Should Professors Be Required To Teach With Tech?

An anonymous reader writes "Are professors who don't update their teaching methods like doctors who fail to keep up with the latest ways to treat disease? Or are professors better off teaching old-school? From the article: 'It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn't the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm. Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using 'clickers,' or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly — course-management systems — focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.'"

Comments

Yes.

[olsmeister]

Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.

Re:Yes.

[TheLink]

Until the day you have "Woah, I know kungfu!" tech :).

Re:Yes.

[blackraven14250]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Re:Yes.

[zwei2stein]

Those things are worthless for practical life or career (voting with stuff on interactive thingy) or simply pointless (teachers blog, really?), so i am afraid you do not have much point. It belongs more into elementary school where you teach 10 year olds about wikis and thats about it.

Best teachers that I met were passionate about their subjects, could sell that passion and had at least some charisma and practical experinece to round it all up. Nothing beats making students dig deep into subject because you convinced them that it is cool. And that is something you can not really put into blog post.

In fact, technology stands in way of that and as it adds layers into communication.

Re:Yes.

[Wyatt Earp]

I'm a historian, clickers, blogs, VTC does not enhance a book, manuscript, image or interview with a witness.

As someone who studies the Great Plains Indians and the Northern Great Plains Indian Wars, VTC, blogs, clickers and interactive quizzes will never be important.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what is being written. If you're just putting up notes for the students to copy, then sure; if you are using the board for interaction, powerpoint may not be the way to go. Using powerpoint puts you on rails, so to speak. You have to do things in the order that they come up in the slides, rather than letting ideas unfold naturally. When you write stuff down by hand, you can do it in any order. Ideally you will be able to do both (having both a blackboard and projector) but many modern University classrooms are set up such that deploying the projector means covering up the only blackboard in the room. Moreover, if you forgo writing things down on the board (due to not having a blackboard) and simply talk about important ideas, many students will not bother to remember those things because they have come to expect what is on the powerpoint is all they need to know (or are unfamiliar with how to determine what is important information out of a speech).

Re:Yes.

[tsa]

Indeed. But I don't think going interactive using technology will work well in front of 100 or so people, because the technology is made for facalitating interaction between two people or maybe a bot more, not for having interaction with a whole group. So for interaction with individual people some new technologies might be good, but they will also be very very time-consuming for the teacher. In other words: teachers shouldn't use technology because it seems cool, but because it saves them and the students time.

Re:Yes.

[Wyatt Earp]

If your tech tool is PowerPoint then you are on the road to fail.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worse. Instead of a detailed discussion, these PowerPoint slides give bulleted lists. A projector or a chalkboard is much better, especially for science and engineering courses. In those courses you would typically have read the text and handouts and the lecture would step you through the reasoning. Each step you would have to pay attention to understand the logical progression. This is certainly not true with PowerPoint.

Re:Yes.

[MoonBuggy]

I've found that when lecturers choose to write by hand rather than use PowerPoint, it helps keep the pace at a level where one can fully absorb the information.

Although it's not an inherent problem of the technology, having long, complex equations on pre-made slides does make it all too easy even for very good lecturers to skip over pieces of explanation or leave the students concentrating on one part and therefore missing another. When the professor is limited to handwriting speed (and also a sequential structure) they tend to do a much better job of explaining each part as it is written.

Re:Yes.

[Sigma 7]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Tech is not better if it isn't used properly. In particular, Powerpoint slides basically anchor the focus on exactly one frame; students are forced to do a synchronized note taking and basically have to treat the entire slide as important, and might not have enough time to pay attention to what the teacher is saying. If using a whiteboard, students can copy down major information first, and worry on whether or not they can copy down individual examples.

Some courses require tech, and there's no way around that. Some students may prefer using tech for their learning, and that's their opinion. However, plopping tech unnecessarily is more of a subversion to education.

I've had experience with some tech-assisted education. I don't remember the name of it, but it had an automated system for generating answers to a multiple-choice math question. You could tell the right answer without doing the math required for it, defeating the purpose of the question(s).

Re:Yes.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

It's a tool; it cannot be inherently better. If any tool is misused, because the user doesn't know it, it's worse than a lesser tool used correctly.

If the teacher is better with tech, they should use tech. If the teacher isn't good at teaching either way, or is in any other way equal between the two, you might as well have them use tech. If you try to and force someone who's actually very good at teaching with a chalkboard, etc, to adapt themselves to technology, you will probably screw up their teaching style and their rhythm, and the students won't benefit.

And this IS about the students, so results matter more than what you intended to happen when you made the rules.

Re:Yes.

[Pixie_From_Hell]

Really?

I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.

I teach with a lot of the techniques they're talking about (group activities, hands-on exercises), but I really don't want to use presentation software like PowerPoint. I'm willing to bet a lot that a student that has written down a couple of examples from the board is better off than one who has seen the same example projected on a screen.

Finally, the technology the article mentions include blogs, videoconferencing, and "clickers". I've avoided clickers mostly by teaching in small classes, but I can see their use as instant feedback. But blogs? Do my calculus students really want to read a blog I write?

Re:Yes.

[shrimppesto]

Because delivering information at the highest blazing speeds possible is inherently good teaching...? Seriously?

I have learned a lot more from talented teachers wielding a piece of chalk than from the drones who clicked through 90 packed slides in 50 minutes. PowerPoint is a great way to put your audience into information overload, ensuring that they learn nothing (google "Death by PowerPoint"). Good chalkboard management is much harder to do. I am not saying that PowerPoint can't be used effectively, and I do believe that all of these tech devices add to the learning experience when wielded skillfully and in the appropriate scenarios. But to suggest that teaching by PowerPoint is inherently better? No. No. NO.

It's not the technology that matters. It's the quality of the teaching. Good teachers remain good teachers even when the power goes out. Bad teachers remain bad teachers no matter how much tech (ppt, ARS, web stuff, whatever) they use.

Re:Yes.

[strength_of_10_men]

I disagree. To pharase a quote applied to statistics: some use tech as a drunk uses a light post; for support rather than illumination.

the good teachers will rarely need more than a chalkboard and the best will rarely need even that. But throw all the tech you want at a bad teacher and they will still be crap.

Re:Yes.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

What is a VTC?

Re:Yes.

[denobug]

But I don't think going interactive using technology will work well in front of 100 or so people

That's the point. The key is not so much tech or not. It is the class size and other factors that is the main obstacles of preventing interactions between the teachers and the students. A class of 100 simply doesn't help student to learn math and science properly in my opinion.

Re:Yes.

[dskoll]

Completely contrary to my experience. When I was in university (admittedly in the dark ages in the late 1980's), I much preferred teaches who wrote on the board rather than using slides. It was easier to keep up with them, and watching the board content "develop" over time somehow made the material stick in my brain much better than watching a slide.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah. I don't know what YOU studied, but in most mathematics lectures I attended, students were finding it difficult enough to keep up with the subject as things stood already, even with the professor writing everything on the blackboard and explaining it as he went along.

The professors, FWIW, always seemed to be quite surprised at how students had difficulties grasping even the (to them) simplest and most natural things. Given that, anything that FORCES the professor to slow down is actually a good thing.

Re:Yes.

[Idarubicin]

Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.

What kind of ridiculous job do you have, where your boss communicates with his subordinates through a blog, and where presenters at meetings prepare multiple-choice quizzes that staff have to 'click in' on? Are you Regis Philbin, returning to host the next season of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Of the technologies listed in the Slashdot blurb, only teleconferencing is likely to be important in a modern workplace -- and that is apt to have very narrow applications for most university courses.

Far more useful are the non-technology-centered teaching techniques mentioned: hands-on exercises and group activities. Those actually do much better represent how things are learned and done in the real world.

Re:Yes.

[Eternauta3k]

I had a professor who posted tips for doing homework, books and even music (he recommended we listen to "Lazy" by Deep Purple when studying mathematical successions). Very handy.

Re:Yes.

[blackraven14250]

So, the Model T cannot be inherently worse than the Honda Civic?

I call bullshit. When technology is isolated from the user, it is not equal. You can do anything that has been said here (isolate each element of an equation for ease of explanation, slow down the lecture) with a properly designed powerpoint, while not limiting yourself to the speed of writing.

Re:Yes.

[FatdogHaiku]

I agree that a powerpoint presentation tends to remove some flexibility from the teachers toolkit. There is also a timing factor to be considered. When a slide changes in an instant, the nimble mind tends to sideline whatever mental process was going on in order to focus on the new data. This is normal as the new data may have some bearing on the current process, but I think it can lead to a sort of induced Attention Deficit Disorder. I believe writing things by hand gives the previous information some time to sink in and integrate while the next set of data is slowly being revealed. That's not to say that projected presentation in not useful, but I think it should be at best a secondary mode of communication with students.

Re:Yes.

[blackraven14250]

I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.

Then make your slide so it has each element of that equation you're teaching as a separate element to be introduced into the slide, instead of popping the whole equation at once, so you have to focus on each element. This isn't a matter of powerpoint being the problem, it's a matter of your usage being a problem. You go too fast; powerpoint isn't timed to go faster than you can speak. Click slower.

Re:Yes.

[Luke has no name]

Powerpoints, clickers, and other 'cutting edge' learning tools are great at masking the incompetence of a teacher.

This is not to say that all teachers who use powerpoints are bad; one of the best teachers I had in college (a year ago) used them to provide formulas while he explained them using a whiteboard.
My other two 'best teachers' used only a chalkboard. No content management system, no slides.

What I believe happens, is you have teachers who feel they have to explain less or work less because all the info is already given on the computer. When you have only a blank slate (literally) to explain Calculus or automatons to students with, you must make sure you cover all topics.

Re:Yes.

[Carik]

I disagree. A lot of teachers don't use the board for writing notes, they use it as a scratchpad: writing down equations, drawing diagrams, etc. And frequently they use it that way to answer questions, which is hard to do in powerpoint.

And given how tempting it is to put too much information in powerpoint slides (to the point of unusability), I'd really prefer they stick to the blackboard.

Re:Yes.

[MoonBuggy]

But why bother taking the time and effort to structure a PowerPoint like that when handwriting provides an appropriate pace by itself?

If you really need to make the exact lecture material downloadable (rather than just adding references to supporting sections of the textbook or course notes), do the handwriting on a tablet and make the files available afterwards.

Re:Yes.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

It cannot be inherently worse, because its value depends on the observer.

If you already know how to maintain a model T but not a modern car--or if you're using it as a museum piece, or for riding in parades--then the Civic is no replacement.

The keyword is 'inherent'; inherent qualities are not subjective, and subjective means 'subject to a process'. There are many processes you can use a chalkboard for more easily than a powerpoint, and if you base your teaching process around those thing--especially if that's because that's how you think and operate normally--then replacing them with technology isn't equal, much less superior. Even if you added a tablet for writing on powerpoints easily, you lack the surface space of a chalkboard to show many things side by side, which helps if, for example, you want to relate back half an hour later to something you wrote earlier.

Now, there are caveats--for example, there's technology to capture what you write on whiteboards and allow the students to receive it, possibly with voice data, which helps sick kids or etc. You could argue that that's inherently superior to a whiteboard, but only because it is a superset of whiteboards (and you could argue white and blackboards are equivalent, which isn't true, but close enough).

Specifically any new technology that removes old features in order to add new ones isn't "inherently" superior. It depends on which features are needed, which are used, and how good they are at each.

Re:Yes.

