How to Teach High-Tech

Thursday, November 16, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time

Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an expert on media and technology. He has written several books on changes in today's media culture and how computers and Web technology influence society. A self-proclaimed "advocate of games culture," he believes that new types of technologies can be harnessed to teach students better.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Dan Carnevale (Moderator):
    Welcome back to the Brown Bag. Thanks to Henry Jenkins for agreeing to answer our questions. Let's get this chat started.

Question from Dr. Joann Kroll Wheeler, The Bush School of Government and Public Service - Texas A&M University:
    What suggestions do you have for moving faculty out of their comfort zone? Those who only use technology for PowerPoint in the classroom? Have you found motivators that really work?

Henry Jenkins:
    The best solution is to find ways to work collaboratively. Teachers are going to feel more comfortable if they are working with someone else who brings different skills to the table. And in the process, they learn the value of collaboration, a principle that I think should be incorporated into education at all levels. I know in my own field, humanities faculty think of themselves as lone wolves and don't really work often with other people. They fear moving into spaces they don't know because they don't want to seem to be dependent on other people. So, the first step is to get them to think in a collaborative fashion so they can accept help and at the same time, can contribute their own insights into the process.

Question from David V. Rudd, Lebanon Valley College:
    What are some of the most effective uses of technology to improve individual student readiness and willingness to participate in the classroom discussions?

Henry Jenkins:
    What I have found is that students have very different comfort zones in terms of class participation. For some students, class discussion comes easily,written work is hard. For others, they are happy to share ideas with others through forums or blogs but not face to face, and still for others, they don't want to communicate in public at all and prefer one on one with the instructor through written work. I try to structure assignments so that students have options in how they contribute but all feel some urge to contribute. In many contexts, blogs work well to solicit response to the readings or other course materials before the class session so that students come in knowing at least one thing they want to say. I've also done something as simple as have students send a few substantive questions to the class mailing list before class to jump start discussion.

Question from Mary Ide, WGBH Archives - public broadcasting station:
    Do students and professors/researchers use digital resources differently? Do they have different expectations when they considering using digital resources? For example, do they want the capability of doing more than downloading/viewing, such as incorporating materials into their work or projects?

Henry Jenkins:
    Some people have used the concept of "digital natives" to refer to students who grew up in a world where interactive media and participatory culture are normative and the term "digital immigrant" to refer to people for whom the digital is a second language. This may be too simple. We know that even among college age students there are a range of different experiences and accesses to new media technologies and practices. This is what I call the participation gap and it can have a very real impact on how young people learn. We can't take for granted that every young person already knows how to use this technology.

But to start with, think about the difference between people who encountered digital technologies first in a professional context and those who encountered it as part of their social and recreational life and how this might define their understanding of what it means to be "on line" or what kinds of uses they make of technologies. Think of the difference between someone who uses computers first and foremost as word processors and tends to think of e-mail as an extension of this individualized authorship vs. someone who thinks of computers as social networks or multiplayer game worlds for whom communication is social and communal from the get go.

The Pew Center has found that 57 percent of kids online produce their own media content and roughly half of those share the media they produce with a community beyond their friends and family. How does this change how they think about authorship, community, intellectual property, etc. and how they understand the nature of a research process? There's much more we could say here but this suggests some of the gaps we are seeing.

Question from Clark Roush, small private college:
    Has there been much research on the effectiveness of using newer technologies or are we merely hopping on the "newest thing" bandwagon in an attempt to inordinately acquiesce to what students want?

Henry Jenkins:
    The answer here is yes and no. We are in a discovery period. Many of the claims people are making about new media are grounded in two sources: 1. our observations of how the most visible sectors of youth are engaging with new media technologies on their own kind -- ethnographic work primarily on specific populations who may or may not be representative of the population as a whole; 2. abstractions from what we know about learning processes to the specific properties of new media applications. Both of these suggest that there are some significant potentials for the use of games, podcasts, blogs, and social networks for education.

Many of these claims, though, have not been fully assessed by traditional matrixes -- the technologies are too new, the applications too sporadic, and in the case of educational games, the focus is on developing prototypes that might be tested through educational contexts. We are still some years away from having definitive research on many of these questions. The exciting news is that the MacArthur Foundation has just made a $50-million/5-year commitment to really explore youth and digital learning, an effort to combines many researchers at many institutions in many different disciplines. I think this coupled with the statistics being gathered from the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life and a range of other efforts may start to give us the data that skeptics need to be convinced one way or another on the effectiveness of these resources.

Question from Raymond Linville, Radford University:
    Many of the latest technologies are innovative but also demanding for students reliant upon slow, dial-up systems or limited bandwidth. How best can faculty balance the information load with the speed needed to facilitate learning, and to keep them coming back for more?

