"All Shall Skip the Announcements and Despair"

I have to wonder: How did I waste time as a student? Or how did technology influence my study habits?

We’re talking about being a student in a pre-silicon world. I didn’t have an email address until I was at least a sophomore at university – maybe it was earlier; my memories are a little fuzzy. 

I remember reading a lot of books. And doodling. I still have most of the books and a small fraction of the doodles.

I have students who look at doing a research paper or a critical analysis of a book with fear when I talk about doing them in the pre-Internet days. Because that meant reading books. Actually having to go to the library to research. Using ancient technology like microfilm and card catalogs and librarians. And – gulp, they say – annotating books. Entire books. Books without text search functions and highlights saved in the cloud.

Did I do all that? I must have.

And I remember the Internet being this interesting thing. A toy, almost like one of those little electronic kits my boys use, to build a buzzer or a timer by snapping pre-made pieces into a grid, following LEGO-like instructions. I built web pages by looking at how others made theirs. Sites dedicated to my favorite books, book reviews, my own creative writing. Once I posted a lyric from They Might Be Giants concerning James Ensor, Belgium’s famous painter. I got an email from someone else using the toy Internet to research James Ensor, and wanted to know what I could say about the guy. I couldn’t say anything beyond what TMBG sings in the lyrics.

It’s a new world out there, Golde, a new world.

The Internet isn’t a toy anymore. It’s this big thing, a collective wad of knowledge and trivia and ephemera and lies and truthiness and facts, all mixed together like those clumps of hair you have to clean out of your tub drain once in a while.

I’m caught up in it. I read, and I’m much more excited when I find something I can react to (like the article I’m about to mention). I’m excited to add to that mostly useless wad of Internet knowledge via my blog, which must be utterly useless to most of those who encounter it. Including myself. Though it does give me a place to free write . . . 

And my students have never known a world without it. The Internet, not my useless blog.

And, like Joelle Renstrom’s students, whom she writes about at aeon.co, they’re floundering where the two worlds intersect. (There’s that article I promised.)

It’s a good read. A frightening read for someone like me, who sees what Renstrom sees

But, I wonder – how much floundering did I do at the intersection of the real worlds and other worlds I inhabited? Memory is a funny thing – the further we are from it, the rosier it gets. Certainly there were a myriad of things I did to self-sabotage my academic career – certainly there are things I’m doing RIGHT NOW to sabotage my embryonic career as a novelist. Maybe this is one reason we’re asked to keep journals. So we can go back to see what kind of folly we might have recorded. If at all.

But this is the part of Renstrom’s article that frightens me the most, whether I remember what kind of useless stuff I used to do to avoid studying. Why frightening? Because I see it in my students. My online students. They have no chance to escape the beast. And what efforts I can put into rectifying the situation feel like they get lost in the noise:

In an effort to save my students exorbitant coursepack fees, I used to photocopy course readings. But when my department clamped down on copier use, I scanned the articles and put them online, which meant I had to allow students to open their laptops during discussions. On the one hand, they’re adults – if they want to go to shop for shoes on the Zappos website or look at celebrities’ Instagram accounts during class, they’ll have to deal with the consequences. But our discussions suffer, which makes my job harder. When reading on screens, students don’t annotate or reread. They get glassy-eyed, zone out, and then struggle to find quotes they only vaguely remember when it comes time to write the paper. The endless opportunities for distraction also mean that they miss other aspects of class, including important instructions.

That’s when they come to me and we have some version of the following conversation:

Student: ‘I have no idea what’s going on.’

Me: ‘What do you mean “no idea”? The assignment sheet details all the requirements, we’ve reviewed them in class, and we’ve read example essays. What exactly are you having trouble understanding?’

Student: ‘I don’t know… everything?’

I used to jump to the conclusion that students with whom I had such interactions were inherently flawed, academic lost causes. But that’s a reductive explanation, and doesn’t get at the heart of the problem; it’s not just that they have trouble paying attention or are distracted by their phones or laptops in the classroom. The problem is their use of technology in general. Technology demands a significant amount of time and attention and has conditioned them to not question it. It takes up more and more of their bandwidth, and the net effect is lobotomising.

Are these students dumb? Hardly, and Renstrom doesn’t believe so either. What they are is distracted.

So, what can I do, as an online instructor, do to cut down the distractions?

There’s little to go on out there. This fellow, for example, suggest confronting students with the studies that show technology is distracting in the classroom. In the physical classroom. Little help to me in an online environment, where the distraction and the classroom come packaged together.

Any solution cannot cut off technology, as technology is the basis of online education. And assigning more readings and presentations to an already distracted group of students seems unproductive.

Then there are comical suggestions like these.

Nost of you who teach online see the flaws already. Post stuff for them to read, Or listen to. For them to forget about as they try to cognate through it all and end up calling or texting or emailing you anyway because you’re the quick answer, not the stuff you’re offering in class to help them find the answers.

So, we bulletize. Offer video announcements. Spread them out over a week, rather than the info dump. Is that going to work?

None shall read them and despair. It’s like Galadriel is in the classroom.

Maybe the solution is that old adage, “Less is more”?

I’m still looking for that magic bullet. Let me know if you find it.

Online Classes and the Motivated Student

From what I’ve seen in just over a year and a half of teaching online courses, it is true that the more motivated the student, the more likely they are to succeed in online classes. And though I might like to think otherwise as an online instructor, it is the student’s motivation, not the teacher’s, that makes for success.