[yankpop]

Then make your slide so it has each element of that equation you're teaching as a separate element to be introduced into the slide, instead of popping the whole equation at once, so you have to focus on each element. This isn't a matter of powerpoint being the problem, it's a matter of your usage being a problem. You go too fast; powerpoint isn't timed to go faster than you can speak. Click slower.

You still have the problem of the information on the ppt, no matter how granularly you organize it, is locked into a set order. Student questions don't come in any predictable order, so working with chalk provides you with the flexibility to incorporate questions naturally into your presentation.

Another problem inherent to ppt is macdinking. Sure, you can make every element of a complex diagaram or equation come up separately, but that requires fiddling with details. Even if you're extremely disciplined and efficient (which in my experience are not qualities promoted by ppt), it takes more time to do this explicitly in ppt than simply adding elements with chalk as you talk about them.

My students have never complained that my lectures go too slowly for them, and I make extensive use of the chalkboard. Even if the terms are already on the ppt (I use both together), writing it out as I talk about it provides visual emphasis. Some students are capable of scanning a ppt slide to learn a concept; others can learn very efficiently from the textbook; some need to hear me explain it, or see me sketch it out. My job is to reach as many different students, each with a different learning style, as possible.

yp

Re:Yes.

[coaxial]

Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.

So you're saying, the professor should simply stand up there, and dismiss every question with "It's on the wiki," which invariably is out of date, incomplete, and too often wrong? Because that's what most of get in our careers.

Re:Yes.

[Attila Dimedici]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

There was a study one or two years ago showing that people are less likely to learn when a powerpoint presentation is used as part of a lecture. So perhaps using Powerpoint or similar is not only not inherently better, it may be inherently worse. Taking the time to write things on the board gives the students time to absorb a concept before the teacher moves on to the next one.

Re:Yes.

[coaxial]

Really?
I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.

As a former math student, I agree. Math definitely works better with a blackboard. It's much easier to follow the steps, and break parts off and derive/solve for things as needed.

Re:Yes.

[Wyatt Earp]

Video Tele Conference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing

Re:Yes.

[Thundercat007]

I disagree completely. Do you know how difficult it is to learn a trade, or to enter a computer field etc when you are tossed into a HUGE room and a teacher flies through powerpoints (on average 50+ in 1 hour) while he goes "ya you don't need this" or "you'll understand that when you do the lab. I personally dislike technology such as Power Point used at the school. It's so impersonal, and the teacher flies through it because he's presented this course 100 times. Where if a teacher has to talk, he knows he is boring people and tries to make it interesting. Then again, 75% of these Power Point teachers don't check their e-mail so when you try to ask questions or hand in assignments via e-mail you are met with "I got 200 students I can't keep track" and you lose out.

Re:Yes.

[jgrahn]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Even half-decent teachers don't spend their lectured silently copying text from a piece of paper onto a blackboard. They talk and write at the same time, and adjust the lecture to the reactions of the students, collect questions, put questions, etc. I bet that's easier done with a blackboard than a laptop and Powerpoint.

Re:Yes.

[dskoll]

I studied electrical engineering, and it was specifically in the math-heavy courses that I appreciated blackboard-writers as opposed to slide-presenters.

Re:Yes.

[N1AK]

No. It's inherently better if it achieves the goal more effectively. If my doctor had the choice of using an old medical practice with 75% success rate or a new one with 50%, fuck new, I'm picking the one that works. If a lecturer is more effective not using blogs (which I don't find hard to believe) then making him use a blog 'to be modern' isn't achieing the goal more effectively.

Re:Yes.

[Beetle B.]

If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Sure. And if you can put it on a Powerpoint, then you're wasting time lecturing. Just type up class notes and tell the students to read them. Why waste 18 hours a week in classes? Just schedule office hours.
[/Sarcasm]

If you've ever taught upper level mathematics, you'd understand the utility of writing on the board. It's so that students can have time to digest what you said. There are other reasons to write on the board, as well.

Re:Yes.

[Tom]

Speed != Efficiency != Quality

Putting the stuff up faster doesn't mean the students will learn more of it. Almost always to the contrary. You need time to digest knowledge, and the teacher writing it up on the blackboard gives you that time.

This is really, really old stuff. When overhead projectes were invented in the 1940s, do you really think it took long until someone thought about using it for training? The army had some success with it, but for stuff that required contemplation and understanding, it quickly turned out that increasing information input does not increase information retain.

Re:Yes.

[Totenglocke]

Agree. As someone who graduated a few years ago and is starting grad school this fall, I think professors should be required to put detailed notes of all their lectures online.

Why? Because that way students can actually pay attention to the lecture. With notes online, students can listen to the lecture and take notes on what seems important without having to worry about missing writing something down because they were actually thinking about the lecture instead of just blindly copying what the professor has on the board. It also means that if a student misses a lecture due to being sick or some other reason, they don't have to hassle another student for notes from that day.

Some of my best classes in undergrad I didn't spend much time taking notes because the professor put the lecture notes online and I could really focus on what the professor was saying.

Re:Yes.

[thomasinx]

That is definitely not the case. With many subjects, just flashing an image on powerpoint does not do a good job expressing the logical progression of the concepts. A good example of this is any high level mathematics. It is *much* easier to follow a clear derivation as it is written with a narration by the professor, than it is to follow a written version in powerpoint, even with the widgets powerpoint has.

If the students could understand the subject just by reading a powerpoint, then there's no reason to have the professor there in the first place. Just email them the powerpoint and tell them to stay at home.

Re:Yes.

[Totenglocke]

I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.

Speaking as a former student, it's way too easy for some teachers to go far too fast using just a chalkboard. The medium used to convey the information is irrelevant. It's all about if a professor goes at a reasonable pace and actually makes sure students understand it (such as asking students questions that are similar, but not identical, to what was just presented). Simply asking "Any questions?" when you're going too fast for the students don't work because virtually no one wants to admit that they're completely lost.

Re:Yes.

[frank_adrian314159]

he recommended we listen to "Lazy" by Deep Purple when studying mathematical successions

Damn. You got mislead. Everyone knows "Lazy" is for integration. "Smoke on the Water" is for mathematical progressions.

Re:Yes.

[Eternauta3k]

He gave us Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin) for integration. That explains why so many people don't get past that course.

Re:Yes.

[91degrees]

Totally agree. I've worked on some of the most sophisticated areas of technology. The main technology I use are computers (obviously), compilers, pen and paper, and email. Oh, and instant coffee. Nothing that wouldn't have been in use 15 years ago.

Re:Yes.

[blahplusplus]

I think the issue is not the technology but rather whether the teacher is capable of using it effectively, I think the biggest problem is that the actual software (if used) needs to be catered to the needs of what is being taught.

Re:Yes.

[PingPongBoy]

If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

New stuff is coming out so fast there's no time to teach about it. When I was a student, it would have been nice to have lectures on the newest thingamajigs but profs just taught the fundamental theory and students were expected to learn new technologies on their own. There are vocational schools devoted to the nitty gritty, but they just target the techniques that are used in paying jobs.

Schools have a limited role anyways. Anyone with a personal goal has to plan our their own learning, whether it is from a school, a mentor, self learning, etc.

Re:Yes.

[i.r.id10t]

Glad I use OpenOffice Impress instead then!

Re:Yes.

[Mr. Freeman]

No, you're not wasting time. Throwing text at a wall is a fucking stupid way of teaching. You're actually wasting time by using powerpoint to display lots of text because you could have just put it IN A FUCKING EMAIL and saved students the time of coming into the classroom.

Any teacher that knows what they're doing writes the stuff on the whiteboard and then explains it. It will take a teacher 10 minutes to write about a paragraph of text because they'll be stopping to explain things. If you think you're getting an education by watching a prof read text off of power point slides then you're a moron.

Re:Yes.

[kklein]

I teach foreign language at a decent university. My need for Powerpoint is minimal, for the same reason. Math and language are things that people need to grapple with slowly and kind of figure out on their own. They are basically new ways of thinking about the world, not lists to be memorized. As such, it's much more important that the teaching be interactive and collaborative.

With a traditional board, if a new word comes up that people don't know, I can put it up on the board, break it into its morphemes, elicit derivations/word family members... All that cannot be done with PPT. Also, teaching 4 sections of the same course (I don't--the most I've ever gotten was 2, and those were halcyon days of minimal prep...) means 4 very different boards, based on what the class needs or is interested in. They already have textbooks and dictionaries. Class time is there to add interactivity and the human component that helps us monkeys learn.

So to address the actual question posed in the title: "Hell no teachers shouldn't be required to use technology in the classroom. It's not necessary or even helpful in many cases."

I use a lot of the modules of Moodle, which I run on my own server. If I didn't have that, class business would be more of a hassle. But in class, I see very little use for most technology invented in the last 100 years.

I like, but kinda suck at, math. I can't imagine learning anything in a math class based on PPT. I want to do things step-by-step with the teacher, by hand, on paper. I also benefit from explaining/having things explained in student groups. It sounds like I'd like your math courses.

Re:Yes.

[MacWiz]

Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers.

I would think that a flat yes or no answer is a little short-sighted.

It would seem as if there are some things which could still be taught without much need for tech -- math, art, music, literature, history, philosophy, for instance. Using technology can make these subjects more effective perhaps, but there is much to be learned in each of these disciplines before you rise to that level.

Re:Yes.

[quadelirus]

I couldn't disagree more. Flashing things on the screen in PowerPoint allows the lecturer to go way to fast and makes the lectures almost useless. There is a reason why I always learned more in math lectures and the only way I learned from CS lecturers was to reread their powerpoint slides after the class. Take a piece of chalk to a chalkboard and you have to write at a speed that can be digested and understood by the attending students. Take a powerpoint and you find that you can easily breeze through way too much information in a single lecture.

Re:Yes.

[stewbacca]

it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.

This is the worst type of logic that leads to failed technology implementation in schools everywhere.

The point of technology is not to teach the students how to use technology. The point is to facilitate instruction and better learning using technology.

Teaching students HOW to use technology is automatic when you make technology part of the delivery method.

This sort of mindset is why there are so many mindless "Microsoft Excel" classes. The point is not to learn how to use Excel because you'll get a job using Excel one day. The point is to under the concepts of spreadsheets and how they help you do your job in the real world.

Re:Yes.

[Grishnakh]

Along the same lines, I think several other things need to change in colleges to mirror modern workplaces.

For instance, exams. When I was in school, exams were done in the classroom, with everyone sitting as far apart as they could, and in complete silence. This is totally unrealistic. To be like a modern workplace, they need to have the exams done in a public cafeteria or similar setting, with lots of loud conversations nearby.

Also, assignments (such as programming assignments in CS) are completely unrealistic, because students usually do these at home in their rooms, where they can have silence, or play music they like, and not be exposed to other people. Instead, programming assignments should only be allowed to be done in busy hallways or cafeteria-like settings, with lots of people standing around having loud conversations. Since this is the environment future programmers will have to program in, as most companies these days have moved away from individual cubicles (or offices) and moved to bullpens or "open work areas", in the interest of "collaboration", they might as well become used to it. If they can't program in that setting, then they should switch to a different major.

Re:Yes.

[Asic Eng]

That really depends on the lecturer. This presentation by Prof James Duane is quite frequently linked-to in slashdot comments: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865 In my opinion - quite apart from the content - it's a very good lecture despite being fast, and he's using PowerPoint.

I would agree that some teachers would produce much better results by abstaining from PowerPoint. However for others it's a valuable and efficient tool.

Its not always needed

[Wyatt Earp]

Tech isn't always needed, for example, my history lectures didn't need VTC, interactive quizzes, or blogs.

