose, as I think his term “teaching naked” gets in the way, but to be sure it is far more a problem in the Dallas Observer story when they mischaracterize what he means by “naked.” Because, no professor I know of is actually advocating teaching without technology. Sure, I know a lot of faculty who say they don’t want computers in their classrooms, or projectors, who don’t use PowerPoint and refuse to adopt WebCT, whose only computer interaction with the class comes in posting grades (which they do only because the administration forces them to do it). This luddite teaching philosophy (and lest you think this is a strawman argument please come visit me sometime and I’ll introduce you to some folks), suggests that technology is bad for education and that we need to get back to basics.

But here’s the thing, to really be anti-technology these professors would have to really advocate teaching naked, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the term, as in teaching sans clothing. For, any teaching practice requires technology. Are we to imagine that these luddite professors disallow paper and pen from class? “Students should not take notes in class, the technology gets in the way of discussion.” Are we to imagine that they do not allow books in class? “No books, they get in the way of discussion.” Books, paper, pen, desks, chalkboards, whiteboards, all of these are technologies. In fact clothing itself is a technology, so if a professor really wanted to be against technology he would have to give up his tweed jacket and bow tie, because as a technology this might get in the way of the students learning, instead really go “naked” so as to better connect with the students.

Of course this is an absurd proposition, teaching, communicating, learning are thoroughly technological affairs, there is no learning without technology. The issue is not technology but using the technology well to teach our students. PowerPoint, generally speaking = bad. Blackboard generally speaking = bad. Podcasting lectures, distributing content to students openly in ways they can easily access = good. But I’ll even make the stronger claim here: Teaching without digital technology is an irresponsible pedagogy. Why? The future is digital, love it or hate it. We can argue later about whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. (Hint: the answer is both.) But to educate students, or to attempt to educate students without developing their digital literacy is to leave them ill prepared for their futures. You wouldn’t think of educating a student and not teaching them how to read, digital literacy is this crucial. In the future if you don’t know how to use this technology you will be “illiterate.” The problem with PowerPoint pedagogy is that it uncritically uses technology, doesn’t teach students to reflect on how technology shapes ways of knowing and learning. So, to simply eliminate PowerPoint and “go naked” is to not address the central issue. We can’t go back to “teaching the way it was,” because this will produce a generation of students who don’t know how to critically engage with, leverage, use, resist, these very technologies. Eliminating technology produces not the affect of a more engaged literate student populous, rather it produces the reverse, an ill informed, uncritical, unengaged student populous who will become at the very best passive consumers of the technology being resisted, and at the worst its willing victims.

Don’t get be wrong, I have little to no sympathy for educators who decry the current tech generation and their addiction to technology, and wistful longings for a return to a pre-technological learning space. After all, there is no such thing as a technology free classroom, pencils, paper, books and chalkboards, heck even tables, desks and chairs, are technologies. But I struggle with the technology in the classroom question because in a hypermediated multitasking world, I see it as part of my job as an instructor concerned with digital literacy to help students learn not only how to multi-task but also when not to multi-task, that is direct singular focused attention at a project or task. (As a brief tangent, but slightly related everyone who teaches writing should have their students read Cory Doctorow’s post on writing in the age of distraction).

Let’s be clear I think wireless access in a classroom is at this point a necessity, any space which purports to be about the sharing and construction of knowledge that does not have access to the internet seems to me to be a severely crippled space (yes I am looking at you MLA conference planners). But I also realize that introducing wireless access to the classroom brings with it a host of possible distractions for the students, and that I see it in part at least as my responsibility to address in the classroom (even if it is simply for me to mention that these distractions exist). I know that with computers in the classroom that some students will be surfing the web, updating their facebook status, studying for another class, playing WoW, playing solitaire (seriously folks can’t you find a more engaging simple game?), or, the ubiquitous nightmare example, looking at porn.

I also realize that for many of my students having access to the internet enhances their ability to discourse about the matter at hand. Many of my students take notes on their laptops, using programs that help them take notes in what is for them a much more productive way than paper and pen, some even have their notes posted live as the class progresses either to a wiki or a blog (the equivalent of live-blogging the class). What is more during a discussion students often use the internet as a giant reference book to query for information or check the facts about an assertion I have made (I often say in class, “I’m not sure look it up on Wikipedia” which sure enough usually within seconds a student has the request page . . .) or to offer an example. Indeed this is the very type of literacy I want my students to develop, how to use the internet to enhance and contribute to your creative and critical endeavors. This is why the reaction of many professors, to demand that students shut-off the computers, or ban cell-phones and laptops strikes me as entirely the wrong response. Indeed realistically little could be done to “demand” the attention of students. Sans digital distractions students still have minds that wander or get tired (this happens to professional academics as well, how many of us honestly pay attention through three 20 minute papers at academic conferences?), they think about what their plans are for the weekend or other matters that seem more pressing than whatever we are currently discussing. And sans some Orwellian mind control device there would be no way to monitor students attention. What strikes me as different about this moment though is that the tool of inquiry (the computer) is also the tool of distraction (and in many of my classes is also the object of inquiry.)