Henry Jenkins:
    That's a good question. The MIT environment is very rich in bandwidth but every summer I spend time in the woods in the North Georgia mountain on dial up. I am always frustrated by the shift in how long it takes to do even simple operations and how many of the things I do easily in Cambridge are impossible to do in Clayton, Georgia. This is something that researchers in this area have not spent nearly enough time reflecting upon. It is frankly a blind spot in a lot of the research initiatives that involve new media for schools. I think any assignment needs to start from a realistic understanding of what it is going to be hard for students to do and what it is easy for them to do. One has to factor in the realistic constraints students face in designing activities. And one has to also know -- and inform them -- about resources on campus where they might be able to get faster connections or more expanded bandwidth. I am not sure there's any magic formula there.

Question from Emma Webb, Baker University:
    How do you think that Learning Management Systems have helped and/or hindered the role of technology in the classroom? Do you think it has limited or enhanced creativity in the classroom and how?

Henry Jenkins:
    To be honest, I've had very little experience working with such systems so what I know I know second hand. Here we come to a balancing act: many such technologies do provide structure and support to faculty who are otherwise nervous about using these technologies at all but can become straight jackets for faculty who might have more imaginative ideas about what they want the technology to do.

We are at a transitional point: there are lots of insights we've gained over the past decade about how to use digital tools for learning but we have had a whole bunch of new tools dumped on us in recent years -- from Wikipedia to Google Maps -- which change what we mean by digital technologies. Witness the introduction of the term, Web 2.0 to describe what people are seeing as a paradigm shift in our relation to new media technology and people are already describing Second Life and other immersive game worlds as Web 3.0. At best, most of the learning management tools were created in response to the first wave of digital change and many of them sought to impose traditional practices and bureaucracies on those technologies. What we need now is experimentation and exploration, not standardization, if we are going to take advantage of the affordances of these next generation tools.

Question from Tim Henrich, University of the Incarnate Word:
    It is certainly possible to use video games to teach certain topics. I am wondering that if this becomes an expectation will faculty be going to workshops to learn computer graphics and games to bring to their learning environment or will there be developers that will sell the games? How much will they cost? Do you think students will pay the price to get the software?

How will it be assessed? Professional Board Examinations, like Law, Pharmacy, Optometry, Medicine, Nursing are going to stick with board exams, so do you think playing video games will prepare people in these professions to take the basic science examinations?

Henry Jenkins:
    Big questions, Tim. Let's take them one at a time.

Yes, we think games can be excellent resources for teaching in some contexts. First, be clear that games will become part of a larger range of instructional activities. I see them supplementing other things we do rather than displacing them. I think about the model United Nations as a kind of role playing game that has been part of social studies classes in high school for generations. You don't just turn up and play. You do library work, lectures, group research and discussion, etc. ahead of time and you follow out from it with class discussions, papers, and public talks. It becomes the catalyst for learning and the scaffold other learning gets put upon. Think of computer games in similar ways. That's the assumption behind the work we are doing on the Education Arcade.

That said, where will educational games come from? In some cases, we will be adapting games produced for commercial purposes. Already people are developing curricular guides for the use of games like Civilization in the world history classroom. Some will be hacked to support education. I have a student who discovered you can flip a switch on many games and bring up foreign language rather than English language texts -- a real asset for teaching second languages. Some will be made at the local level -- we've turned Neverwinter Nights into colonial Williamsberg in a project through our program. In some cases, there will be tool kits which allow teachers to adopt game templates to the local particulars of their own areas -- such as work Eric Klopfer is doing here at MIT or the Future Lab is doing at the University of Bristol. In some cases, nonprofits will generate games that will be distributed by free over the web. And in some cases, students might be asked to buy games instead of textbooks. In some cases, these games might actually be cheaper than the textbooks currently on the market.

How do we assess these games -- again, a good question and one which has been explored in much less depth. My current hunch is that different disciplines will begin to review the games in their fields much as they currently trade notes about textbooks or secondary readings which might be valuable. I suspect we will have sites where people trade insights on instructional activities around games, etc.

Could we use games to prepare for exams? Perhaps -- though frankly our current games are better at teaching new modes of thought than they are for drilling and practicing complex content. The most unimaginative educational games are glorified forms of flash cards we use to cram for test. The best ones are what David Schaffer calls epistemic games which teach us how professionals think and work by giving students exposure to simulation tools and authentic real world materials. This will help them master the skills of a discipline or profession but may not be great for test prep.

Question from Dr. Clark Roush, small private college:
    Is there any research that proves students learn better, not are more entertained, via all this technology?

