Paul Dourish, an informatics professor at the University of California at Irvine, appears to be attracting a fan base among scholars, according to Liz Losh, a rhetorician at the university. In a blog post this week, she observes that Mr. Dourish, whose research centers on human-computer interaction, has inspired a “has a posse” sticker in his name and an “I Heart Paul Dourish” confession from a new-media scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“I’ve served on committees with Dourish and think [his book], Where the Action Is is a good read, but I probably couldn’t tell you his height, weight, or eye color,” Ms. Losh writes. “Have I missed something about my supposed heartthrob colleague?” —Andrea L. Foster
20 Responses to U. of California Professor Paul Dourish: the Sexiest Man Alive?
Peter Newbury - February 17, 2012 at 2:27 pm
I don’t want to appear to be splitting hairs, but I think there’s a significant difference between, “He is teaching himself” and “they are teaching themselves”, as in teaching each other through peer interactions.
When it’s one fella’ sitting at home watching a flipped class video, the instructor has a huge and direct role in the learning that goes on. The instructor talks/models/demonstrates and this good student listens, pauses, rewinds, continually checks his understanding.
In a classroom where peer instruction is integrated and integral to the lesson, there is still a “time for telling” as you nicely outlined in a previous post. In the classroom, the instructor also has the clandestine role of creating a learning opportunity, coaxing the students down that path where they “teach each other” and collecting them back together at the end.
In other words, when I hear “students teaching themselves,” I don’t picture a classroom full of students, individually teaching himself or herself. I see a classroom full of students huddled in 2′s, 3′s and 4′s explaining the concepts to each other.
Robert Talbert - February 17, 2012 at 3:46 pm
That’s an important distinction, Peter. What I mean here in the post is that each student is teaching themselves individually (“I’m on my own”), or possibly that the class is teaching each other with no input or guidance from the professor (“we’re on our own”). In other words, there’s a perception that the professor has checked out.
Of course in PI, there is a mix of prof->student direct instruction, studentstudent instruction, and even quite often student->prof instruction, which is one of the reasons I like PI so much. But some people take this to be an all-or-nothing proposition — if the prof is not lecturing 100% of the time, he is teaching 0% of the time.
22067030 - February 17, 2012 at 5:04 pm
My impression of peer teaching is that the conversation is not lecture – one person at the front of the class, projecting words into space – but something closer to tutorial, with the peer providing more individualized attention. I am becoming skeptical of lectures, whether in class or on YouTube; the problem is that sooner or later the student has to sit down and do some work, and that’s what’s hard. And that is what no one has found a substitute for.
GL McColm
5768 - February 17, 2012 at 5:44 pm
A large part of the question is where “knowledge” resides. A student or teacher who privileges the localization of knowledge and knowing in either the expert talking head in front of the class or the online lecture outside of the classroom, might as well privilege its locus to be a well-written textbook if it exists. Delivery of that knowledge (as opposed to knowledge itself) is perhaps best regarded as an entirely separate matter. Some cultures and disciplines rely to a greater extent on oral tradition but those that have codified knowledge (and well-written textbooks) need not necessarily do so. This might in some ways parallel informal versus formal education (although anything “formal” seems increasingly confused these days with what is “stilted”).
Certainly, animals don’t archive what they “know” in libraries. Transmissible human knowledge resides in language and symbol systems however much students and many of us as teachers would like to associate that knowledge with a given person. Symbolic systems, whether language based or numerical, are a human achievement and the hallmark of the human. Higher education seems to be forgetting that fact. Forty years ago students would study out of class since lectures were way over their heads–nothing new; we have merely forgotten this. Did they teach themselves then? Many of the older generation as well as students elsewhere in the world know they did. I won’t always be around as a teacher, but what is written will have a longer lifetime.