Technology doesn't always need to be used.

Re:Its not always needed

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I wouldn't want to take a math (or programming, for that matter) class that didn't have a big whiteboard in the room. Nothing beats the interactivity of a teacher with chalk in his hand.

Re:Its not always needed

[Sir_Sri]

And adding them in takes time to do right, and there is no point in doing it wrong, especially for older profs who won't have time to get it right.

Honestly, none of the 'tech' mentioned in article are broadly applicable. Interactive 'clickers' cost money, regularly don't work, are easily lost, and are a nightmare to manage, there's no easy way to detect mistake with them, and are only useful in large first year type classes. Not that they're really useful there, but they look like they'd be useful so profs try it, and then people like me have to figure out how to cope with them not working regularly. Oh and did I mention they cost money? Which we make students buy, who may not use the stupid thing ever again.

Group activities and so on are fine, if you have time. My undergrad (theoretical physics), most classes were 3 hours of lecture, 3 hours of lab per week (that's time with a TA/instructor), comp sci, where I am now as a PhD student, has 3 hours of lecture, 2 hours of lab in some first year courses and virtually no labs later. Group activities in class are slow as molasses, and waste time you could be well, covering content, which students are expected to know. As always in school, with a group activity it's usually one person or a small subset of a group that actually does the work. They're suitable for lab sessions, assuming you don't need 2 hours and 45 minutes of focus to take data (which happens occasionally but not usually).

Video conferencing is situational. Where it's useful, it's really useful, but normally it's of no value. I've taken courses while physical at one university from another (at University of guelph, course taught at waterloo), and at several places I've been they have 'distance' ed courses. But with enough students you don't want them, on an individual basis trying to conference call with you, you want them in class, focused on the class.

Lots of these 'technologies' you could try, I would call 'distractions', and think are better left out of classrooms. They're distractions in the real world too, but there it's up to your boss to worry about how much time you're actually working or not. In academia we don't want to facilitate the students distracting themselves, that seems counter productive. The technology I use when teaching is I give students powerpoint slides in advance, and then use a tablet to annotate the slides, and work problems etc, (and make corrections) in class, so the students are 'following along' with the notes, they have to at least read them a bit. It's not ideal but there's a lot of stuff in comp sci notes, especially when you're doing computer graphics that you can't reproduce in real time in front of them (actually correct code, diagrams that sort of thing).

Re:Its not always needed

[MoonBuggy]

Note: if your teacher is using chalk in a room equipped with a large whiteboard, it may be a good time to double check their technological competence.

Re:Its not always needed

[icebraining]

Maybe when we finally have an interactive whiteboard that doesn't suck. Not to fill it with gimmicks but to provide small, useful tools like fast cleaning, recording, moving parts of the text/drawings, etc.

Re:Its not always needed

[cp.tar]

Tech isn't always needed, for example, my history lectures didn't need VTC, interactive quizzes, or blogs.

As someone who rather disliked history and several other subjects in high school, I must say I would have been a bit happier with interactive quizzes and suchlike.
Then again, my best history teacher did have interactive quizzes. She’d ask questions, we’d answer, and she’d write up the score on the blackboard.

Technology doesn't always need to be used.

Precisely so.
You can be a great teacher without even resorting to old tech, such as writing. I had a teacher in my university who taught linguistics; he would seldom write anything on the blackboard, and taking notes in his class was nearly harmful: if you took your time to take notes, you could have missed an important detail.

Technology can undoubtedly be useful. One of my university teachers went to the US on a scholarship, so she would pre-record her lectures for us to attend. My Chinese teacher uses Powerpoint masterfully to give us grammar and vocabulary exercises. A friend of mine teaches physics and uses Facebook for homework.
However, teaching is an art. Technology may offer some assistance to some teachers, but forcing teachers to use technology when it is incompatible with their style seems to me an inexcusable waste of effort. And while it is true that modern students expect and want and even need a different approach to teaching, different approaches yet have to evolve. I’d even go so far as to say it is more important for students to use technology than it is for teachers. It’s the students who need it more, who are usually more comfortable with it, and who are more likely to invent some practical use for it.

It is no wonder teachers use technology mostly for housekeeping. A lot of their work is bound in red tape, which they see as a hindrance. If technology can help them deal with red tape, it is the best use they can find for it.

Re:Its not always needed

[Mitchell314]

There is one tech that is needed: a maker that doesn't run out of ink at the most inconvenient times.

Re:Its not always needed

[UnknowingFool]

Do you mean electronic whiteboard? I think there are advantages of a dry erase board over chalk. It's easier to see, colors are better, it's easier to erase, there's no dust, etc.

Re:Its not always needed

[SnowZero]

So you want to be taught by the UPS commercial guy?

Re:Its not always needed

[Hognoxious]

Our creator The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

Re:Its not always needed

[w3woody]

I prefer chalk and chalkboards over whiteboards: less stench.

Re:Its not always needed

[Oewyn]

Note: if your teacher is using chalk in a room equipped with a large whiteboard, it may be a good time to double check their technological competence.

Does technological competency (which in /. means "computer gadget competency") matter if the subject is statistics, calculus, physics, or even algorithm analysis or theory of automata?

Shit, even in Computer Science/Software Engineering, I wouldn't care if my professor hasn't programmed in, say, the latest JEE stack or what not. For subjects like distributed computing, algorithms, or networks, it really doesn't matter.

Gimme a good old' school professor with chalk dust all over his head any day of the week!

*Whoosh*

Re:Its not always needed

[Interoperable]

Exactly. It's altogether too easy for professors to use PowerPoint slides as a crutch. There's no substitute for making a derivation in class with the students following along in their notebooks. "Here's a derivation that I worked out three years ago when I made the slide" just isn't good enough. Even the process of making small mistakes can be a valuable learning opportunity for students, as long as it isn't excessive.

Re:Its not always needed

[geminidomino]

There is one tech that is needed: a maker that doesn't run out of ink at the most inconvenient times.

And maybe one with no damn fumes, plzkthx.

The buzz might be fun for you young'ns, but after a certain age (probably around the same time that 'beer-bonging' falls out of fashion), it just gives you a whopper of a headache.

Re:Its not always needed

[Grishnakh]

> Note: if your teacher is using chalk in a room equipped with a large whiteboard, it may be a good time to double check their technological competence.

Does technological competency (which in /. means "computer gadget competency") matter...

Gimme a good old' school professor with chalk dust all over his head any day of the week!

And how are you going to read anything he writes if he writes it in white chalk on a WHITEBOARD?

Maybe you need to check your own technological competency.

In short...

[kidgenius]

No.

Teachers should not be required to teach tech. The only areas I can see where tech would help things are in engineering or science classes. But even in a science class, you are just using a computer as a data-logger, that's it. Math shouldn't be using tech, as the students should be learning how to do the math without the tech. Computers only help out in crazy high level classes where you have to start doing things like matrix manipulations, etc. Do I care that my teacher does or doesn't have a blog? No, that's silly. If they want to post office hours on a website, fine, go right ahead. Video-conferencing? Practically worthless in the teaching environment.

Re:In short...

[siwelwerd]

Computers only help out in crazy high level classes where you have to start doing things like matrix manipulations, etc.

That's not exactly 'crazy high level'. Matrix Algebra is usually a sophomore level class, and a watered down one at that.

Re:In short...

[gartogg]

My Fiance will be taking her senior level engineering classes remotely, because smaller schools don't offer all the classes larger ones do, and with the sate university system, it makes more sense for the one largest school in the state to offer the elective in biomedical engineering or even the required vibrations and controls classes than to attempt to have it taught for the 2 students a year who want to take it locally.

So there is a slightly less vague support of the argument.

Re:In short...

[nonades]

Video Conferencing practically worthless? You're kidding, right? My college uses a setup that allows a teacher to teach two classes at two campuses an hour apart. Hardly worthless if you ask me. Best part? If you miss a class or have a scheduling conflict, you can get a DVD recording of everything that happened in the class room.

Re:In short...

[Jaime2]

So why did she go to the school that doesn't have the local facilities to teach the classes that she needs to take? We're not talking about a few liberal arts classes, this is senior year specialization classes. I have an engineering degree and I know that the only part that isn't "cookie cutter" is the senior year. By cookie cutter, I mean the foundational classes that almost every engineering specialty needs. She's going to end up with a degree in Biomedical Engineering from school "X", where school "X" isn't known for Biomedical Engineering, instead of the school that actually runs the classes. When she goes for a job, people are only going to look at two things about her education, what degree she has and where it came from. It doesn't even matter if she gets the exact same education as students from the other school, she won't get the same degree.

My opinion has always been that university is all about "punching your ticket". For $50,000, I'd make sure the right hole gets punched.

Re:In short...

[fermion]

Here is the way that it was when I was in school. We had a bunch of stuff available to us. We went to class, took notes, then went out and used whatever equipment was available to help us process what we had learned. It might be typing a paper on the computer, or running equation through mathematica to check them, or processing data in a spreadsheet, or writing a program to simulate an atom, or building a circuit, or running a hypercard stack for latin.

Here is the key. We were expected to go out and get the appropriate experiences for ourselves. We were not stuck in a classroom for 8 hours a day where information and activities were filtered for us, where we were forced to a hands on activity or use a graphic organizer. We had the choice on how to process the ideas.

Furthermore, we had the freedom to learn what we did not know. If you did not know how to program, you had better learn. If you did not know how use some piece of lab equipment, you better learn. If you did not know how to write, you better learn. College students are supposed to be at a place where they can make these decisions, and do not need an adult monitoring their every action

So here is the answer. University should provide a wide range of equipment and opportunities so that students can gain experiences. It is not going to look like high school where student are carefully lead through contrived experiences because college s not high school. A college students should have the ability to learn mathematica or revit without having someone on top them demanding they work. Fifteen hours of classes, even with part time work, still leaves one hundren hours a week in which to experience the resources of the university.

So yes, professors should integrate technology in classes. All professors I have known have done this, and have modeled this. But because it is college, it is up to the student to use it.

Re:In short...

[Idarubicin]

That's not exactly 'crazy high level'. Matrix Algebra is usually a sophomore level class, and a watered down one at that.

Hm. I got my first exposure to matrices in high school, and my university hit all of its science and math students with it again as freshmen, and then we got vector calculus as sophomores.

But...there wasn't anything there that required a calculator, let alone a computer. The problems we dealt with were in real space, so 3x3 (and occasionally 4x4) matrices covered everything we needed - and we learned everything that was important about matrix manipulation using matrices small enough to manipulate by hand.

I didn't need to dust off Matlab/Octave until at least junior year, when I was doing quantum mechanics problems in matrix form. (And manipulating image datasets, modelling the propagation of polarized light, and analyzing and deconvoluting time series of data. Even then, these last three applications were more hands-on laboratory situations, not lecture courses.)

Re:In short...

[w3woody]

I believe, however, that calculators should only be used after one has learned how to do the math long-hand, and graphing calculators only after one has learned how to draw graphs oneself. The number of people I've encountered over the past few years who cannot add single-digit numbers in their head strikes me as remarkable--though I've almost made a profit off of a few of them when they punched in the wrong numbers into the cash register and don't know that intuitively one shouldn't get more than $20 in change from a $20 bill...

Re:In short...

[Helios1182]

And using a computer isn't useful in the teaching aspect. When performing computations on large matrices a computer is invaluable, but when learning the concept it isn't.

Re:In short...

[Grishnakh]

Video-conferencing? Practically worthless in the teaching environment.

