A Recommendation for Campus-Life Deans

Is this inspired by Levin’s playing at being a peasant?

I’m not sure the parallels hold so well, goxewu. Think of the difference between all of the things you name and the amount of immersion teens have in digital tools, which they carry around at all times, use in all spaces, and regard as prosthetic aids.

perhaps we should do an experiment where we give up the technology of paper & pen/pencil or the printed word (both radical technologies for their time) – this discussion seems ‘much ado about nothing’- I’m 56yo and am dependent on my technology – computer, phone, iPad – dependent in the sense of my work would be much harder without them because I off load some of the cognitive work to them – I am also dependent in the same sense on my assistant. Could I live without these technologies/people – of course – but life would be different – so my so much hubbub about life being different – if there is real evidence that our technologies harm those who use them (and I suspect that at least they change us in generally undesirable ways) – then let’s have that – these anecdotal tales of warning are a waste of time at best and often annoying

Check out the previous post, livefreeordie2, on the disappointments of computers in the classroom over the years, along with the high costs. Keep in mind that digitalizing schools is one of the biggest expenses on the balance sheet, and that you pay a tax for it with every phone bill you pay. An occasional note of skepticism amidst all of the techno-enthusiasm in education can’t be a bad thing.

Re #8:”An occasional note of skepticism amidst all of the techno-enthusiasm in education can’t be a bad thing.”So Prof. Bauerlein’s anti-computer stance has been diluted to this. I daresay he’s invented a new genre of writing–the homeopathic op-ed piece.

Some of our greatest journalists of the 1930′s to 1960 often stated that sitting in front of their trusted typewriters inspired their greatest journalistic work. Picking up a piece of paper and a pen just didn’t seem to inspire them. Ideas flowed and sentence structure flourshed, somehow magically, when they sat alone with their typewriter. As I have pointed out so many times in the past, Bauerlein greatly fears technology because it exposes his own vunerability as a classroom teacher. Notice that he never presents any research findings from his own classroom, using his own students, to demonstrate that his “people-based” methods yeild a level of learning superior to any other group of students who have been exposed to technology laden teaching practices.

Rock on, livefreeordie2 (post #9)! You just made my day! :)

Willynilly makes an important observation: “Some of our greatest journalists of the 1930′s to 1960 often stated that sitting in front of their trusted typewriters inspired their greatest journalistic work.” As an undergraduate, I found that sitting at a typewriter focused my attention in a way that pen and paper did not. Substitute the computer for the typewrite and it is still true that paper and computer engage my capacities in very different ways. I think and organize better on paper — my works somehow seems more tentative — but when I need to get some writing done, I work much better at the computer. The two are not interchangable for me.

markbauerlein #17 – I don’t think I have missed the point, but anything is possible. You are complaining that technology makes available numerous distraction – I never said it didn’t. The reason I used the word “opportunity” is because students must choose to use it as a tool for learning. They can also choose to use it for all the wonderful distractions you mentioned. But is that different from 45 or 50 years ago? When I was a youngster, a walk to the library provided the opportunity to do research or check out a worthwhile book. It also provided the opportunity to stop at a local restaurant and play the pinball machine and never get to the library. Or get to the library and check out the latest John Mayall LP and use the library’s headphones and turntable to enjoy the blues rather than work on a term paper.Was it up to the library to motivate me? Hardly. And I’m not sure why I “need to explain” anything. Researchers come up with all manner of harebrained schemes. Those of us in educational technology provide tools – that’s all. It’s up to instructors and students to put them to proper use. I can’t tell you for sure why high school students flounder, but the ones who “need to explain” are the parents, the teachers, and the students themselves, not the IT department.

