Teaching and learning in the humanities, including philosophy, are changing rapidly as technology advances; that’s pretty much a truism when every faculty member has an email address. Now, general discussions of technology often begin with the point that pretty much every object in our lives is a technology: the pencil, the staircase, the chair. (And similarly, books are information technology.) But this is usually just said to get the point out of the way before they get to Web 2.0 and cloud computing and all the fancy new stuff people are excited about. But the most important thing I realized at this week’s NERCOMP conference is that the point has really significant implications for the way we think about technology in the humanities and academia, and about generational differences more generally.
At lunch I talked to a professor who was surprised to find that students had a hard time using a wiki; other attenders tweeted their surprise that most students had never used blogs before, when the students text and tweet and use other technologies so regularly. How could the students have a hard time with these technologies when they’re so tech-savvy?
Here’s the trick: undergraduate students are not “tech-savvy,” not in the sense that previous generations think of that term. The older we are, the likelier we are to equate “uses lots of technology” with “loves technology.” But 20-year-olds are not tech-heads. They do not, as a group, “love” Facebook any more than older generations love cars or telephones. For them these technologies are simply there, and useful, just like books and staircases. Texting and wikis do not fall under the same category in their minds, any more than books and staircases do.
I’m old enough to remember when information technology per se was new and exciting, when computers were not just a part of life. But they’ve been a part of my life for long enough that I don’t put them in a category, the way people older than me do. At a job interview a few years ago, the search committee asked me: “How do you use technology in your classes?” The question blindsided me. I set up online discussions and had my sessions videotaped for online learning and used PowerPoint-like presentation software and stored readings as online PDFs and did my gradebook on a spreadsheet and sent paper grades by email, but I had never grouped all of these together. To do so felt a little bit like Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia”. Far as I can tell, the undergrads feel the same way as I did, but more so.
And so I wonder whether we should simply try to stop talking about “technology,” even “information technology.” Making predictions is a dangerous game, but I bet that in 30 years, when my generation are the old hands and today’s undergrads are in charge, colleges and universities will not have departments of “information technology.” Instructional technology, the field I’m trying to enter, will just be a part of pedagogy, of teaching and learning; tech support will be grouped with facilities management, the people you call when the classroom temperature is too high. Technology will be categorized by function, not by the fact that it is “technology.”
Technologies are tools. I’ve previously admired the wonder and gratitude that older people feel for technology. But youth have a wisdom of their own. They know that Twitter is useful for some things, texting for others, pencils for others, glasses for others. They don’t need to be told the thing we keep hearing at conferences in the field: that instructional technology needs to be about the instructional and not the technology, digital humanities about the humanities and not the digital.
At a panel on blogging in the classroom, Elaine Garofoli tweeted: “blogs strike me as being very old tech. Been there, done that.” Many other participants retweeted and seconded and thirded this claim. But what’s wrong with old tech? We might think we need to switch over to all the latest technologies to keep up with Twittering and texting 20-year-olds. But they still use cars and pencils and staircases. It’s just that for them, instant messaging and Google Buzz are part of the same toolkit as the staircases.
This reminds me of difficulties I had with my old prof Albert Borgmann (a student of Heidegger) who focuses so much on technology as a destructive force in modern society. His arguments are very nuanced, and I cannot hope to give them justice here, but he tends to have two categories: the technologically mediated world and the ‘real’ world. How things fit exactly into one or the other is a matter of debate and terms like ‘focal objects’ or ‘focal practices’.
While I have my difficulties, I agree this is an important issue – connected with our problems of disconnection between humans, Affluenza, the dumbing down of the populous, etc. How do we use technology, or Instructional technology, in a way that doesn’t distract from the subject matter and from students’ face-to-face learning and interacting? There are countless pitfalls here and we (academics who aren’t so tech-savvy as yourself) need lots of help here. And with increased pressure to produce and specialize, dabbling in fancy new ways of teaching isn’t going to come quickly.