Even way back in 1995-1997 when I was in college, they were using videoconferencing so that a professor at my campus could teach classes at another campus 6 hours away in another part of the state.

I've never been part of such a class, so I can't say if it really works that well, but it's not something new to teaching.

Re:In short...

[ResidentSourcerer]

Much teaching, outside of the math related fields can be done well with a a teacher surrounded by a cluster of students.

Having a projector to put images of maps up for geography and history; art and artifacts for cultural studies; rocks & formations for geology has some merit.

Math is not a spoken language (at least not easily) and so a chalkboard is useful.

A white board is the next level up, in part because it is easier to use multiple colours to highlight things.

Certain topics lend themselves to models, graphics, animations. E.g. Stepwise refinement showing how slope is the limit in rise/run as two points converge on a curve. An energy flow chart showing proportions in an ecology. A chunk of programming text. Animation showing the same collision in lab frame of reference and center of mass frame of reference. Functions of multiple variables. (Sketching bessel functions clearly on a chalkboard is tough)

No!!

[fluch]

There is no sense in demanding "tech" to be included for what ever reason! Just because "tech" is used does not make a lecture better.

Re:No!!

[Lehk228]

sure there is when there is $$$$$ or even $$$$$$$ to be made selling "clickers" and other such horseshit to admins who don't undderstand how useless it is.

Re:No!!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Some educational tech is quite reasonably priced(the various FOSS CMSes are really priced to move); but you can pay ~$3,000 to kit out a 24 seat classroom with a set of IR clickers.

Mind you, these suckers are the lowest rung on the totem pole of clicker tech. Almost exactly the same IR setup found in a dollar store TV remote; but with device IDs to allow the receiver to distinguish multiple units.

At least the software is still a pile of unstable crap that takes ~60 seconds to start up on a reasonably modern C2D with a couple of gigs of RAM and crashes uncomfortably frequently...

Re:No!!

[Manip]

Exactly. We've had an entire generation who are obsessed with throwing technology at schools and expecting magical results based on that alone without any real logical explanation as to how that is meant to work. I think technology is just a very cheap, very neat, action that legislators can take, they can say "I've put $100,000 into improving standards at our schools."

I think the article's author just lacks imagination, or is unwilling to suggest things that would actually improve education simply because they would be far too expensive and difficult. For example they could increase teacher pay or introduce a bonus scheme encouraging good teachers but that would be far more costly in the medium and long term than for example a one off $100,000 that looks great on the headlines.

Re:No!!

[Yvanhoe]

The problem is that often, when "tech" is used, it doesn't make the lecture better : it makes it obsolete.

Re:No!!

[icegreentea]

Uh... we use something called i<clicker. It costs like 20 bucks for a wand (and the university store sells them at 30 dollars to students... of course). The support software/hardware is like a hundred bucks per prof or something. Haven't really had any problems with them.

Re:No!!

[IANAAC]

The problem is that often, when "tech" is used, it doesn't make the lecture better : it makes it obsolete.

Maybe if the handout is an exact copy of everything the lecturer says.

If you're going to a lecture just for the handouts/notes, you're going for the wrong reasons.

And if all the lecture consists of is an exact copy of the handouts, the lecturer is teaching for the wrong reasons.

Re:No!!

[noidentity]

Nonsense! Tech should be included in everything. I'm still trying to figure out how to modernize my silverware, though. I've tried lots of electronic improvements, but they keep failing (and shocking my tongue when I eat). Spoons and forks are just so old-fashioned, darn it.

Re:No!!

[dcmoebius]

I can't agree with this more strongly.

Technology can be a useful addition to a lecture, but it doesn't ALWAYS add value.

The most engaging, informative CS courses I ever took involved nothing more than the instructor using a blackboard. Some of the worst on the other hand, came as a result of poorly applied tech.

Re:No!!

[Jorl17]

Indeed! I think I can sometimes benefit from it (as a student and a programmer), but I know many teachers who don't know how to work with computers. I find it unbelievable that here, in Portugal, it is now REQUIRED that you have a "pseudo-diploma" in computers to teach, even if you've been doing so without it for 50 years.

Re:No!!

[Yvanhoe]

I have been to three kind of lectures :
- The lecturer reads the handouts.
- The lecturer tries to "interact" with a 60+ students room and ends up answering the dumbest questions and lose everyone's time.
- The handout is bad enough so that we need to copy what the lecturer says and it takes 2 or 3 years to have a student-made handout that is good enough.

Actually, there was a 4th kind : one teacher who had been a student of Feynman and apparently tried to imitate a lively form of teaching. I can't say that mimicking the behavior of electrons or declaiming propagation equations like a love song is not entertaining : his classes were full. But to learn about the subject at hand, we were lucky he was providing a good handout.

Face it : there is no way to have an efficient 60 to 1 interaction in the physical world. Small exercise classes with a lot of small 1 on 1 or 1 on 4-5 interactions are great and a teacher is necessary there. But teaching a 60 students class ? Surely not.

I went to university to get knowledge. Amphitheater classes were a huge waste of time in my opinion. I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. But hey, I needed a diploma. So please tell, if not for knowledge and for a diploma, what are the good reasons of going to a lecture ?

Re:No!!

[HereIAmJH]

I'm still trying to figure out how to modernize my silverware, though.

That's because you aren't using enough tech. Take all your food and throw in into blenders. Attach the blenders to a computerized paint mixer. And then pump it through a hose to your mouth. That way if you don't get enough cheese with your broccoli you can change it with a quick touch of the keyboard.

I still have some small details to work out though, like course separation. I keep getting mashed potatoes in my pie. Leftovers are a breeze though. I picked up a batch of surplus IV bags. Just pump in the leftovers and toss them in the fridge....

Re:No!!

[Shotgun]

You missed out, Yvanhoe.

There was the "you and 600 of your closest friends" class. It was Psych 101, for me. It had one of the PhD candidates acting as an aid to give a presentation of what was clearly delineated in the book. The class was a waste of time.

There was the "watch the unintelligible professor mumble at the blackboard while scribbling stuff" class. I had the pleasure to sit through that for Calculus 3. I'm still not sure what all that scribbling on the board was. Very little of it looked like anything in the text book.

And who can forget the "professor is a complete moron" class. The class was supposed to be Argumentation and Logic, but I had to listen to racist dribble about how Nicole Simpson was a cheating whore and OJ should have cut her head off (Sorry for the US centric reference, but suffice it to say that it had nothing to do about argumentation or logic.)

Then there were the group project classes that were supposed to simulate real world working environments, except there was not project lead and no peer review. The result is that it was really a "big project for me, because I don't want these lamers busting my GPA" class.

All that said, like you I learned more from other students and books than from teachers. Giving more tech to the professors* will do nothing to increase the transfer of knowledge. It just gives the professors new toys to play with while continuing to ignore students.

*professors, not teachers. Teachers are a different animal, one that tries to convey rather than just present knowledge.

Only results should matter

[CityZen]

Not the methods.

Re:Only results should matter

[mundanetechnomancer]

why the hell is this modded flamebait?

Technology is not the answer

[PrecambrianRabbit]

Teaching is fundamentally a human activity. The best way to ensure quality teaching is to hire good teachers. A crappy teacher who keeps a class blog or uses videoconferencing is still a crappy teacher. A good teacher who stands in front of the class and engages the students using nothing more than chalk and a blackboard is still a good teacher.

Technology is all but irrelevant here, but it's trendy to propose it as a way to improve education because it skirts the real issue of hiring excellent teachers, and allows administrators to throw money at the problem in the form of tech budgets.

Re:Technology is not the answer

[gmuslera]

Technology is a just tool. Knowing how to use it, and knowing how to teach could enhance a lot what you can do as teacher. And there are some difficulties at teaching that are more related to expressing yourself than knowing about the topic, so giving you another way to express yourself could turn a "bad" teacher into one that now could deliver his message. Of course, bad teachers with no clue about how to teach will still be bad. And good teachers with no clue on technology could get a degradation in how they teach if they are more busy trying to make the tech work than trying to actually teach.

In the end, is up to the teacher to decide if the technology could be useful or not. Forbidding or forcing to use tech is bad, but just having the tech available and letting the teacher decide, try, or learn about it won't hurt, and could give good reward at the end.

Re:Technology is not the answer

[AnonymousClown]

Yes, yea and yes!

And to add, the tech just adds more costs. The costs of education are spiraling up - especially college - and adding technology is only accelerate that increase.

The article sounds like they're adding tech for the sake of adding tech.

"Most of those changes are almost impossible to make without technology," he says. "Technology becomes the handmaiden of the change."

I completely disagree with that statement.

When I was an undergrad, microfiche was it. We were taught how to use that. Now everything is digital. So I ended up having to learn that. But didn't change was how to do the research.

The technology is irrelevant.

Re:Technology is not the answer

[FoolishOwl]

This is obviously the correct response.

Elsewhere, there are comments on the relative merits of transcribing slideshow presentations to transcribing notes. Both are indications of bad teaching. The point of having students in a room with a teacher is to have an interaction between the students and the teacher. If they're just transcribing notes, it's a meaningless ritual.

It's not always the teacher's fault that the teaching is bad. There really can't be any meaningful interaction between a teacher with a lecture hall filled with hundreds of students. That said, I remember many college lecturers who would be *irritated* that someone would interrupt their writing by asking a question.

Technical aids are only there to facilitate that interaction. If the teacher finds them useful, good, but there's no sense in using technical aids just for the sake of using technical aids.

Re:Technology is not the answer

[stewbacca]

Technology is a just tool.

It's also "just a tool" as well.

Writing code with pencil and paper...

[Anonymous Coward]

...really sucks. I'd like to see more schools adopt testing methods that allow students to write code during exams the way that code is meant to be written - with a computer!

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[Manip]

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm. What school makes people write code on paper? I've literally never seen that (at least "real code" obviously algorithm design and maths).

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[AnonymousClown]

One day, you'll be working on a project and you'll be in a restaurant. While sitting there, the solution to a problem you've been struggling with will pop in your head. All you'll have is a napkin and a pen.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[blackraven14250]

Middlesex County College NJ, and Devry NJ, just to name two I know.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[Kashell]

oh wait, I have my iPad and iPhone.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[icebraining]

That'll be an algorithm in pseudo-code, not actual code. I had teachers who discounted points to people who got the order of the arguments to standard library methods wrong.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[shrimppesto]

Several years ago, when I was taking an intro CS course at Stanford (106X), our exams were on paper and we had to code our responses by hand. There would be a problem to solve at the top of an otherwise blank page, and the rest of the page was where you could "code." Certain caveats were allowed (no declaring variables, etc.), but apart from that it had to be functional code. The point was to test your understanding of the elementary concepts, and how to implement them in a non-hackish manner. It was hard, but it was also a great mental exercise in design. To be fair, I think we could have done something similar by computer (take away the compiler, or something). I have no idea what they are using now.

From time to time, I still pseudo-code on paper. Helps to sort out an overall approach to a problem.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[PitaBred]

It's quite common in testing situations that you have to write code without the benefit of a computer to validate it before you hand it in. But that's mostly in theory courses, not in classes like Graphics or something where you have to do the projects on a computer.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[foobsr]

oh wait, I have my iPad and iPhone.

Hmm, chances are you don't have the solution.

CC.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[AnonymousClown]

I'm talking about on the job.

Those teachers was a jack-asses who were taking points off just for the sake of taking points off. They've obviously been in academia for too long or have never worked in the real world.