Prof. Bauerlein is anti-computer. While he may try to qualify his stance–and, indeed, dilute it rhetorically to “an occasional note of skepticism amidst all of the techno-enthusiasm”–by saying he’s only anti-all-digital-all-the-time, the aggregate of his posts on the place of computers in undergraduates’ lives (e.g., the debilities of reading from a screen vs. reading from a printed page) is fairly described as “anti-computer.”No undergraduate or high school student is “all-digital-all-the time.” There are breakfast cereals, dating, beer-drinking, Frisbee-throwing, driving, Spring breaks, lying around on the lawn, etc., in their lives. “Digital” is merely replacing (albeit not yet completely) the previous technology (albeit a centuries-old one) of print on paper. Put it this way: A college humanities professor in the 1950s was pretty much “all ink-on-paper-all-the-time” in terms of how he (and it pretty much a “he” back then) expected his students to conduct their academic lives. Note: There’s nothing like hypertext and links to facilitate close reading.

goxewu #20 – My brother is an English professor. He once told me that if you could take a police detective from 1895 and bring him forward to a 1995 crime scene, he would be lost. If you took a surgeon from 1895 and brought him forward to a 1995 OR, he would not know where to begin. If you took an English professor from 1895 and dropped him (and as you said, all were pretty much “he” in 1895)into a 1995 classroom, he would pretty much go right to work without skipping a beat. While it’s a funny analogy and there was some truth to it, I think that 15 years later, we are nearly at the point where the English Prof would be lost as well.The ability for students, even those in a traditional face-to-face environment, to engage in synchronous and asynchronous communication, work collaboratively on writing assignments, engage in peer review and comment, etc, seems to me to be quite worthwhile. I realize that these pedagogical strategies might not work for everyone in every circumstance, but then, that’s true for just about every innovation in the area of teaching and learning. Many of these new strategies are still being refined, but I don’t know that ignoring them or waiting for perfection will benefit the students.The entire discussion reminds me of a Star Trek episode from nearly 45 years ago. Capt Kirk is accused of a crime and hires a lawyer named Samual T. Cogley to defend him. The lawyer prefers books to tablet-like computers and gives an impassioned speech about not losing the printed word. It’s the same kind of either/or logic that seems inherent in Mark’s blog entries. I would modify your point by saying that for the foreseeable future, digital complements ink-on-paper. . .it puts another tool in the toolbox, it doesn’t require that you throw away all of the old tools.

Twenty-eight years ago I bought my first computer, the original IBM-PC. With a 300 baud modem, a dot-matrix printer, two single-sided disk drives, and 48K of RAM, it cost $3600, about what I’d paid for my first new car a few years before. (And the modem needed 64K of RAM, which the salesman didn’t realize, so there went another two hundred dollars, for another sixteen kbytes.) The fundamental reason for buying the computer was simple: I was sick to death of retyping pages on a typewriter.Almost three decades later, here we are. And the computer has made it possible for myriads of people who can’t spell, punctuate, capitalize, or use good grammar–never mind think, reflect, consider, evaluate, ponder, judge, compare, contrast, or otherwise cogitate–to open their minds to the world and demonstrate that there isn’t a damn thing in there worth a moment’s consideration. Computers are good for a lot of things, but they don’t cure stupidity, ignorance, or bigotry, as plenty of the above comments make clear.

Mark Bauerlein writes: “I think senecan is wrong–online searching isn’t always more effective than card catalog, shelf browsing, and other slow methods.” “Effective” was a poor choice of words on my part. But electronic catalogs allow researchers to find more citations faster, and to focus their searches more precisely. Electronic catalogs can be consulted from the office, from home, or from any floor of a large library. Those are the advantages of electronic catalogs. What advantages might a card catalog offer? Shelf browsing has its benefits, of course, but is irrelevant to the card catalog/electronic catalog comparison. – Robert Dimit

Agreed, senecan, that online searches take you more quickly to where you want to go. Most of the time that’s for the best. But in educational settings, I think, sometimes the slow route fosters happy moments of discovering other things along the way (such as going through cards in the catalog and coming across nearby cards that offer ideas and knowledge relevant to the assignment). And, goxewu, while many have hailed the Web as the diversification of media and opening of access, what one all too often sees is more homogenization. I’ll have a post on this regarding the fate of Barnes & Noble.