This is quite right. As I start entering academic technology as a profession, there are two big things I observe: first, at every conference and every discussion of the field, people make it clear that teaching has to lead and technology has to follow; and second, it’s equally clear that in practice technology leads and teaching follows. This for a variety of reasons: one is that instructional technologists are out of a job if people don’t adopt new technologies; one is that instructional tech is usually organized under IT (where it really doesn’t belong) rather than under teaching centres (which is a much more natural home); and one is that faculty themselves (who tend to be older) think they already know how to teach, they just want to see the cool gadgets. Someone at the conference said that inserting pedagogy into tech discussions with faculty is “like slipping them their vegetables.”
The problem isn’t with technology as such, but with institutional pressures and attitudes that surround it. Under existing conditions, it can indeed become a distraction or worse.
Fax came and went without my sending or receiving one. I’ve never tweeted (?) nor do I expect to. Its koan like compression might at its best be a sort of poetry. I like my gear to be stripped down, less to go wrong. I find a mobile phone that has text, talk and loudspeaker to be perfectly adequate. The latest Word is appalling. Abiword which is free means that I can move around from Linux to Vista without fuss and with all the simplicity and utility of Word 95. Does the word processor affect writing style? Yes I’m afraid so and to the detriment of creative writing. It’s much too easy to produce finished looking copy. In a Guardian series recently it was not surprising to me how many established writers go from fountain pen to typewriter or wp. I like a manual myself, it’s so blessedly silent and without the blinking cursor whipping you on. Typescript gives a certain distance and impersonality that allows you to see faults and it forces you to rewrite. Elmore Leonard who after 40 books might be expected to have attained a certain facility gets 1 page out of every 4 he writes. You have to set it up so that you are forced to rewrite. The wp is fine for industrial prose but it’s speed if you are a touch typist means that you stay within the short term memory window which leads to repetition and loops. That’s my theory.
I only write on a computer, unless I have no access to one (and I carry around a handwritten journal in case of such instances). I touch type, and so I do repeat and loop a lot when writing. But I’ve found this method works quite well for me: I spew out enormous amounts of logorrhea (I wrote over 5000 single-spaced pages on my dissertation alone) and then, when I keep coming back to the same topic, I put together a separate outline to assemble my thoughts more coherently and sort through the good stuff. New tools require new methods.
Twitter has its uses, but you can’t do philosophy on it unless you are Nietzsche. I dislike Word and avoid using it when I can help it – for scholars, Mellel is a far superior (and cheaper) product.
Amod:
I reel. By my calculation 2 o’ those pages is 1,000 words so you had a total of 2,500 x 1,000 words in all which equals 2,500,000 words. Now considering that Proust’s ‘Rememberance’ is a mere 1.5 million words it must be that you ate a mega-muffin. Have I gone wrong somewhere?
I note that you are moving into the area of educational technology. Even here in Ireland I see that the local primary school has interactive whiteboards. Is that another layer between guru and sishya. Must we now approach the guru with memory cards?
No, you’re entirely right. My dissertation took me four years to write, including the proposal, and I tried to write at least 2.5 pages a day (often at least 5 pages a day) almost every day during those years. That adds up pretty quickly.
The difference between me and Proust is not volume – it’s that every page of À la recherche du temps perdu is a work of genius, or so at least some readers claim, whereas the vast majority of what I wrote is drivel. :) Like I said, enormous amounts of logorrhea – above all it’s a way of getting past writer’s block. If I tell myself that today I need to produce one quality paragraph of my actual publishable book, I will tremble in fear and procrastinate the day away. If I tell myself that I need to write three pages of crap, well, that I can always do, even if I’m tired and hung over and miserable at the same time. Then by the time I need to write the actual thing, it’s just a matter of sorting through the dross to find the pearls.
As for technology: this is why I say instructional technology needs to be about the instructional and not the technology. If new technologies make teaching or writing better (as I think this one does), then use them. If not, not.