Technology shouldn’t be used for everything, damnit!
My generation’s classroom has been slowly invaded with technology. Not the good technology like projectors and computers and other useful tools to increase learning. Those are fine with me. Our classrooms have been invaded by obnoxious gadgets and websites that replace good, old fashioned teaching. Frankly, I’m sick of it.
The one useful piece of technology that is prevalent and works well at our school is called WebCT but other university students may recognize Edline or Blackboard. They are all functionally the same. This is a website that tracks the courses I am currently enrolled in and allows educators to post grades, assignments, announcements, activities, etc. This is actually a fairly useful system and works well in practice.
I don’t mind those systems. They work well and have a useful purpose. The problem comes from a lack of standardization. My Organic Chemistry class requires me to use WebCT for announcements and grades, CourseCompass for notes and AceOrganic for interactive questions. My psychology class has me use MyWebPsych. Physics makes me use WileyPlus. My nightly routine has gone from checking my day planner to browsing 30 different websites looking for my homework. It is ridiculous.
Furthermore, we no longer do questions out of textbooks. Because apparently that didn’t work well enough for all the people who went to college before the technical revolution. We have online problems. These problems, of course, are scattered across the thousands of different sites I have to check. And the interface rarely works, often having javascript errors. The best part is the pain professors can put us through using them. I always believed homework was a means to make sure students were practicing at home and provide a measure of how students are in the class. Not now.
With these online monstrosities they can make all your homework timed. I can assure you thats fun, trying to work out a problem over new material (because the professor teaches the content after you do the graded homework) while under a time limit.
Lets switch gears and talk about technology in the classroom itself. One of my courses is “interactive” and requires you to follow along on your laptop while the professor lectures. Whoever thought of that idea should be shot. Besides the fact that no one is paying attention to the professor, it is near impossible to follow the interactive crap (which you are being graded on) and take notes and pay attention to the powerpoint presentation. But hey, its ok! We have interactive technology!
But really, the holy grail of technological crap being shoved down our throats today is the unholy creation generically called the Clicker. Some genius took an age-tested method of classroom polling, raising your hand, and made a technological monstrosity out of it. The clicker is a simplified remote that tallies votes from the students. Professor asks a question, students click answer, pretty graph shows up on screen. And hey, they even get to grade your class participation.
It doesn’t work that easily, obviously. What should be a 3 minute operation takes 15 minutes of class time. First everyone must register the active channel on their clicker. There will always be at least 5 people who can’t do this, despite doing it every day for an entire semester. Then the professor fools around trying to get the software to display three choices for multiple choice. People poll, taking another 5 minutes. Finally the professor tries to display the graph on screen but can’t because it is minimized and has no idea where it is. Several minutes later, long enough for students to run down to the corner deli and grab a sandwich, the professor manages to get the graph on screen. Yep, thats the answer. Thanks for wasting my time.
Or we could just have raised our hand and saved 20 minutes. I’m paying some ungodly amount of money per hour of college, I don’t want to waste it fussing around with clickers. And to make matters worse, we have to pay the publishing company for these damn things. The clicker I bought was $30 and only works for one class, after that you have to pay more and re-register under the class.
Technology can be good and useful. Or it can make the lives of students miserable and actively detract from a learning environment. It feels like the administration and faculty were given a blank check for tech toys and went crazy without evaluating their usefulness. Is it really so bad to ask people to raise their hands for a poll? Do we really need a tech option that does the same thing? Why do we need 30,000 different websites that could be taken care of by one? Or, heaven forbid, the professor just teach without needing a website to post last minute assignments?
I embrace technology. I used to be a computer science major. But honestly, this is just crazy. Perhaps I’m bitter already. Perhaps I’m just tired from staying up too many nights using this tech crap. Something needs to be fixed and I don’t think it is my perspective.
September 7th, 2007 at 9:50 am
(Hi, I’m a recent fan!)
My observation is that clickers tend to be popular in the bio classes — so far I haven’t had any profs require the clicker. (I’ve heard that they’re not cheap, so I feel relieved.)
Another tech problem that I’ve noticed is how profs start to teach around the Powerpoint lecture — if it isn’t on the slide, they may not discuss it. Edward Tufte has some pretty strong (but thoughtful) opinions on the issue of Powerpoint in class.
September 7th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Hi, thanks for reading!
Watch out for chemistry classes, it seems the publishers are starting to conn them over too (we were required to use them for general chemistry).
Id tend to agree with the powerpoint argument as well. It can be useful at times but more often than not it feels like a crutch the professor is using. Edward Tufte has some interesting papers on his site, I’ll have to read through them
September 8th, 2007 at 3:22 am
So, I just wrote a long and rambling reply only to lose it to the web phantoms a minute later.
To sum it up, Carnegie Mellon has few of the problems you mentioned Zach, at least in my experience. I’ve been very happy with the co-existence of technology with teaching - one does not overpower the other.
Sure, some professors have their own website - but they make it a point that you bookmark it in the first class, or always display it visibly during class (i.e. they work off of it) in order to better, or they have a link to it on Blackboard. A lot of teachers use Blackboard for grading because it saves them the hassle of writing everything down; using it for the rest of their stuff may be a symptom of laziness.
As for web homeworks: Calculus is the only one thus far to require me to do much homework on the web, and that was torture. Multiple choice questions that either took 2 seconds or 25 minutes - oh dear Jesus. Needless to say, random guessing took over a few times.
However, a class that I am currently in has a far different web homework-esque type thing; it is interactive with other students, open for multiple days, and has workbooks. Though, at this point, I have not yet done a workbook. So, I can’t comment on those… most of the time, doing one will give a bad taste in the mouth. It [i]is[/i] work, after all.
Clickers in the classroom are registered with the teacher once, in the beginning of the semester, and no further calibration is needed… just point and click until the end. Yay CMU! Physics and chemistry, sometimes bio, use this the most here.
Powerpoints… oh boy. Some professors love to drone on about these, following them exactly as E.L. says - those are annoying to listen to, but some provide context not found in the slides, or not found in the version of slides that the student can get. So… may make you pay attention. My favorite use of slides thus far has been my Organizations professor, who uses them to display simple drawings and introduce concepts and sometimes definitions. He uses the PP as a starting point for his segment, and adds 5-10 mins of talk per sentence or two on his slides. Some professors don’t use them at all… I’ve had some professors use chalkboards only; and no, not only for math classes. Programming, even! It was great.