(the new) bgblogging

A quick rant:

Will’s post this morning pointing to Steve Dembo’s Podcast versus Lecture Shootout post and Dave Warlick’s “An Apple for my ipod post, ask the same question I get asked repeatedly about my blogging-podcasting-digital storytelling classrooms: If so much time is spent outside of class engaging in the discussions that normally take place inside the class (the blogging part), or in this case, if podcasts or vodcasts will replace the in-person lecture class, then what DOES go on in the classroom? I find this question nigh on shocking. And it points to the fact that we do not train our teachers about learning–about what education means. We do not ground them in classroom practices beyond the lecture-demonstration-discussion model, and we do not ground them in Paolo Freire or Ron Burnett who writes in his essay, “The Challenge of Change in Creating Learning Communities” : “…the importance of learning in a shared dialogue between partners and not in a monologue that is based on power.”

Indeed, I went on a bit about this topic a couple of posts ago and throughout my blogging. It’s hard not to get frustrated by this question–that it even needs to be asked.

Teachers are forever lamenting the fact that we don’t have enough time to dig into our subject in any depth, to do more than a greatest-hits kind of overview in survey courses, for example, because there’s so much ground to cover and so little time. First off, I have always had a hard time with the entire knowledge consumption model of education–well before a computer ever passed the threshold of my classroom. But, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a decent lecture (at certain moments). And a good lecture can work just fine virtually. So what do we do with all that time? Focus on the learning, provide opportunities for our students to practice and apply the discipline as apprentices in collaboration, rather than wasting the precious hours together in passive (or even active) listening.

WHAT DO WE DO IN CLASS??

POSSIBILITIES:

* Engage students in collaborative, subject-centered learning through authentic projects, activities and simulations. Not all of these need to take place in class of course. The time together can function much like the circle around the fire–sharing, discussing, probing the issues. Teachers can present problems to be solved together, the way Exeter dispenses with textbooks almost completely and instead throws a challenging problem on the table that, when solved or explored, will trigger questions about the theories, the facts, the processes of the discipline. Students learn by questioning, questing, doing and consulting. (And don’t tell me you can’t evaluate such learning! The whole notion of evaluation is another post I’ve got steeping…)

* Bring experts into the classroom (and onto the blog) to contextualize the subject within the real world. Have them talk with (not at) the students. Have them, like Paul Klein did when he visited my class–give them an assignment (Paul gave my artswriting class the charge of designing an exhibition that would include a specified number of artists. They had to decide who to show, how and why. What a lesson in thinking , doing and writing about art! Or look at this assignment Jim Grant, a composer, gave to the class. Have them write wiki-books about the subject, creating the course text as they go. Have them explore create tags for the lecture or reading or discussion, compiling terms and tag clouds as a way to engage with the vocabulary of the discipline. I could go on and on here… Every course, every learning situation will invite its own opportunities.

* Throw the classroom doors open to service learning. Have the students apply the learning from the lectures, books and online discussions in efficiacious, meaningful work for the larger community in which they live.

* Have the students present their takes on pieces of the lectures–analyzing, extending, applying the learning for their peers. They can do mini-lectures and presentations in front of the group to gain experience in formal and informal presentation situations. They can create podcasts and vodcasts as well, comparing the three kinds of presentations within the field.

Ah, the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations and by our grasp of the goals of formal and informal education and our specific course objectives ( of course we are often hampered by state mandates and standards). As Maxine Greene has said repeatedly, “Scholarship is intensely creative.” Shouldn’t teaching be so, too?

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TALKING AND WRITING DURING LAST WEEK’S SSUG MEETING IN OHIO

Last week’s NITLE-sponsored Social Software Users Meeting at The College of Wooster brought together educational technologists and faculty from liberal arts colleges (a 50-50 split between the roles) to talk through the successes, failures, opportunities and future of social software in the liberal arts. I came away with many ideas, seeds for collaborations, and a community of fellow educators thinking about the relationship between uses of social software and undergraduate learning.

Mulling those two days over and meeting up with the remarkable Sarah Lohnes for coffee yesterday reaffirmed my growing inclination to spend less time looking through crystal balls at what the future might have in store, and more in examining our actual classroom practices with technology–what works, what doesn’t, and why. I plan to talk here even more than I do about teaching, giving examples from my classes and pointing to theory and practice out in the world. It isn’t enough to say to people that they need to have the use of technology spring from the classroom goals–we who are doing this need to show how it’s done while keeping an eye on the big picture. At Wooster we didn’t talk all that much about the next five years, about the transformations that will certainly occur on our campuses–we talked a lot about teaching and literacies across disciplines, and how social software can contribute to our missions of preparing our students to be active, thoughtful citizens. We talked Pierre Levy and Stephen Johnson and Paolo Friere and Maxine Greene among others. Those kinds of conversations will help us to pull down artificial walls of the classroom as Web technologies provide us with ways to ground the learning in the world, to focus on collective intelligence, and to mentor learners.

