Comments on Technology Gap

• What is technology?
• Posted by Steve , Professor of Economics at University of Mary Washington on November 5, 2009 at 8:00am EST

• If this is the extent of the survey, there's not a lot there to draw meaningful conclusions. 'Technology' is an ambiguous term, and it may mean different things to students and teachers. The real question should be are teachers using technology in meaningful ways to increase teaching effectiveness. I don't use our CMS because it doesn't help achieve the goals of my courses. Does that mean I'm a laggard? Instead, each of my courses has an interactive website build on a Wordpress platform. Each site is different to reflect the unique learning goals of each course. Most students find this a new experience. Does that mean they are ahead or behind the teacher in terms of technology?

• Huh?
• Posted by bevo , Department of Skepticism on November 5, 2009 at 8:15am EST

• The survey makes no sense. The instructor makes the decision whether a class uses course management software. Let's say I have three classes: In one class, 100 students are enrolled and are taught by one instructor. In the other two classes, 15 and 10 students students are enrolled, respectively, and are taught by separate instructors. If I survey the three instructors and the 125 students about the use of course management software in the class, then I will get 33% of faculty use it and 80% of students use it.

  How do you interpret it? What do these percentages tell us?

  As to social networking, how is it suppose to improve learning. That question goes to a bigger issue. Why do we assume that all technology has to improve education?

• Social Networking in the Classroom?
• Posted by Steve on November 5, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• I have yet to see, nor can I imagine, one single way in which Facebook can improve learning. As far as I can tell, students and faculty use Facebook to socialize with their peers. When they're using Facebook they are not looking to learn more about what was covered in class that day. They either contact their professor via email or if they have an ounce of ingenuity they might try and Google.

  Twitter could conceivably allow students to discuss what's going on in the classroom at any given time. I suppose this would allow a teacher to lecture without continuous distractions. Still, I'm not convinced this adds any value.

• I'm not suprised
• Posted by Jessica on November 5, 2009 at 9:15am EST

• I am not surprised at all by this article, cause I see the same thing happening daily. Most faculty seem to be set in their ways about what the limits of technology are - I propose a new idea and they say it takes to much time to do or learn how to do. Even our IS department has this same idea. It's sad but true. How do we get faculty and staff to realize their so much more they can do with their courses? Education has changed so much over the years - we used to just sit down and the teacher fed us information. Now courses are all about collaboration and the students discovering the information. Once a teacher realizes the time of lecturing is over, they will look for new tools to engage the students. As for social networking - this is a way to build a sense of community in your course - not a place to put lecture materials.

• Posted by Barbara Fister on November 5, 2009 at 9:45am EST

• Interesting in view of the fact that the ECAR survey has found, year after year, that students want a moderate amount of technology used in their classes. That could be partly because they think it's used clumsily, but from the open-ended comments it seems that to at least some extent it's because they want to have lots of face-to-face learning. See the latest report here:
  http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ers0906/rs/ERS0906w.pdf

• articles on teaching with social networking
• Posted by Cheryl E. Ball , Assistant Professor of English/New Media at Illinois State University on November 5, 2009 at 9:45am EST

• For those looking for scholarly articles on using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in class settings, here's one place you can start:

  Vie, Stephanie. (2008). Digital divide 2.0: “Generation M” and online social networking sites in the composition classroom. Computers and Composition, 25(1), 9-23.

• Face Time
• Posted by Gas Doc on November 5, 2009 at 11:30am EST

• Faculty discussed putting all lectures and powerpoints on the web for "student-directed learning". Residents not as enthused as expected-- didn't want to be exiled to computer guidance.

  Learners wanted "face-time" with faculty -- heart-warming to find that we as people are a necessary part of their development.

  On the topic of the comments so far, I think they are all correct in some way.

  Certainly a lot of problems with the survey, but it's an interesting place to start a discussion.

• re: Facebook
• Posted by PS on November 5, 2009 at 11:45am EST

• Facebook can have a significant impact on enhancing student learning. Students can create work groups, share documents, take responsibility for their learning, get instant feedback from peers (as opposed to waiting three weeks for feedback on a test), and initiate discussions. Learning is also enhanced through collaboration, not just listening to someone drone on for 50 minutes, three times a week, only to be evaluated three times a semester on a scantron test. Facebook may not be ideal, but it can be an effective mechanism for enhancing collaboration and learning.

• poorly designed survey
• Posted by bsci on November 5, 2009 at 2:30pm EST

• Assuming the reporting isn't flawed, this is a poorly designed survey and the professor/student responses match perfectly. The professor survey shows over 1/4 of faculty do not consider themselves technologically savvy. Students see that more than a quarter of their teachers aren't optimally using technology and correctly say there is a lack of faculty technology knowledge.

  A better survey would be asking students about the courses/professors who are high technology users.

• Meeting expectations
• Posted by Mike on November 5, 2009 at 5:30pm EST

• In my experience, the lack of adequate technical support limits the degree of risk that online instructors are willing to accept in deploying new technologies in their courses. In my courses, I'm the de facto technical support person. It is not surprising that many of my colleagues prefer to stick with familiar or supported technologies that underwhelm the expectations of online learners.

• The Straw Man in the Room
• Posted by CC Prof on November 5, 2009 at 8:45pm EST

• Both Jessica and PS have given a straw man argument about face-to-face education. They both assume that all traditional classes are boring lectures where the students sit passively and consume "knowledge" which they regurgitate onto Scantron exams. This is not how I teach a face-to-face class, and I find it insulting to be constantly told that that is how I must be teaching.

  I teach philosophy, and I don't use any technology in the classroom other than a whiteboard. However, my courses are small in size (under 25) and frequently very interactive. I don't think that it requires technology for a class to be interactive or good.

  Furthermore, I've frequently asked my students if they would like to take the same philosophy courses online and not one has ever wanted that. They all think that the material is too difficult for them to handle without my explanations, interpretations, examples, etc. Students can collaborate all they want while reading something difficult like a text by Aristotle or Spinoza, but without expert guidance, that's pretty much a waste of time, especially at the introductory level.

  Finally, how does the technology help them read better? The most difficult parts of my courses for the students are the difficult primary sources in philosophy. Frequently, we spend an entire class just reading, interpreting, and discussing a few pages. How is technology going to facilitate that sort of exercise? And, if students don't do that sort of exercise, then how are they going to learn to read such texts well?

  I recently ran into a student of mine who had graduated from the community college and completed a B.A. at the nearby university. She thanked me for teaching her how to read difficult texts. She said that it helped her enormously in her upper division English courses. She told me that my philosophy class was the only class that she had taken at the community college that really taught her to read such texts well. Why would I stop doing what I'm doing when it seems to be doing something so important for my students?

• Re:I'm not surprised
• Posted by Mark , Librarian on November 6, 2009 at 5:15pm EST

• It's sadly telling that the student complaining about the technological shortcomings of faculty can't compose a coherent or grammatically correct response to the article.