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[`NS]

All programmming was on paper back when I did a programming course in grade 11, 1980, if memory serves correctly. There was only one computer for the entire class, a Hewlett Packard with 4k of RAM. You wrote your program on paper, then put it onto cards to be read by the card reader. You ran the cards through the card reader, and either the program worked or it didn't. You could print out your code, and then it was back to your desk to debug any errors, or to make tweaks. We were only allowed to use the keyboard for entering data which our programs might ask a user for. We tended to have few programming bugs, most often errors were from mistakes on the cards. It was a lot of fun. Oh yeh, get off my lawn :)

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[Grishnakh]

Yep. If they had worked in the real world, they would have made their classes more like modern workplaces. Instead of taking coding tests in quiet lecture halls, they'd move the class to a busy cafeteria, and make you write all your code there, amongst loud and annoying conversations. When asked why, the prof would say it's to "facilitate collaboration".

Re:Writing code with pencil and paper...

[Chowderbags]

And you won't need to write actual code (with correct syntax) on that napkin. In fact, you'll probably skip a lot of formalities to get the general idea down. Unfortunately some professors want you to have correct and full explanations on a piece of paper.

Though I can understand why that helps to make sure that the students actually do understand the material, it can be a huge pain in the ass to write out a lot of code by hand

No

[shriphani]

I've seen profs use tablet PCs and every other dumb tool and the unanimous opinion of teachers and students alike is that overhead projectors and powerpoint are good enough for most teaching. Anything else accomplishes nothing extra but costs more $$.

Re:No

[Jaime2]

Except the PowerPoint part. Back when I went to school, professors used one of the old-fashioned projectors that display whatever was on a clear sheet of plastic onto the wall. They started class with a few pre-printed sheets, a big roll of blank plastic, and a few markers. It was just like PowerPoint, except much more dynamic. It was like a chalkboard, except you could go back to previous drawings. One of the big problems with PowerPoint is that the entire lecture has to be planned out in advance and any deviation from the plan cannot be accomodated by PowerPoint.

Re:No

[shriphani]

Agreed. Powerpoint brings its own problems to the table but it has permeated instruction so much that it is something we have to embrace. Using the overhead projectors (the ones that use clear plastic sheets) are the best way to teach.

Silly

[icegreentea]

Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster. While in surgery, newer procedures are almost always a measurable improvement over previous procedures in some way (time, cost, success rate, whatever), I feel it that its simply too difficult to quantify the 'success' of various techniques. Especially when the success depends so much on the course material, professors, and the students. For example, I could hardly imagine Calculus I being improved with video conferencing or blogs.

What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring? If anything, I believe there are entire concepts which are better taught on a chalkboard, not with powerpoints or slides. Things where the process matters (like integration, or physics problems) where simply seeing the steps laid out before you seems to miss out on some of the 'magic'. I really feel this because I've just completed a term where I had a calc prof teaching all on chalkboard, and a physics prof who had most of the material laid out in powerpoint, and would fall back to the board when asked a question, or having to elaborate.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging profs to try something new. Provide them with resources and information on new ways to teach. Don't force them. You'll likely just end up with a bunch of profs pissed off at the university admin, and classfuls of bored students.

That said, I do find the use of the clickers really useful. I do wish more courses/profs used them.

Re:Silly

[Backward Z]

Requiring Professors to teach by certain techniques is certainly going to lead to disaster...What benefit would forcing professors to teach integration with powerpoints bring?

I want to address this. Full disclosure: I worked for several years as an A/V tech at UC Berkeley.

Your first sentence is spot on the money but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Professors are like petulant children when it comes to learning new technology--it's as if they're proud that they don't know how to operate a VCR or speak into a microphone properly.

But the part that you're missing here is webcasting. At Cal, webcasting is becoming a huge huge thing. The professors don't like it because it means fewer students show up for class (if I were a student I'd appreciate this because it would mean more access for me) but the administration LOVES the idea. It goes something like this: "If all of the students could just stay home and watch the lectures online then why are we paying to heat the lecture halls?"

This is the way things are moving. The webcasting program at Cal, despite using stone-aged RealMedia technology, has been astoundingly successful. We'd get emails from the other side of the world thanking us for what we were doing (and complaining that the professors didn't know how to speak into a microphone properly).

What I'm trying to say is, whether or not the professors like it, this is the way things will be trending in the next generation. Professors that don't know how to interface with techonology will become relics.

Not like this will happen anytime soon--by and large the profs get their way. It was just a year ago that we finally discontinued support for SLIDE PROJECTORS for chrissakes. I should only hope that they're phasing out the VCR's by now.

In the end, though, the people who suffer when the prof doesn't want to learn the tech are the students and even moreso the people who are watching the webcasts online for free--people who possibly cannot afford a proper education or live in a part of the world where such a thing is unavailable to them. To them, a professor that can't take ten minutes to figure out where to pin a lavalier mic on their lapel should be nothing short of an insult.

Bad analogy alert...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The "doctors" analogy seems dangerously weak. In theory, when a new drug/surgery/device comes out, it has undergone an FDA approval process, which includes a bunch of safety and efficacy testing. The process is imperfect, and can be marred by relatively small sample sizes, or shenanigans on the part of companies who really want to sell new, shiny, patented stuff, rather than generic old stuff; but it theoretically provides a degree of assurance that newer offers at least some improvements, at least in some situations. Therefore, a doctor who isn't aware of the new stuff is pretty clearly inferior to one who is.

Educational technology, on the other hand, is required to undergo precisely no testing of any kind(aside from basic electrical safety and not catching fire type stuff), and frequently receives very little. The vendor is always terribly enthusiastic, of course, and there may or may not be a study or two of dubious quality; but the adoption is driven much more by optimism and hype than by data. Since there is pitifully little testing, the idea that newer=better is largely nonsense.

As TFA notes, certain technologies that are more or less unequivocally superior have been widely adopted by all but the most fossilized. CMSs beat the hell out of distributing photocopies and shuffling paper. They have largely replaced the distribution of photocopied stuff, with the common exception of the near-ceremonial "handing out of the syllabus on the first day". Similarly, computers are largely superior to typewriters for working with text, and both are more legible by far than handwriting, so most documents are now written on a computer(though, for markup/editing/grading, handwriting is still competitive).

If you are going to "require" something, you had better have good reason to believe that it is the better way to go.

Re:Bad analogy alert...

[UnknowingFool]

I agree. There should be a difference in a professor embracing new information and embracing new technology. They are not the same thing.

No.

[Manip]

No. There has been tons of research in this area and none has been very positive to technology.

On a much more personal and anecdotal note, I have taken classes at a "modern" college that did everything using IT (*in an IT course no less) and I've also taken courses where they used a black/white board, and I learned much more in the latter. Further, I believe that a teacher who has a poor grasp of the technology they're using just should skip it - nothing worse than some idiot putting 100% of their course material into PowerPoint and assuming that is enough.

Re:No.

[supercrisp]

My wife does research in instructional technology, and I am, as you might guess (since I'm on /.), a nerd. We both keep up on the research on the value of "tech" in teaching, and the results seem to suggest that technology is not so helpful in the classroom. Maybe this is because it's still often a distraction because teachers don't know how to use it well or because it's often still quite clunky to use. That said, one thing is certain: all the students (and people on slashdot) who say they can multitask with technology are very likely wrong when it comes to any task that requires recall or concentrated thought.

I am an advocate of using technology in the classroom when it is appropriate. I think many popular uses are not appropriate. Clickers are of dubious value. Online tech often encourages bad forms of testing, but it's very useful for unevaluated, "low-threat" fluency-building writing--BUT the pressure is always on, from students AND administrators to offer grades for all work. Admins need to demonstrate teaching's impact, while students don't want to work that doesn't have "count."

Tech is useful when it's very careful integrated into a lesson plan and sparingly used. But the main focus these days is on using tech to increase the ratio of students to teachers and/or classrooms. And a lot of the people who want to use or advocate for tech either are a) somewhat over-enthusiastic people who want to use computers for everything, including dessert topping and floor wax, or b) older people who are doing it for appearances. You end up with a lot of people using class time to teach the technology instead of the subject, or (worse) older people thinking it's cool and useful to convert all their old lesson plans to PowerPoint slide with snazzy transitions (they then spend 15 minutes of each class trying to plug the video cable into the Ethernet port).

Finally, and here's the kicker for me: tech is costly, either to students or to the institution. If we're going to spend money, it would be better spend on teachers because we no without any doubt that students benefit from greater direct access to faculty. But that's so old-fashioned, and you can't say cyber this and 2.0 that on the fundraising brochures if you're just hiring faculty.

Note: Why do I initially write "tech"? Because we always mean electronics. The chalkboard and whiteboard are tech, and they're often under-utilized or poorly utilized by teachers. (I realize I'm sort of blowing my ethos because I'm too lazy to get real paragraph breaks. But it's Sunday, and I'm feeling entitled.)

One more thing, seriously, administrators, 1995 is calling; it wants "cyber" back.

Re:No.

[stewbacca]

You sure your WIFE is the one doing the research and not you? I'm in the same field (instructional technology), and the points you make took me several years (and lots of tuition) to come up with.

I was able to find just as many studies that show good tech implementation indeed improves learning better than standard instruction. Unfortunately, most of the benefit is lost at the hands of inept instructors. The "just stick it in PowerPoint and call it tech", or "make them look it up on the Internet" mentality is still far to prevalent.

There's a curriculum movement that I support called I2 (Integrated-Interdisciplinary). Students take two classes, say Spanish, and Technology, then use the stuff they learn in the technology class and apply it to their Spanish class assignments. Students generally do one project, but get two grades--a Spanish grade for the content of the Spanish, and a tech grade. it can be done with ANY subject--Physical Education and a spreadsheet class (track calories, scores, whatever), Music (AV class to record performances), Math (err, I'm not a math person, but whatever software you need to type Math in word processing?)

Re:No.

[Grishnakh]

Maybe this is because it's still often a distraction because teachers don't know how to use it well or because it's often still quite clunky to use.

It doesn't matter if it's a distraction. Students SHOULD be distracted, because that's more like the workplaces they'll be working in. If they can't concentrate with lots of noise and loud conversations around them, in addition to being interrupted constantly, then they need to find another profession.

That said, one thing is certain: all the students (and people on slashdot) who say they can multitask with technology are very likely wrong when it comes to any task that requires recall or concentrated thought.

Right, so those students need to be flunked so they'll move on to another major so that only those who can multitask and concentrate will graduate. Since that's the workplace they'll be working in, it doesn't make sense to graduate people who can't concentrate with a lot of distractions.

No

[grasshoppa]

Professors should teach with whatever medium they feel most comfortable with. As a student, I am there to learn the concepts and ideas they are providing. Anything that gets in the way of that transfer of knowledge is a bad thing.

Let's reverse the question

[Culture20]

Are students who fail to learn via old school methods only in school because the tech helped them get there? Are they only capableof learning one way? Sounds like they deserve to fail?

Nah

[jmcvetta]

Specific teaching technologies should definitely not be mandated by the university administration. This is not so much because I doubt the utility of all new teaching technologies -- some are no doubt quite useful, others complete garbage -- so much as because I severely doubt the ability of educrats to mandate the actually-useful tools.

does tech help, or is it just a toy?

[petes_PoV]

Are there any studies that show students who are taught with lots of technology actually get better qualifications?

If not, and if it doesn't make the teachers' lives any easier, what's the point?