The next conference/meeting (that is, after the International Digital Storytelling Conference) that I attend will, I hope, focus on teaching and learning with technology in the liberal arts–the hows and whys and what we can learn from social activists, artists and others about teaching and learning in the world. Why are people having so much trouble moving from lecture to what Sarah calls, subject-centered teaching? Instead of seeing the teacher as holder and dispenser of knowledge, or student as central maker of knowledge, why aren’t we concentrating on the conversation itself–on how Web technologies can help with the process of exploring a subject matter–its vocabulary, its parameters, its demands, and its constraints?

I realize how lucky I am when I think back to high school, to Exeter’s Harkness Table, around which we were given primary source documents, novels and problems to puzzle over together in search of the hows and whys of world events, literature and mathematics. The teacher was there to ask, not answer questions, and the best instructors were nearly invisible and yet always there, helping move us towards understanding how we engage with the discipline at hand. I think, too, of the two courses my daughter goes on and on about at Barnard College —Reacting to the Past I and II, courses in which the students study pivotal moments of change in human history–the partition of India and Pakistan, for example–by assuming the roles of the constituent parties and conducting research into their point of view. Each unit culminates with a debate, a trial, a reenactment of sorts. My daughter (who also went to Exeter) has a firm grasp over the events studied, but more significantly, I think, about the processes. Computers had nothing to do with any of this–inspired teaching did; an understanding of learning did.

Let’s face it. Students come to the liberal arts not really wanting technology in the classroom–at least not initially, not to the degree that I shower them with. They want the convenience of it, sure, but the rest of it? Do they really want to blog to the class and beyond, putting their flawed work on display, discussing discussing discussing in public? Do they want to hear their own voices on the audio files embedded onto the blogs? Play around with Photoshop in a literature class? Create tag clouds in political science? Such exercises initially seem like add-ons or smack of high school to them–this isn’t what a liberal arts college is all about, what they had imagined even when we make the pedagogy transparent, as my colleague Mary Ellen Bertolini is committed to doing. I have a reputation as the blogging teacher around here, so students know they’re in for something different when they step into my class for the first time, but still they’re skeptical, resistant even. They have romantic notions about the liberal-arts college life conjured through the stories of their parents, the movies, their high school teachers. Blogs and wikis; skypecasting, podcasting and digital storytelling might be fine in high school, but in college? Many students think not. Many think the magic of learning means to come under the spell of a charismatic, “brilliant” teacher whose lectures entertain and inform. Even in discussion classes, the students expect the teacher to do most of the talking–and indeed, if there were a study conducted, I bet most discussions classes are really call-and-answer sessions dominated by the teacher’s questions and commentary.

This kind of classroom takes some getting used to–and teachers have to be okay with students feeling a bit off-kilter to begin with in the course (my students often liken their experience during the first couple of weeks to free-falling). But just wait until a student gets a chance to learn within a class using this technology effectively. I don’t think my students will ever look at learning or their role in their education quite the same way again.

Why am I going on and on about this? Well, I found myself at Juniata and Wooster being asked quite a bit about what it is I actually do in the classroom during class time if my students are blogging away together so much outside of class. How do I remain a part of the community if I am not reading and commenting on everything they write–if I’m off somewhere to the side? What happens when I don’t post more than a couple of weeks of a syllabus at a time when students need to plan their semester? Do I really just let the students take over everything? Is there no balance? And I was also asked about the particulars of assignments–how I actually teach with social software–the nitty gritty. I realized how little we teach our scholars, our teachers in the liberal arts about teaching and learning.

I feel lucky to have had that taste of collaborative, subject-based learning at Exeter and even more, to trained as a public high school teacher in an exceptional teacher-training program that immersed us in educational theory as well as having us teach under a master teacher for a year. These experiences have given me a solid background in pedagogy and practice, in understanding the journey of an adolescent through the high school classroom before I turned to undergraduate teaching.

And so I plan to do more talking teaching here. Pulling examples out, pointing to the experiences of such inspiring, inspired educators as Barbara Sawhill and Ted Permutter and Peter Havholm and the many others who shared their insights and experiences with technology in the liberal arts.

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