It is not surprising that the long childhood of the human biases all of us toward dependency on the voice and the gaze of someone just like ourselves in front of the classroom, mesmerizing us into thinking that something is being done for us that we could not possibly do for ourselves, namely, learning. But neither is it excusable that we let this deception influence us or our students if we maintain that our classrooms are oriented toward student development in terms of their individuation and development as agents who can think for themselves in the worlds in their various future professions.
I do not lecture but structure student education by assigned daily readings and quizzes taken both individually and in groups. When I first did this years ago sometimes students would grouse “we pay him to lecture.” They no longer do as word has since spread that 50 minutes in class passes much faster since there is no lecture. From my vantage point there is positive student engagement , and in my experience, much “more” learning occurs.
Do my students thereby “teach themselves”? Whether the spoken or the written word is at stake, students are expected to make meaning out of symbolic systems of either format when they deal with formal knowledge systems, to extract something from what is before them and to realize they can’t get everything, which doesn’t let them off the hook from doing the best they are able. Dealing with formal knowledge systems is precisely what we are about at the level of university education if we are about anything. A person who him/herself is a beneficiary of cultural knowledge is required for the generation of formal knowledge, but arguably is dispensable as far as its transmission which may be written and remain when the person is long gone. Pushing the Sisyphean rock of knowledge uphill while students sit passive and watch, no matter how much both parties may “enjoy” doing so, may not be as necessary as we think. “What is a teacher” is perhaps a corollary question to “When are they teaching themselves.” Good questions both. If teaching doesn’t imply a process in which a student relies on, exercises and actively employs skills it took all of K-12 to acquire, and in so doing further develops better reading comprehension of printed technical knowledge, I don’t know what either teaching or learning would mean at the university level, at least in my field.
11186108 - February 17, 2012 at 6:02 pm
I’m puzzled by the idea that 332 minutes = 1 credit hour of lectures.
332 minutes / 332 minutes/lecture = 6.6 lectures. Wouldn’t the usual 1 credit hour course meet once a week for the semester = 12 lectures or so? (That’s after subtracting perhaps 2 for exams and quizzes.)
doug_eike - February 17, 2012 at 10:38 pm
I’ve never taken or given an online course, but it seems to me that if the teacher actively lectures, whether in a classroom or online, the student is being taught. One of the most important goals of education is to learn how to teach oneself, but few students reach that goal in high school or undergraduate university. This is a fascinating topic, especially given the trend in higher education to take academic shortcuts in order to make more money and free up professors to take sabbaticals, travel, consult, do research, and write books and articles. Thanks for raising an interesting question.
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 7:28 am
There may be a difference in what you’re calling “peer teaching” with Mazur’s concept of Peer Instruction. PI does use minilectures to set up multiple choice questions — but in Mazur’s formulation, even those are set up by out-of-class readings.
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 7:34 am
What I said was that the 330-minute mark was “not very far off” from what you’d get in a standard one-credit course, not “equal to”. A 14-week course meeting 50 minutes a week would amount to 700 minutes. Not every single moment of such a class, even taught traditionally, would consist of lectures. Subtract out time for passing back papers and handing out papers, quizzes, tests, etc. and even the occasional group activity and you are in the ballpark of 500 minutes, which is “not very far off”.
The point here is that there is a significant amount of lecturing going on, not completely different from what you’d expect from the same class taught in a more traditional manner and certainly it’s not the case that “there is no lecture”.
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 7:41 am
It’s better for students if we focused on whether they have learned as the result of instruction, instead of whether they have “been taught”. By definition, any student who sits in a lecture has “been taught” in some sense, but if the student doesn’t demonstrate any gains in understanding of the material then it doesn’t matter what the student was exposed to — it doesn’t get the job done.
mbelvadi - February 18, 2012 at 8:21 am
That’s true, but defining it that way shifts the “blame” for the “job not getting done” from the instructor to the student. Too much of the rhetoric about “teaching and learning” seems to assume that if the students fail to learn, it’s entirely the failure of an unimaginative instructor, and not a failure of the students to exert enough effort.