They should be able to

[gweihir]

But also be able to use a blackboard. For some things the latter is just a lot better. Teaching with prepared slides (no matter what type) carries a huge risk of not saying enough or going though the material too fast. I have seen countless bad lectures and talks that resulted from this. If you write in real-time, e.g. on a blackboard, you not only have good timing, but you actually need to understand what you are talking about. Too many people using prepared presentations do not and waste their audience's time.

So, no, do not force teaching style on anybody. It is a very bad idea.

I'm going with mostly no

[NotSoHeavyD3]

I mean the one tech I think they should use is a video camera or similar device to tape the lecture but then again that would probably encourage stupid students to skip the lecture and watch it later. (But it would be a boon for us that went to the lecture, missed a point in the lecture and want to go back and see it again.) Other than that most of the time I don't think the tech would help.

Profs should use what's best for them and students

[techmuse]

Different profs have different styles of teaching and communicating. Different technologies lend themselves well (or not) to different courses. PowerPoint slides work only so long as they are distributed to the students, but often cause the class to be taught too fast to take detailed notes. A blog wouldn't be useful at all for many courses. Would you find a blog on Roman history useful? What current events would the prof be responding to? How about a course on physics or compilers or crystal structures or genetics? How exactly would a blog help there?

Are the students technically inclined? If not, using technical resources may hurt more than it helps.

What really matters is if the prof can give clear explanations that students who learn in different ways can understand, whether or not the course is paced appropriately for the students, whether it is sufficiently advanced, but not so advanced that the students can't comprehend what is going on, whether assignments teach the students more of what they need to know, whether grading and feedback are timely and helpful, etc. It's not about throwing the latest technology at the students. That doesn't help at all unless it actually enhances how the students learn, or how effectively the prof can deliver the material!

Technology is only a tool, not a cure

[Beetle B.]

Whether technology can be useful depends entirely on the course and what it's trying to teach. I've taken courses that were taught very well with Powerpoint. Yet those same courses could be taught as well using traditional means. Some courses would really suck with Powerpoint, while yet others could benefit.

Wikis? Blogs? Again: Maybe. Depends on the course.

One thing I always hate about these discussions is the issue of students getting bored/falling asleep is always brought up. There are two sides to the coin: Yes, the professor should make all attempts to make the class interesting. And yes, the student should be flexible enough to learn from different styles. If he/she is falling asleep, it's not a given that the professor is to blame: Education is not a spectator sport.

More importantly, whether they fall asleep or not has virtually nothing to do with technology.

Finally: The article fails to mention the most important point: In today's (US) universities, professors have no incentive to become better educators, and are more interested in getting their next grant.

Re:Technology is only a tool, not a cure

[LinuxIsGarbage]

If he/she is falling asleep, it's not a given that the professor is to blame: Education is not a spectator sport.

Some professors don't do anything to make it interactive (eg: ask questions), and aren't very receptive or useful to questions being asked, causing those classes to essentially become spectator sports.

Re:Technology is only a tool, not a cure

[Beetle B.]

Some professors don't do anything to make it interactive (eg: ask questions), and aren't very receptive or useful to questions being asked, causing those classes to essentially become spectator sports.

I never claimed that there aren't bad professors. My point is that students falling asleep in the class is as often a "student" problem as it is a "professor" problem.

Re:Technology is only a tool, not a cure

[michael_cain]

Some professors don't do anything to make it interactive (eg: ask questions)

Many years ago, as a freshman in honors calculus, the professor had a habit of pausing in the middle of a proof, looking across the shining young faces, then settling on me and asking, "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" Often with the stick of chalk offered. Other people got asked as well, but I seemed to be the favorite victim. More than one of the other students asked me why Prof. Lewis hated me. "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" was the subject of occasional panicky nightmares for a decade. At one point some years later, I did get a chance to ask, and Prof. Lewis' response was "There was a mathematician inside, trying to get out, and you needed a bit of prodding."

Powerpoint slides might have saved me that particular bit of stress. But the "mathematician inside" might not have gotten loose, either.

Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[selil]

As a technology professor I'm going to say it. Tech in the classroom can be as debilitating as boring lectures. PowerPoint can be a crutch. Poor teaching can't be fixed by cool tech. I've got a million dollar lab full of tech, but if I put my students to sleep who cares?

I use AdobeConnect, instant messenger, a blog, CITRIX, a variety of open source tools, and a bunch more but I am a technology professor. I don't use powerpoints with bullets (presentation zen?) and I hate snore fest lectures more than my students.

Telling professors to use tech is like telling a mechanic to use a crescent wrench. What is the context of the learning environment and what are the learning outcomes? I tailor my educational strategy to the educational outcomes. Critical thinking skills, don't need flashy graphics if linear processes are the desired result.

Heck. I'd be happy if my students simply read the text book, and additional reading. When I assign a reading on the web half the time I get complaints that I didn't print it and pass it out in class. Some of my students say 100 pages of reading a week is to much homework. These are the same students bragging before class that they spend 50-60 hours a week play the latest MMORPG.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[spiffmastercow]

100 pages a week is too much. In a 16 week course you'd need a 1600 page textbook. The best classes usually cover no more than a couple hudred pages of dense material.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[PitaBred]

Just remember that you are not their only teacher. That's the thing that always got me in school... every teacher said "it's not that much!" but when you add it all together (and you're working a job through high school) it's a hell of a lot of work. 100 pages of reading a week isn't that much. But if I have to do 700 pages of reading each week because I have 7 classes? That's two novels a week.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[blueg3]

Depends on the information density. A chapter of Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics is something like 30-40 pages and is too much for one week. A Harry Potter novel is something like 800+ pages and is light reading for a week.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[Idarubicin]

Some of my students say 100 pages of reading a week is to much homework.

It depends on the reading. In an English course, that's a trifling amount. In a science course with densely-written prose that may need to be reread multiple times (or have proofs and analyses reviewed and rederived by the the reader) that's a pretty steep demand. Is this stuff that just needs to be skimmed, or is it stuff that needs to be closely read? It is technology news, or technology specifications? Are those 'printed from a website' pages, with a large font and lots of pictures, or are they 'telephone book' pages, with tiny print and no whitespace? Is there significant overlap with the in-class material, or are they in virgin territory? Are they software manuals rich in repetition and full of 'this-page-intentionally-left-blank'?

When I was in school, the normal full course load was five courses, each with three hours per week of lecture time, plus another five or six hours (varying greatly from term to term) of hands-on laboratory courses. Throw in another couple of hours of mandatory 'tutorial' slots on top, and we're at between twenty and twenty-five hours of 'you must be here' per week. If we assume that each of those hours in class has an associated hour of work outside of class, then the students are at a full-time (plus a bit of overtime) level of 40 to 50 hours of weekly work. (And don't forget that some of them will have ten or fifteen or more hours of part-time paid work on top of that, so that they can pay rent and eat.)

So, let's say your three-hour allotment of weekly lectures can legitimately draw an additional three hours' worth of out-of-class work. If the students spend two minutes reading each page (and reviewing, and making notes on the material), then they're at two hundred minutes per week You're already twenty minutes over quota, and they haven't even looked at the final group project, their assignments, or studied for their midterms or exams. At a brisk minute per page, they're left with just eighty minutes in which to do all of their other assigned work for your course.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[Xanthas]

But if I have to do 700 pages of reading each week because I have 7 classes? That's two novels a week.

As a university professor, I take exception to this. 700 pages to read in a week is not too much, when that is (part of) your full time job. No one said university is easy, and trying to become proficient in seven different topics is very difficult. Note that I do mean proficiency, not mastery--mastery is certainly not possible in almost anything in a single course.

If you can't read the assigned material in a week, you should really consider dropping your course load to a number that is attuned to your level of ability.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[PitaBred]

Wow. For a university professor, you have pretty shitty reading comprehension. Didja note where I said "high school"?

As for university classes, I have(had) no problem doing the required work. When one class takes 4-5x as much work for the same amount of credit as other classes is when I take exception. Especially when it's in the same department as the others. THAT is when shit is out of line. Get off your high horse.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[MattskEE]

As a university professor, I take exception to this.

And as a university student, I take exception to this ;-)

It depends far too much on context to make this sweeping generalization that a student can read 700 pages of material in a week. I'm an engineer, and one of my hardest courses in grad school covered about 200 pages worth of textbook material over 10 weeks. One of my roommates is a controls engineer (and a very smart guy), and he can spend a week studying a single 20 page journal paper. Maybe you're simply referring to *reading* while I'm talking about *understanding*. It is possible to read 700 pages of technical material in a week, but not possible to understand it, unless it is already below your skill level.

There are courses like "Introduction to Psychology" (not to pick on the field, just the teaching methods I've seen) where all you have to do is skim the textbook and regurgitate key facts on a multiple choice test. I might have read about 50 pages a week for that class, probably in an hour or two, but I don't feel like I learned very much. And I don't feel like that's a useful way to teach a class.

700 pages/week might make sense as say an english student, where you need to read lots of novels/stories/etc but aren't writing an in-depth paper on each and every one.

So don't get arrogant and tell GP that he's just taking too many classes, because in many fields 700 pages a week is way, way too much.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[ralphbecket]

Ha ha, when I was an undergrad my friend's supervisor for one course told his students, "Most supervisors do not realise you have other courses to study for and expect you to spend 100% of your time on their course alone. I do understand, and only expect you to spend 80% of your time on mine."

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[Xanthas]

Actually, even in computer science, there are many sub-fields where 100 pages of reading and comprehension a week is entirely warranted. Off the top of my head, security, software engineering, programming languages, operating systems (depending on priorities), robotics, vision, and artificial intelligence. Granted, I'd have trouble coming up with that much reading for introduction to programming (where all that time should be spent actually coding) or algorithms (where it should be spent deriving), but I digress.

And I stand by my earlier observation that if one's course load is too much for them to handle, they should drop back. Some topics (even within a discipline that also covers "easier" topics like you mention) require a lot more work than others to gain proficiency. Other times, people may not have learned the necessary starting material. This is why we have prerequisites, but from experience, if students did not see it as useful when they took it, they might have passed the pre-req without the required degree of understanding. This leaves them scrambling to catch up the whole time they are in a course that depends on earlier material.

I didn't mean to come off as arrogant. Gaining real understanding is very difficult. And all of us occasionally take on too much. Sometimes you just need to recognize this and limit yourself to what you can handle. I got my butt kicked a couple of times before I learned that lesson myself.

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[The_mad_linguist]

My highschool, which made you take six courses each semester, expected you to do 1-2 hours of homework each night for each course.

Mathematically impossible requirements say what?

Re:Tell /.'rs no tech is dangerous

[gatzke]

What, you can't read two novels a week?

The question is a two parter

[mwvdlee]

The summary asks two separate questions and then somehow magically links them together as if both questions can only ever by answered by the same answer.

Q1: Should professors use technology to teach?

Q2: Should professors stay up to date with teaching methodology.

Teaching methodology != technology. It may do in some cases, but it won't in most.

p.s. AFAIC, A1=No, A2=Yes.

Re:The question is a two parter

[ocean_soul]

Indeed, this are two completely unrelated questions.

Re:The question is a two parter

[Lemmy Caution]

Even Q2 I would answer with a "maybe."

If you are studying 19th century philosophy or Russian literature or such, an instructor who has been working on a handful of lectures and seminars over his or her entire career is going to be a lot more interesting than someone experimenting with methodologies. The best education is an engagement - a relationship between minds - and cultivating that relationship is a slow, interior process.

Re:The question is a two parter

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Even Q2 I would answer with a "maybe."

