The Attack of the Pod People

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By ROBERT SCHNEIDER

It was a lovely, crisp autumn day, but a piece in the Northern Star, my university's student newspaper, took all the joy out of it. The reporter, Lauren Stott, began on a lyrical note: "It's every student's dream: Wake up for school, stumble over to the computer, and download the day's class lectures ... then crawl back into bed — iPod in one hand, notebook in the other."

The object of the student journalist's enthusiasm was the possibility of having her courses delivered as podcasts, recordings distributed over the Internet and played back on miniature MP3 players like the eponymous Apple iPod. "To most students," she wrote, "podcasting proposes an idea of almost unlimited leisure, letting them learn on their own time and in their preferred location."

The article went on to report that my university was planning to set up a central server that would allow instructors to deliver recordings of their lectures to students enrolled in their courses. Asked for her opinion, another student said, "Hopefully professors will give the students a chance to meet in class at least a few times throughout the semester so they can make contacts for study groups and to get help."

That dystopian nonsense moved me to pen a dissenting article in support of real-time, nonvirtual class sessions similar to those already offered on our campus. I sent that diatribe to the newspaper's opinion editor. After a week, during which he neither printed it nor acknowledged it, I attached a hard copy to my bulletin board and figured that was the end of that.

Shortly afterward, however, I received an e-mail message from a professor at the University of Connecticut, who agreed with me about podcasts but said I should have made allowance for students who couldn't get to campus because of inclement weather. I was flabbergasted — had the professor from UConn been reading my bulletin board?

I discovered that an online newsletter, Podcasting News, had run a small piece titled "Professor: University Podcasts Are Totally Bogus." The professor was me.

The piece included a link to our student newspaper, which led the reader to a mangled version of my opinion piece, reduced to a fifth of its original length and printed as a letter to the editor. The paper had gone at my text with a hedge clipper, then printed it when I was traveling out of state. I never caught my "letter."

The shrunken, mangled piece made me sound like a Luddite, a curmudgeon railing against a technology whose self-evident usefulness lay just beyond his intellectual grasp. By the time I found the piece, various readers had added their comments. Most said I was antediluvian, and one cited a survey to prove that. Only the professor from UConn had had the courtesy to look up my e-mail address and contact me directly.

The online piece made no reference to the article that I had originally responded to, which led several of my e-readers to castigate me for neglecting to consider how valuable podcasts would be for handicapped students and students who couldn't come to class because of illness or religious holidays — situations never mentioned in the article that first aroused my ire. Curiously, I had also acquired defenders, one of whom generously forgave my curmudgeonliness on the ground that it was to be expected in a ballet teacher (actually, I teach theater history). Neither my detractors nor my allies had any notion of what I'd written or why. I had been reduced to a silent sound bite in the ether, a floating phenomenon of technophobia.

What the electronic press had done to my arguments was exactly what I suspected podcasting would do to my lectures: shear them of all context and present them at the recipient's convenience, yes, but without style or conviction.

I'm grateful to The Chronicle for this opportunity to finally see my whole rant in print.

The subject I teach is largely about events, irrecoverable, ephemeral, you-had-to-be-there events, like the 35 minutes of curtain calls that followed the premiere of Olivier's Othello, or the moment — at once stylized and spontaneous — in which a Kabuki actor acknowledges the acclamations of the crowd. Such events can't be recorded, abstracted, time delayed, or transmitted in any form without losing their quality of liveness, one of the essential qualities that qualify them as belonging to my discipline. The specificity of the events, the way they are bound in time and reserved for those present to witness, is one of the most important things I try to convey to my students.

In a more general sense, my class meetings are also events: Participation is reserved for those who manage to get out of bed, put on some clothes, and drag themselves to the appointed classroom at the appointed time. I'm one of those people. It's a nuisance to me to go to class, but my presence is essential: It shows that I care enough about my subject to get out of bed and get dressed in order to transmit its principles to students who've made a similar sacrifice for a similar purpose.

It would be different if I were communicating practical information like a talking clock, or the recording that tells you the campus is closed because of snow. But teaching isn't like that: When you teach, you're also transmitting the values that make information worth having.

So I have to be there. If that means I occasionally have to speak without adequate preparation, misspell words on the blackboard, garble my sentences, and generally work without recourse to a second "take," so be it. At 8 in the morning I may not be beautiful — hell, I may not even be fully awake — but I'm there, and I'm dressed. Any questions?

Students have to participate in my classes — and I don't mean "have to" in the sense that if they don't participate, they won't pass. They have to participate because I can't teach if they don't; I have to sense if my students are following me or not. Even if their participation takes the form of a blank look or a nodding head — as occasionally happens — I need it.

If forced, I could walk into an empty room to deliver a stream of scholarly syllables into a microphone for an hour and a quarter, but I would never call that teaching.

Students who, in pursuit of "almost unlimited leisure," consent to dilute their classroom experience by forcing it through an iPod are shortchanging themselves. Those of my colleagues who have allowed their teaching to degenerate into mere utterance are shortchanging their students. Lazy students and lazy professors form an insidious alliance whose principal goal is economy of effort, and whose principal product is boredom for all concerned. The new technology supplies an alibi for both groups: It's more convenient, so it must be better, right?

In her "Classroom Is an iPod?" article, Lauren Stott embraces that noxious tendency wholeheartedly. I would have preferred a warning: Podcasts of university courses are not "every student's dream"; they're totally bogus, a thin surrogate for real instruction, a fig leaf for disengagement, an excuse for lack of commitment from professors and students alike. People who believe in the transformative value of higher education will resist podcastification with a passion.

Let me add, as a sort of afterthought to my original rant, that there's another, more self-interested reason for professors to be wary: In a world where students can be replaced by iPods, professors can be replaced, too, and quite inexpensively — by tape recorders.

Robert Schneider is an assistant professor of theater and dance at Northern Illinois University.