Henry Jenkins:
    Yes -- For a good overview of that research, let me suggest you check out the white paper I recently published through the MacArthur Foundation. It provides an overview of the recent research in this area. You can find it by clicking here.

In the paper, I identify a range of core social skills and cultural competencies that kids are acquiring through their engagement with new media. These skills reflect the best research in the learning sciences and in media studies.

Keep in mind that like any other tool (including books), these new media can be used well or badly, can be used in ways that encourage original thinking and creative exploration or used in ways that are merely boring or distracting. I don't think the answer to your question has to do with the properties of these technologies per se but has to do with what we are doing with them.

Question from Aaron of Mid-Sized Public Institution:
    What is your take on faculty comfort with and knowledge of current and emerging classroom technologies?

Henry Jenkins:
    I suspect it varies enormously. Keep in mind that the generation that grew up playing Super Mario Brothers are just now entering their professional lives -- becoming first time teachers, Assistant Professors, etc. I suspect these people are going to have a very different relationship to these tools than the generation that proceeded them.

Interestingly enough though, some research suggests that entering teachers have spent significantly less time playing games, for example, than other people their same age -- indeed, the rate of gamers is lower than almost any other professional group -- which suggests that they were people who saw themselves as bookish growing up and often sought to distance themselves from rather than embracing new technologies. The result is that even with younger faculty members growing up around digital media, they are still apt to have a less engaged relationship with those technologies than their students.

In any case, part of the challenge is to let students take the lead in the deployment of technologies for learning. You can do this through group projects which pair more technologically advanced students with others who have less technical background but may bring other kinds of skill and expertise to the collaboration. Or it may come from having more open ended assignments which can be fulfilled through media production activities but which may be met in other ways. In my children's culture class, for example, I ask students to produce an artifact for a child and then draw on concepts from the class to explain the rationale behind the project. This combines hands on and conceptual thinking. It can be collaborative or individual. It can be met through any number of different media. Students program games and they write and illustrate picture books. They write plays and they do photo exhibitions. They do radio shows and they design webpages or make dollhouses. I don't have to teach production to have this assignment work -- indeed, I couldn't teach production if I wanted to. My own skills are pretty limited. But I enable students who know how to produce media to draw those skills into their course work.

Question from Bill Reynolds, New Jersey Institute of Technology:
    How might we utilize some of the social networking tools (departmental blogs, more online communications such as these sessions) in the day-to-day work of faculty to make them more comfortable with the technology and thus break down barriers to their increased use of technologies in their teaching and perhaps close the gap between the average faculty and their students?

Henry Jenkins:
    Let's think of several models here:

1. blogs as a way of sharing insights and experiences teaching -- as part of the process of mentorship within a department. Most of us spend far too little time talking with our colleagues about our roles as teachers and younger faculty are often starved for advice from senior members of their department but don't know how to ask. If a department created some blog or wiki that allowed for people to trade positive or negative teaching experiences -- everything from dumb things student wrote on tests to innovative ideas about classroom activities -- I think this would create a context for support for pedagogy within departments. Of course, the same can be done through fields.

2. think about social networking tools as resources within professional organizations to help people find others working on similar problems or who may have resources/background scholars need to pursue their work.

3. think about the use of forums like this one as a way of broadening the kinds of guest speakers you can bring into your classes. I am using skype more and more to connect my students with the authors of readings from the class or real world media makers who have experiences relevant to our content. We are also doing this to expand the pool of outside readers on thesis committees, etc.

4. We use icq technologies to do orientation and recruitment sessions for potential graduate students. This allows us to be responsive to inquiries from students who may not be able to visit campus directly but may want to have exposure to some of the life of the campus. As I pull faculty into participating in these sessions, it exposes them for the first time with some of these new tools while allowing them to engage as teachers with prospective students they might not otherwise meet.

These are just some examples of ways you can build these tools into our normal professional activities.

Question from Paul from middle-sized state college:
    I have a question regarding adoption of new technologies. Do you find it more effective to wait to use new technologies until they are adopted by a large portion of the student community, or do you find it effective to be an "early-adopter" and deliver content in a way that encourages students to use technologies they might not otherwise have been exposed to? Who should take the lead role in technology adoption?

Henry Jenkins:
    I don't think there's any set answer here. Clearly if you use technologies that are not yet part of the lives of your students, you need to spend more classtime introducing them to the technology, what it can do, how to use it. This is valuable especially as a way of addressing the participation gap -- especially in a context where many students do not have a lot of exposure to new technologies outside of the classroom but may be entering a workforce where this is part of their day to day lives. This may be worth doing if the technology you are using is one that is part of what it is like to do professional work in your field. It may not be worth doing if the only reason they are learning the technology is to access material for your class and then for only a smart part of your class activities.