If you are studying 19th century philosophy or Russian literature or such, an instructor who has been working on a handful of lectures and seminars over his or her entire career is going to be a lot more interesting than someone experimenting with methodologies. The best education is an engagement - a relationship between minds - and cultivating that relationship is a slow, interior process.

I've had professors working on the same lectures over their entire career. It was still as unengaging in year forty as it was in year 5. Of course with tenure they didn't have to give a shit.

Newer professors, usually without tenure, I found made more of an attempt at being engaging, and would try things out. Some things might not work well, but they would learn from the experience and apply it to the following year.

Re:The question is a two parter

[dcollins]

Actually, I would say that they are related in that both ("new tech/ new methods") are generally foisted on schools as a scam ("sell new tech/ sell new books"), and both generally lack any research evidence that they improve student learning outcomes. Furthermore, they're becoming linked in practice, in that book publishers tie new-method books and technology products together.

Re:The question is a two parter

[TheGothicGuardian]

Teaching methodology != technology.

Sure it does. Teaching methodology. See?

Re:The question is a two parter

[Lemmy Caution]

I hate this idea that lectures should be "engaging." They aren't forms of entertainment. If you happen to be entertained, that is a tiny little plus.

Reminds me of a cartoon described in this article:

Re:The question is a two parter

[dcollins]

Supporting my own post with a quote from the New York Times today:

Publishers have started de-emphasizing the textbook in favor of selling a package of supporting materials like teaching aids and training. And companies like Houghton Mifflin have created internal start-ups to embrace technology and capture for themselves some of the emerging online business.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/technology/01ping.html?_r=1

Regarding doing more things online

[Aboroth]

Maybe it is just me, but the students who want everything online, including the course notes and videos of the lectures, overwhelmingly just support that idea because they don't want to go to class. Sure, maybe they actually want to learn (unlikely), and maybe they are actually great self-studyers with lots of motivation (even more unlikely). I'm not even saying they learn anything from going to class, or that going to class is inherently better. All I'm saying is that they will support anything that means less hours physically in class, and haven't put much thought into whether or not it is actually better for them. They just see an opportunity to use tech buzzwords to support the agenda of sleeping in.

Then there are the people who simply push stuff with buzzwords so that they sound smart and feel like they are accomplishing something. They aren't thinking much about the repercussions of it either.

I'm not saying there aren't benefits to tons of tech and everything online, but neither category of person listed above really listens to any negatives, and will actively avoid intelligent discussion on the topic. So it is hard to take them seriously.

Per-course mailing list

[klapaucjusz]

There's just two medium-tech tools that I use for my courses:

• the course's web page, where I publish my lecture notes (PDFs) and any useful information (including project deadlines);
• the per-course mailing list, open to the lecturers, the TAs and the students. This is used both for official announcements (the lecturer is hung-over and won't be able to come), for unofficial announcements (some students are going for beer tonight, everyone is welcome), and for class-related discussion (does anyone understand what's written on page 27 of the lecture notes?).

Two years ago I stopped printing and distributing the lecture notes, since they are available on the web page. Nobody complained -- some students print them out on their own, but most of them are happy to just consult them online.

dumb

[ralphdaugherty]

This is the dumbest thing I've seen lately. Figures it's from education activists. I didn't think they could screw things any more than they have but apparently they're still at it.

Blogging? Taking tests with clickers? These people are pathetic. Please don't tell me we're paying for these a$$hats.

  rd

Re:dumb

[ocean_soul]

Agreed!

Re:dumb

[shrimppesto]

"education activists" == "teachers who do not actually teach"

Re:dumb

[bgoffe]

As a college professor (economics), I take pretty seriously the work of physicists like Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001, U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities), 2004; and currently associate science adviser to the President) and Eric Mazur (Harvard). They and many other serious physicists have carefully studied how students learn in their field. They've found that things like clickers, correctly used, and simulations can indeed aid learning in deep ways. Here's some links to summaries of their work: http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf (Mazur -- short, in the journal Science) http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (Wieman -- longer) Here's a key part of the primary literature; it has more than 1,000 cites: http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf (the most frequent method of "interactive engagement" is clickers). Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.

Re:dumb

[ralphdaugherty]

Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.

      Thank you for the insight and links. I looked at Mazur's "Farewell, Lecture?". Certainly I agree that a question response dialogue is more engaging and useful than a dry lecture, although I have never been shy about asking questions anyway. And professors trying new techniques and reporting on the results if educational activism is activism of the most welcome kind.

      However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?

      Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker. A clicker alone to periodic questions is merely mildly entertaining / annoying depending on perspective and I do not think more useful as being "interactive" and "tech" as the OP of this thread puts it than traditional "pop quizzes" in the lower grades.

      Still, efforts of professors to be more effective are commendable and we are not paying for that, the students are. The education activists I am referring to who want to make half-baked ideas such as clickers and blogs mandatory we are usually on the hook for.

  regards,
  rd
   

Re:dumb

[bgoffe]

However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?

Yes and no.

It was an intro physics class, but at Harvard (with many pre-meds in the course; not sure if majors or not). Certainly the students were motivated and had had physics in high school. The point is that students could do calculations, but they didn't understand, in a fundamental way, Newton's Laws (kinda the point of an intro physics class). If you really don't understand them, then you haven't learned what that course is all about. Here's my favorite quote when one of the students was given the assessment with that question, that asked about everyday phenomena, like colliding cars and trucks: "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" (again, a Harvard student taught by someone who was regarded an excellent lecturer). When the results came back on the assessment, sure enough, these students largely didn't understand the fundamentals.

In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI and http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990 Mazur (sorry, both are quite long) describes the same thing with circuits -- students could do the math, but couldn't describe what would happen if a light bulb was pulled out of a simple one. In short, they didn't fundamentally understand the concepts. There is a large literature in physics education research that on a fundamental level students don't understand the key concepts. One leading paper on this (the leading one?) is http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/fci.pdf (some 1,000 cites from the scholarly literature) . It makes for sobering reading.

Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker.

Rather than "dumb," this literature finds that such techniques leads to students who (i) can do calculations as well as those in a traditional class and (ii) have a better fundamental understanding. This really isn't too surprising as they're actually doing physics with a lot of frequent feedback from their clicker responses and discussions with each other to carefully crafted questions designed to help ferret out their common misconceptions. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (quite short) where students are much more engaged than in the typical lecture. Part of that is students committing anonymously to a question (via clickers). With no questions, there is a strong temptation for students to say, "Yeah, I understand that." Many times, in fact, they don't.

Yes, the clicker is just a means to an end (shouldn't all technology in teaching be that?) -- getting students to commit anonymously to an answer. As Mazur says in http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf , you can get the same basic results with cards that students hold up and where they can't easily see each other's cards. As you say, and I'm sure that Mazur agrees, key is the discussion with other students and with Mazur.

One more direct role for technology here is that students at first do on-line homeworks that are used to guide the selection of ques

Re:dumb

[ralphdaugherty]

Pretty much everything in this discussion has been assertions.

      point taken. The proof is in the results, so to speak. Lots of good info you've shared.

  rd

Using what works is what matters

[timholman]

As a faculty member who has been involved with web-based coursework, online lectures, and the integration of laptops in the classroom, I am less than impressed with most technology-based pedagogical "innovations".

It's not that teachers are typically anti-technology (although some certainly are), but instead that most teachers realize that adding technology does not necessarily improve the teaching experience, and in many cases can even be a distraction. There's a reason why the Socratic method of the lecturer standing in front of a classroom full of students has persisted so long - it works. It is very hard to beat the teaching effectiveness of a good instructor who can expand on concepts and formulate new examples on the fly, based on the questions asked during a lecture. Furthermore, technology cannot make bad teachers into good teachers, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. The man or woman in front of the class makes all the difference. Most tech-based classroom techniques are generally introduced with great fanfare, but generally fall by the wayside within a few years as everyone realize that they are more trouble than they're worth, i.e. too much time and money involved with no measureable improvement in student comprehension of the subject.

Most faculty are happy enough to use the web to distribute material to the class, or to post grades, but beyond that point you hit diminishing returns very quickly. I don't even try to post my class notes online, because I learned long ago that most students tend not to grasp the material unless you force them to create their own class notes. Beyond the current use of the web to distribute course materials, there are two pieces of technology that I would personally welcome to the classroom:

(1) A pen-based tablet with the ease of use of the Apple UI, for taking class notes. I'm not talking about the Windows / Wacom / OneNote tablets which still haven't gotten it right after years of attempts, but an entirely new concept that is more akin to the iPad experience.

(2) A augmented / virtual reality technology that would enable students to remotely "attend" a class with the same 360-degree audio-visual experience as physically being in the room. That's still a few years in the future, but I think it could make a big impact to education, as it would enormously multiply the effectiveness of good lecturers.

Re:Using what works is what matters

[laslo2]

Two semesters ago (as a student), I had a Calculus 3 class that was supposed to be in a "smart" classroom, complete with surround sound, projector, PC and Mac, automatically dimming lights, etc. Due to enrollment, the class got moved to a different classroom that had an old fashioned overhead projector and a blank space on the wall instead of a screen. The professor wanted to use the smart classroom, but we were ultimately stuck in the low tech "normal" classroom, so he printed his lecture notes (skeletal notes, which we filled in during the lectures in class) to transparencies, and uploaded the notes to Blackboard. (The main reason for wanting the smart classroom was being able to show graphs using Winplot and similar tools.)

I learned the material in that class from taking good notes, doing the homework, working with classmates, and reviewing the notes-- which I would have needed to do anyway. I never missed the "smart" stuff.

The same semester, I had a Zoology class that was in a smart classroom, and was based on Powerpoint presentations that included video clips and animations. Most of the time, the video presentations were distractions- they were meant to enhance the reading and lecture, but I never felt they did. Some of the animations (DNA replication) were useful, if they weren't longer than a couple of minutes. Again, I learned the most from taking good notes, reading the material, and working with other students.

On the student side of the class, I use a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen to record lectures along with my notes, and find that very useful-- but I leave my laptop in my bag.

Re:Using what works is what matters

[brokeninside]

the Socratic method of the lecturer standing in front of a classroom full of students

The Socratic method does not involve a lecturer, much less a lecturer standing in front of a classroom full students. Rather, the Socratic method consists of a discussion leader asking leading questions of a small group in order to get them to realize that they already have the answers bouncing around in their head.

If more professors used the Socratic method, I doubt that there would be as much emphasis on some of the more misguided trends in "interactive" education: group projects, small group discussions, web forums, etc. Much of the time (but certainly not all of the time), these props are a reaction to the perceived impersonality of the lecturer standing at the head of the classroom method that has dominated academia in the Anglo-phonic world through most of modern history.

The problem, though, is that the Socratic method doesn't scale well. You can cram 1000 students into the lecture hall if its large enough and they'll all be able to hear the lecture about equally as well. But you can't use the Socratic method very well on a group of more than about 10.

Re:Using what works is what matters

[Vengie]

1) That is why you use a panel system in larger classes. 2) I have used the socratic method just fine in tandem with group projects, etc, at the undergraduate level.

Re:Tech or TeX?

[colinrichardday]

I write my quizzes and exams in LaTeX, does that count?

Logical conclusion

[DoofusOfDeath]

Given: "technology" is possibly necessary for good instruction.
Given: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Conclusion: The authors want magical professors.

Re:Logical conclusion

[Lemmy Caution]

Well, there's always Hogwarts.