Robert Talbert - February 18, 2012 at 9:15 am
It’s a shared responsibility. The instructor is responsible for designing a learning environment which facilitates rather than hinders learning and for making sure students are progressing towards mastery at each step of the way. The students are responsible for taking the necessary steps on their part to learn. This is not about shifting blame — it’s about defining the goal of an academic course (student learning) and determining whether or not that goal has been met. Believe me — I’ve been on the receiving end of this “it’s your fault” rhetoric far too often in the past. I have no interest in engaging in that sort of thing in the future.
mbelvadi - February 18, 2012 at 9:28 am
Take apart your second sentence. I agree that the instructor is “responsible for designing a learning environment which facilitates rather than hinders learning” but I think it’s an impossible burden to expect instructors to “make sure students are progressing towards mastery at each step of the way” – at best they can provide detailed feedback at each step on whether the students are progressing or not, but only the students can make SURE they are in fact progressing rather than fooling around reading Facebook. If the instructors are doing the first half of your sentence competently, then it’s up to the students to, mixing two of your sentences together, make sure that they are taking the necessary steps to progress.
chedie - February 20, 2012 at 9:18 am
“I am becoming skeptical of lectures, whether in class or on YouTube; the problem is that sooner or later the student has to sit down and do some work, and that’s what’s hard. And that is what no one has found a substitute for.” Uh…No! There is no substitute for the work succesful students will have to put in to succeed. We should not be looking for a substitute for work, but for ways to improve students chance to succeed in getting the most out of the material presented.
jung_gt - February 21, 2012 at 10:54 am
“Where is the belief that “lectures outside of class = teaching myself” coming from?” Great question. Several of my students expressed this view in end-of-semester course evaluations. Students objecting to the inverted model claimed that an in-class lecture was somehow more interactive (even though students rarely ask questions, or even answer questions posed verbally without a clicker). Another objection was that they now had to spend more time outside of class viewing the recorded lectures. Ultimately, I think the objections were really about an unfamiliar model (this wasn’t what they had signed up for), and being asked to work harder.
karelupdyke - February 21, 2012 at 11:52 am
I think the focus should be on LEARNING rather than teaching. Students are the ONLY ones who can do the LEARNING. All we, the teachers, can do is try to facilitate their learning.
5768 - February 21, 2012 at 2:59 pm
“Where is the belief that “lectures outside of class = teaching myself” coming from?”
Robert, rereading this, are you indicating that “we teach ourselves” is an accusation effectively being levied by the student against the professor?
If so, this may say more about the student than anything, not to mention their misunderstanding of what constitutes good teaching. Students who evidently have never been expected to read the very textbook they purchased for the course since their previous teachers “told them what we had to know” for the exams might invariably levy such accusations. In some departments–poor departments, I hasten to add–where traditional lecture is used but the teaching/learning dialectic has devolved to “you scratch my back (give us easy exams) and I’ll scratch yours (give you a good teacher evaluation), the odd duck who actually expects students to engage will obviously stand out like a sore thumb. The rhetoric ‘we have to teach ourselves” could in such cases be an insidious way to make the teacher come back into (mis)alignment, and make him/her conform to a lower standard. Much easier for water to run downhill than up, and knowing the effort it takes to break out of traditional lecturing and actually challenge students while developing them as learners, many teachers succumbed long ago to the path of least resistance, and their students were their accomplices.
Robert Talbert - February 22, 2012 at 9:12 pm
That’s pretty much what I mean. Being able to teach yourself is a pretty wonderful thing, but in this context it’s intended as an accusation that the prof isn’t doing her/his job. Also, +1 to everything in your comment.
Robert Talbert - February 22, 2012 at 9:13 pm
Just curious — when students said that they had to spend more time outside class viewing the lectures, what did they mean? More time than *what*? More time than they used to spend outside class? More time than they spend watching lectures in class?
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