Part of me is of the mind that if students are focusing their attention elsewhere so be it, what do I care, who does it hurt. Except for the extreme cases (looking at porn) the students are only “hurting themselves,” (it is not really distracting to others) and will most likely reap the consequences later when they have to beg to borrow someone else’s notes, work harder on the assignment, or just plain receive a lower grade (as in all of my classes participation is a component of the final grade). Call this the business model approach, in the business world if you don’t pay attention in meetings (generally speaking) your work will suffer, and you will most likely endure consequences or at the very least not reap the rewards of labor (i.e. promotion). But, I don’t view my classroom as a business space, and I certainly don’t view my role as an educator to be to train students to be better workers so this model has little purchase with me.

Part of me also thinks that a large part of the responsibility lies with instructors. Lets be honest many instructors are just down right boring, like the ones who read from lecture notes or worse use PowerPoint presentations riddled with text and bullet points. If I can’t entice my students to pay attention, convince them that what I have to say really matters, maybe they should just tune-me out. After all, this is what I do. If I am listening to a lecture, or a presentation, or reading another scholars work and it bores me, if I am unconvinced that it matters I just tune it out, stop paying attention, or put the article aside.

But there is another issue here, and that is what it means to be a member of a community, to participate in a creative and critical discussion. And this is one of the things that I see as my role as an educator: to teach students how to participate in an academic community, to both model this behavior and illicit it from them. Honestly it is downright disrespectful to not pay attention during class, to ignore the instructor and more damagingly to ignore ones peers, in effect saying I know better than everyone else here and have nothing to learn from anyone (even if what they “know better” is a “false” assumption that the matters being discussed are not worth paying attention to). Honestly I spend a great deal of time preparing for class, and most of my students invest substantial time prior to class as well, to simply blow off all of that effort seems ill-informed. (And I should say here that this is more than just the problem of the commons, or the 80/20 rule, although this also factors in).

So this is my conundrum, how to teach students to participate in a learning community without demanding that they do. Which brings me back to Howard’s prompt. I really like what he does in the second video, demonstrating for students what the classroom looks like from his perspective, (and to be sure one of the problems here is how the classrooms are designed, but that is a matter for a much different and longer post, Foucault never did write that book about educational institutions). But, and here is where I want to progress more slowly or question Howard’s framing of the question. He says that it is about “paying attention” and “looking at the person who is talking.” I take it he primarily means not looking at the screen, or looking at cell phones, i.e. demonstrating that one is paying attention by looking at that to which you are paying attention. For the most part I would agree, but on several occasions when this has come up, part of me is resistant to this reduction of the problem.

Why? Because eye-contact ain’t all it is cracked up to be. In the first case the notion of eye-contact is culturally specific. There are entire cultures where eye contact specifically with someone who is speaking is considered aggressive, and as someone (sorry I forgot whom) pointed out on twitter the other day, eye contact not only privileges a certain Western cultural form of discourse but also one predicated on a pre-defined “normal” social behavior (some autistic youth pay rapt attention without, indeed on the condition that they not make eye contact). In a former life I was a camp director and one of the smarter people I ever meant observed that saying “look at me when I talk to you,” is one of the worst mistakes that adults make. Why? Because if you say that, then what is the student/child thinking? “I must look, make sure I look, don’t break eye contact . . .” In fact thinking a host of things that have nothing to do with paying attention to the content of what you are saying. Eye-contact in this regard is just another way of demanding attention, reproducing an old hierarchy that privileges certain modes of interaction, and structures, “all eyes face forward.”

Okay at this point I should be fair to Howard and admit that he is using “eye-contact” as a stand-in for being fully present, paying attention, and that I don’t think his musings are not sensitive to difference. Again this is where things get complicated, for what I am interested in teaching students is how they can each in their own way pay attention, become deep critical learners, who can be fully present in the academic community at hand, but how can I measure this? Is it even possible to measure this? Especially when all our measurements are so steeped in cultural, social, and historic biases (what’s with always privileging vision?). Do we even know what it means to pay attention when we move into these hypermediated spaces? Or are me just asking them to pay attention in old ways, reproduce old behaviors that might not only be outmoded, but not entirely useful for everyone? For one of the things that I love about these digital spaces is the ways in which they enable a host of learners to participate enable, participation from people once excluded. But, if we measure participation by old standards I think we continue to loose what is most promising about these digital spaces. (And if it isn’t clear already, I am not really talking here about eye-contact . . . it’s only just a stand in for the large issue.)