There’s quite a bit of hand-wringing going on out there about online courses and how they leave the less-motivated students behind. There are other factors they point out that also leave other students behind, couching everything in the unrealistic idea that every educational opportunity ought to be open to everyone, no matter what inabilities or disadvantages they possess, such as in this piece from Noliwe M. Rooks in TIME magazine. Her conclusion:

If we really want to democratize education, finding creative ways to realistically open up colleges to different communities will do more to help than will a model that, despite its stated intentions, is more beneficial for students for students who are already wealthy, academically well-prepared an highly motivated. We ought to make sure that everyone has access to the same opportunities or we will further widen the opportunity gaps we mean to close.

So why not make online courses only for the motivated student?

Well, there are many reasons that would cause hand-wringing sessions of their own. First and foremost is this American idea that education ought to be available in all forms to everyone, rather than in a tailored fashion that lets students take advantage of their learned or inborn advantages and move at a brisker pace through their education. Making online classes open only to motivated students – and how do you measure motivation – smacks as undemocratic, something that’s just not allowed in educational circles.

Maybe getting these highly-motivated students out of the classroom – leaving more room for the less motivated in traditional classrooms where they can get the physical, one-on-one instruction they need – is an advantage that’s being overlooked.




Another advantage: I’ve seen highly motivated and talented writers simply go through the motions or kick against the pricks of their online course because – this is true – they already know about writing a thesis, organizing a paper, doing research and the little bitty tricks that their less-motivated and less-talented peers are still working on. They’re bored in physical classrooms and frustrated at the busywork in online courses, and I don’t blame them. These are the divergent thinkers Sir Ken Robinson talks about in this video. Why not, in fact, let these highly motivated and talented students audit courses for credit and get it without having to go through the motions at all?

Darwin in the Machine

As I read the readings for this week, I coincidentally came across a passage from Samuel Butler’s book “Erewhon,” which describes a utopian society that distrusts machines because they find it unacceptable that machines should evolve more quickly than mankind. In his book, Butler quotes from a “history” of machines written in Erewhon:

“Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrata attained a much greater bulk that has descended to their more highly organized living representatives, and in like manner, a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress.”

Butler’s description of the “evolution” of machines, back in 1871, is amazingly prescient, and applicable to our discussion as we look at how students, teachers and institutions evolve into the world of online instruction.

Machines – and I include the online worlds of Blackboard, e-mail and such in the realm of machines – are tools. As this week’s readings point out, it is how we use these tools that affects how successful we are as students, teachers and institutions in creating online classrooms. They are means, not an end. As Blair and Hoy write: “. . . the extent to which a course is successful depends largely on the students themselves. Thus there were significant differences in motivation among some students particularly two younger students, in Blair’s first class who were not only taking their first online course, but who were simply not accustomed to self-directed learning models that require active participation.” Student success depended on their adaptability to the curriculum model, not the technology used to deliver the curriculum.

Walker Pickering also points out how developing an online ethos/persona is important for student and teacher success. This is something I’ve noted in past online and face to face courses, in which I’ve created negative and positive personas – not consciously, but subconsciously. Like one of the students Walker Pickering interviewed, I’ve become more aware of what I do that creates a persona, and have consequently learned from the times my persona came across as negative. I’m interested in hearing how others in this class create and moderate their online personas. I’m kind of a hybrid between the two students Walker Pickering interviews: Partly, I let my persona evolve through honest self-expression, and partly I try to moderate what I say and how I say it in order to maintain a persona that is open to other opinions. I agree wit what Walker Pickering writes:

“Students themselves determine from this point [at the division of labor] how they will consciously or subconsciously develop their personas. In addition, at times, other students’ responses to discussion postings will indicate to individual students that certain comments/topics or strategies for communicating ideas are not welcome or should be modified; such responses influence the developing personas of the students as well.”

I’ve been told in past classes that I come across strong-willed, and I recognize that such a persona can introduce communicative barriers. If I ever become overbearing, please know I’m open to correction.

An interesting side note: I have been on Twitter for the past three months, and recently experimented with a tool meant to reveal my Twitter psychological profile. It tells me that, in part, I am aggressive and focus on negative thoughts. That struck me as weird, but it’s also a reminder that words (or phrases, or whatever the psych profile parses) bears meaning beyond what is intended. So again, I am sorry if I come across as aggressive and negative. I do try to moderate myself, as Walker Pickering suggests. Like the student Robert, I’m evolving into “perplexed thinking about how to voice [my] views.”

In reading Meloncon, I realize my persona may be a reaction to the “messy and disorganized” appearance of the online classroom. Not that this is messy or unorganized. It’s just how I tend to react in social situations – again, evidence how students shape the landscape and how self-moderation is important in making sure the landscape doesn’t become so messy as to be intrusive for others who have to walk these same paths. Yes, a lot of navel-contemplating here.

But going back to the Erewhonians and their theory of machine evolution: This navel contemplation is a good thing, because as we build experience with these online landscapes, we become more aware of how we help the technology evolve to our needs, and how we ourselves affect the evolution of classroom tone within that technology.

I wonder if the technology and how students interact with it and with each other invites the constructivist approach, as we discussed last week? I know from past classroom and online experience that I’d rather not have an instructor who takes the didactic approach; I’m much more interested and stimulated when I can interact with my peers, with the instructor working as a facilitator. I don’t see that role as dismissive of the instructor’s presence, as many a wise instructor can, and has, with a quick message, a question, an idea, a suggestion, influenced these online discussions for the better.