You have to weigh the value of the technology vs. the expenditure of time ramping up for its use. In other cases, it may make sense to tap technologies that students are already widely using -- think here about the use of ipods as a platform for course related podcasts say. Here, you are offering ways that students might better integrate your content into the routines of their day to day life and you are building off of an existing interest or enthusiasm. But even here, you have to be careful about assuming that every student has an ipod or has used one regularly. We keep discovering this in the use of commercial games for education. Even if everyone plays games (not a given), then they play different games on different platforms with different play mechanics and they probably are going to be asked to learn new things to learn to play the game for your class. And so you are back to balancing benefits and costs.

Question from Kristin Thomas, Northwestern University:
    Often the assumption is made that college students are technology-savvy by virtue of their age, even though digital divide research suggests other factors, such as race, gender, and socioeconomic factors, may play a role in computer access, resulting in less competence/comfort with technology.

What can colleges do to ensure that all of our students are "technology fluent," and how can we ascertain what levels of that fluency our students should have?

Henry Jenkins:
    Yes, this goes back to what I was saying earlier about there being both a "digital divide" in terms of access to technologies and a "participation gap" in terms of access to experiences, skills, and knowledge that surrounds those technologies. Growing up in a digital world constitutes a new kind of hidden curriculum. Just as opera records in the home were once determinant of whether students developed languages and learning style that were recognized and rewarded in the classroom, growing up with easy access to new media develops habits of mind that are going to be increasingly valuable in the future. In any given class, there will be students who have had those experiences and those who do not.

This goes beyond technical fluency though. Many schools think it is simply a matter of teaching them how to use the technology -- that's the equivalent of confusing penmanship with composition. To be literate, they need to develop the whole sets of social skills and cultural competencies which surround the technology. My own sense is that the best way to confront that is for departments to take on responsibility for teaching students those skills that are central to their own discipline. So, for example, simulation is widely used in contemporary science or social sciences, yet few undergraduate courses introduce students to how to work with simulations -- how to build them or reshape their variables, how to interpret the outcomes of working with simulations, the ways that they are or are not reliable predictors, etc. So, science and social science teachers need to take ownership over helping their students acquire those skills. By contrast, literature and writing needs to help students engage with new forms of research, collaboration, and authorship, including potential storyboarding tools, etc.

Question from Dan Tonelli, Babson College:
    I'm finding that more and more faculty are getting annoyed with technology in the classroom, with student laptops in particular. How do we convince faculty to take advantage of the changes noted in the chat description?

Henry Jenkins:
    There are two ways to go:

1. think of laptops as simply replacing notebooks -- seeing them as serving old functions in new ways.

2. think of laptops as enabling new relationships to knowledge -- which require us to more substantively rethink classroom dynamics.

Both seem preferable to thinking of them only as distractions. Teachers should respond to any signs that the laptop is getting in the way of the educational process, but they should think creatively about how to take advantage of the opportunities they represent.

In some of our Intro to Media Studies classes, professors have asked TAs to do real time blogging during the lecture, throwing out links to web sites which are relevant to the content being covered. This way if students are multitasking, they may be reinforcing what is being taught rather than being pulled in a separate direction. After all, this is a generation that is used to absorbing information from multiple sources at the same time and often learns multimodally -- that is, by taking in the same information through multiple sensory inputs. So build on that.

You can do things like informational scavenger hunts -- throwing out questions to students which require them to quickly search the web and bring back information. This can become a vital part of classroom discussions -- just as a literature professor might ask students to flip through a book and find a quote.

I am not sure I have a magic way to convince people who are hostile to technology to incorporate it but I do think we need to question our negative assumptions and try to find ways that these tools can be used to enhance rather than distract from learning.

Henry Jenkins:
    If people are interested in these questions, you might want to check out my blog at henryjenkins.org. I have regular discussions of many aspects of new media including lots about their implications for learning. You might also check out the white paper for MacArthur which I mentioned earlier which can be found here or follow the conversations at http://spotlight.macfound.org/. Thanks for your questions. Now I have to stop playing with new technology and go to class.

Dan Carnevale (Moderator):
    That's it for today's chat. Thanks again to Henry Jenkins for taking our questions and providing such great information.

Next week we will not have a chat as the Brown Bag will be getting stuffed with turkey and mashed potatoes in celebration of Thanksgiving. Join us again at 12 noon on November 30 when two Chronicle reporters, Audrey Williams June and Paul Fain, take your questions about executive compensation.

Can't wait that long for an online chat? The Chronicle is holding a Colloquy today at 1 p.m. about the benefits of getting students more engaged with their colleges, leading to improved retention of underrepresented students. Click here to join in.