Sorry to comment consecutively (which is tacky), but I just discovered another illogical point-attempted by Prof. Bauerlein in #25:”To claim that hypertext and links are great for close reading, as goxewu does, one has to explain why it is that, in spite of those tools the biggest reason so many young people enter college not college ready’ in reading is that they can’t handle complex texts–precisely the kind of texts that require close reading.”Generally this is like saying, “If rollerball pens are so superior to old-fashioned ballpoints, why are so many stupid class notes taken with them?”But to get to the particulars:1. The percentage of Americans in the 18-25 age bracket who hold bachelor’s degrees is about the same today as was the percentage of people in the days when my mother graduated from high school who held high school diplomas. In other words, undergraduate college populations have been growing less and less select. (Politically and socially, there’s a lot of good to this; people other than economically well-off white folk should be in college). The ability to “handle complex texts–precisely the kind of texts that require close reading” has declined accordingly.2. In addition to the (again, mostly beneficial) democratization of the undergraduate population, high schools have grown worse: alienation of faculty and students, drug and alcohol problems, watering down and “self-esteem”-ization of curricula, weaker parents and parenting. In short, the average freshman today comes to college less able to give close readings to complex texts–and not, by the way, because they’ve been doing schoolwork on computers. (Surfing the Internet instead of doing schoolwork is a separate problem, like watching too much television, playing too many video games, or texting too much on smartphones instead of doing schoolwork).3. “Complex texts” requiring close readings aren’t always from the literary canon. Many non-humanities majors today can often read complex technical texts much better then their predecessors.4. “Complex texts” from the literary canon that require close reading are often written in an English that resembles a semi-foreign language because, well, people just don’t talk and write that way anymore. “Complexity” is often not a matter of “complexity,” but rather of a thick layer of linguistic dust. Lots of literature professors, temperamentally natured to be enthused as undergraduates by, say, the essays of Joseph Addison, and having specialized in them throughout their paths to Ph.D.’s, simply cannot understand why so many contemporary undergraduates don’t see the same stuff in them when compelled to “close-read” them as they do.In sum: You’re reading a “complex text” on a screen. The “complex text” is positively freckled with words in blue which, when the arrow-turned-finger cursor on them is clicked, lead to further related words, information, and explanations. Unless there’s some Evil Spirit of the Screen that compels the reader to break off and go to live blogs of baseball games in progress, what on Earth is wrong with this available technology as a tool superior to adjacent print study guides and dictionaries, etc. for “close reading”? And if one’s professor is enlightened enough to be projecting the class’s text from a laptop to a big screen at the front of the room so that everyone can follow along, ask questions, discuss, etc., it’s even better.I apologize for being so insistent and prolix about these things, but Prof. Bauerlein, for some reason, seems to be oblivious (is this ad hominem?) to these rather obvious virtues of reading a digital text as opposed reading ink on paper. Perhaps he also remembers when reading from a scroll didn’t have all those nasty distractions of being able to thumb forward and backward on numbered pages.

Re #31:The analogy holds. Even if nobody ever claimed educational advantages for rollerball pens, blaming students’ inability to close-read complex texts on their use of laptops IS like blaming bad notes taken in class on the pen with which they were written. But my thanks to Prof. Bauerlein for tacitly conceding every other point* in my two posts rebutting his–inevitably, in the end–sentimental attachment to ink on paper.* 1) The improbability of more serendipitous connections in a card-catalogue search than a digital search, 2) the inefficiency, compared to digital searches, of card-catalogue searches, 3) the obvious advantages of digital hyperlinks in texts to be closely read, 4) the many other, probably more important reasons, for students’ not being “college ready,” than their use of laptops, and 5) other, probable reasons for students’ not getting what the professor wants out of certain texts other than a general inability to close-read them.

Point conceded, senecan, and some of yours, too, goxewu (expecially #2), but one quibble. I don’t believe the expansion of college attendance is proportionate to the expansion of remediation, college un-readiness, and other bad showings.