Been working in instructional tech for 15 years

[edremy]

and my answer is hell no. Use what improves your teaching, not what you think you "have" to use. When I teach, I use a blackboard for most everything- it's simple, it always works and it doesn't get in my way. I'll use a computer in class when it's actually useful, for things like

• 3-d models of molecules
• Graphical simulations
• Photos and movies

But simply moving your stack of notes to Powerpoint is beyond worthless- it wastes your time and adds nothing at all to the content of the course. Outside the classroom stuff like blogs and videoconferencing can be amazingly useful if you want to correspond with people around the world, but there's really not many good reasons to use stuff like discussion forums when you have a class of 10 people- why not just discuss face to face? We're spending a ton of time moving to a new course management system this year, but it's a plumbing application now- it makes doing routine chores easier and helps with distributing reserves and such, but there are very few serious pedagogy changes when using them. (We have a few exceptions, but 75% of the use is reserves, handouts and collecting papers)

Look at things that can improve the way you teach, to do something you *can't* do without tech. Don't just assume it's great because it looks shiny

"Tech is just a tool" really sums it up, but ....

[King_TJ]

I think like in any other situation, you simply have to weigh the pros and cons to see if it adds enough value or not. For example, in the real basic scenario of "Do we still use a real chalk board with erasers, or a newer technology to replace them?", there are various options of increasing cost. The schools my kid has been attending dumped the traditional chalkboards in favor of white boards with dry erase markers. Then, they request that each parent supply a package of the dry erase markers as part of the school supply list. I find it a bit irritating, really, because those dry-erase markers are fairly expensive (especially when they specify you only give them a certain name-brand of them, like "Expo"). On the plus side though? I'm pretty sure those white boards erase more cleanly than chalkboards did, and you don't have to mess around with someone going out and clapping the erasers or washing the chalkboard with a sponge and bucket of water all the time. I think they're probably a little easier to read too.

Schools with more of a budget often went to electronic board technologies that let them digitize everything drawn on them, for download to a computer. Exponentially more expensive, but potentially a good value, if used properly.

At the end of the day though, ALL of these technologies do the same basic thing. It's still back to the TEACHER having the ability to convey the information well while drawing information on whichever board is implemented. Whether he/she writes in chalk, dry erase market, or digital light pen --- the content is what a student is paying for.

it all depends

[yyxx]

What works really depends on the professor, the student, and the subject; there's no one-size-fits-all.

Your employer should too?

[yalap]

Here we go again - 'lets computerize this mess and hope to improve it!' All you get is a computerized mess. But seriously, what does the poster expect his/her bosses to do? Create a razzle dazzle multimedia presentation that highlights your new tasks and responsibilities? Not likely. 'Get this done, and get it done fast'. Clickers during a business meeting? I don't think so. You are there to work, not be entertained or play games. I've seen 30+ years of technology in education and most of the time they prevent learning because there aren't enough computers, the server is down, it takes 15 mins to get everyone started (that is a huge chunk of time for a teacher/professor) Or, being the cynic that I am, maybe colleges will embrace this to recruit more students and charge higher fees. All they care about is their revenue, not whether the students are employable.

Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[Confused]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Well, to optimise it further, he just could give you the title and the page of the text book and save everyone to make and display power point slides. Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson. In the end, it doesn't really matter of the dance is writing on a chalk board or putting everyone to sleep with power point slides, the technology used has nothing to do with the learning success.

I would go so far to say, that someone who can't teach without technology gimmicks is a bad teacher. All the best teachers I met, didn't need it, although some of them liked to used it.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[MoonBuggy]

On the one hand you talk of good and bad teachers, on the other you seem to say that the only reason we need teachers rather than text books is that "students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own".

I certainly can't get as good a grasp from a book as I can from an attentive lecturer who can explain something in several different ways, all the while gauging the response of the students.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[tsm_sf]

Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson.

Yeah, like those shiftless fuckers in first grade. We should let the free market sort this out.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[Hognoxious]

All the best teachers I met, didn't need it, although some of them liked to used it.

Perhaps someone, should invent a usage of, commas instruction program.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[WCguru42]

most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson.

Read this and tell me if you wouldn't benefit from a lecturer who has been in the field for 20+ years.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[rawler]

Anecdote; I suck at teaching and presentation but occasionally, I have to do it anyways.

Once I had to do a 40minute presentation, prepared rigorously with material research and powerpoint slides. At the time of presentation however, there was a mixup, and I got the wrong presentation-file with me, so I had to draw the important sketches during the presentation, and talk from memory.

According to the feedback both at the time, and followup months after, it was one of my most appreciated presentations ever.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[Korin43]

On the other hand, a lot of people don't go to class precisely because it's just as helpful to read one page of a book rather than spend an hour watching a teacher write on a board. My favorite teachers are the ones who use Powerpoint (so if you go to the lecture you'll learn more than 30 lines worth of material) and then put those up online (so you can actually pay attention instead of writing).

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[edumacator]

the technology used has nothing to do with the learning success.

In fact it can hinder it. I often go into other teachers' classrooms to try and help them with integrating technology into their instruction. Powerpoint is a seductive killer with interaction.

Often times, when a student asks a question that is out of line with the next slide, a teacher who has become reliant on technology to teach for them, rather than using it to enhance their instruction, will ignore the question or gloss over an answer -- at the very moment you KNOW you have a student's interest, the absolute worst time to blow a student off.

Technology should be used in education as it should be in the real world, to facilitate the task at hand. Using PowerPoint is rarely a quality use of technology. Have the students argue with each other in a discussion board. Let them rate each other's work. Give them the ability to interact with the larger world, where their work will be judged, applauded or ridiculed, rather than with seemingly arbitrary letter grades.

The whole technology community should be engaging with their local schools to discuss how technology is used outside of the classroom. Too many teachers are lured in by pretty tech without considering how it will benefit the students beyond the "wow" factor.

</ SoapBox >

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[Thundercat007]

It's not a song and dance. All my years going through school, the best learning (example of math) was the teacher explaining the concept, giving examples, then giving you 1/2 the period to work on an assignment. If you got stuck, he was there to answer. The difficulty with College/University is Tech, and Power Point for sure. The teacher zips through 50+ slides then lets you out early, when you go to do an assignment at home, if you don't get it, you are pretty much hoping to find him in his office or through email to set up an appointment. Most of the time they don't reply to e-mails, and state "I have 200 students I don't have time". If I wanted to learn with "Tech" like Power Point, I would be doing online courses or classes from afar. I'm paying thousands of dollars to attend school and have them teach me my future career. My last year of College teachers were more concerned with the new construction, their vacations, or the possible strike and if they got a raise.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[Arterion]

I have to totally agree with you, the value of a lecture from a talented and knowledgeable lecturer is immense. I think it's necessary to point to learning theory, though. Some people learn better from reading; others hearing.

I tend to be of the exact opposite opinion of the GP, though: if a teacher can't teach you what you need to know without forcing to "learn it on your own" out of a book, he's no teacher at all, he's a classroom monitor. If I wanted to learn out of a book, I'd pay $40 at Barnes and Noble, not $300 a credit hour at a university.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[sirlark]

Gotta agree here. Books can supply information and often in far more detail than a lecture/class will ever be able to convey, but they're not nearly as good as conveying introductory concepts as someone who can correct you when you go wrong.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[HungryHobo]

I'm of the opinion that there's no point requiring them to use tech.
It can help, lord knows I had a few lecturers who could have done with learning about how to throw their slides up on the net.

To all the lecturers out there:

I can either scribble down whatever you're writing on the board

or

I can listen to what you're saying, read what you're writing and think about it.

Not both.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[quadelirus]

I have the opposite approach. Classes where powerpoint is used are almost always worthless and you might as well just download the slides and read them on your own time. Thoughtful use of a piece of chalk can explain complex and abstract ideas in depth at a pace that can easily be followed. I only take classes where powerpoint is not used, if I can get away with it (which isn't easy in my field).

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[sac13]

Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson. Yeah, like those shiftless fuckers in first grade. We should let the free market sort this out.

I realize you were joking and seem to be (though it's very hard to tell... sorry if I assume wrong) against a free market solution there, but you're right to a fair degree there. While I don't believe that the government has absolutely no role in providing education, if parents had to pay out of pocket for their kids schooling, I can guarantee you wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have to day with parents that completely abdicate their responsibility assuming that it's the school and teachers job to teach their kids and they have no role to play. They would be much more involved and focused on dealing with whatever issues that need to be dealt with to ensure they're getting something for that money. They'd also not tolerate their kid being in a school that didn't try whatever methods necessary to ensure that learning takes place.

Even if the parents aren't having to come out of pocket personally, like with a voucher system, they are engaged in consumerism by choosing the schools that are turning out the best results. That's why voucher systems are so popular with urban parents that have been victimized by a system in which they don't get to decide if their kid goes to a bad school or not, and thus poverty is perpetuated because those parents don't have the luxury of paying for a quality school.

I hear way too much free market bashing going on here, and it's ridiculous. I can't believe that the same people that argue for open source over proprietary software can then turn around and say that they prefer a centralized, monolithic system over a distributed one in which those that are using the outputs are closely involved with creating the systems. Big government, big corporations and big, bloated, proprietary software have the same problems. There are too few people that have proper influence. There are too few people that have proper visibility to the problems. And, since there's someone whose "job" it is to make sure something is done, there are too many people that just assume that the job will be done without verifying it. And, we only find out there's a problem when there's $9 billion that can't be found, or there's a huge oil spill in the ocean, or there's a huge vulnerability that allows malware to hijack thousands of machines and execute ddos attacks.

The free market isn't perfect. Nothing is. But, the bigger something is, the less effective it is at achieving it's intended objective. Size and waste are exponentially related. The universe doesn't like big things. Big government is a waste. Big corporations are wastes. Big stars consume themselves much more quickly than smaller stars.

The universe doesn't like big. It's a distributed system that is optimized for distributed systems. Whether we like it or not, those are the rules of the universe. We can go against it, but it's an amazing waste of resources.

Re:Teaching Gimmicks and the decline of teaching

[tsm_sf]

Sac13, there are two problems with your polemic:

1) You assume parents aren't invested in the education of their children simply because they have no financial incentive. Parents aren't invested because nobody in America gives two shits about education. Here's a simple litmus test you can use for your local area. We've known for a while now that, especially in high school, starting school later in the day provides a massive benefit. Has there been any talk in your locale of changing school start times?

2) You're confusing the taunting of young and foolish "libertarians" with a serious political philosophy. In my above comment the sarcasm isn't directed at the concept of a free market, but rather the people who think it can exist in our country. You cannot have a free market and corporate socialism. They're diametrically opposed. The phrase "too big to fail" could never be uttered in a society with a free market.

It really depents...

[ocean_soul]

...on a lot of things. Using tech just for the sake of using tech is stupid, of course. For most courses classic teaching methods are really the best their is. But that doesn't mean technology can't be helpful sometimes. Professors should know what is available, so they can chose if something is useful or not for their courses.

Not Tech... Technique

[Nemyst]

Do I want teachers to use technology? Not necessarily. Do I want them to learn and try new techniques for teaching? Hell yes. I had a teacher who tried using a technique he saw from another professor that mainly consisted in short bursts of lectures with the majority of the courses taken up by interactive quizzes. He'd bring up a Powerpoint with questions in relation to the subject at hand, give the students some time to think about it and discuss with their peers, then ask for everyone to show a letter corresponding to their answer choice. He'd then explain the correct answer. Students would read chapters on the subject before going into the course (with a small timed online test to verify that you've indeed read the chapters).

The result? One of the most fun and engaging courses I've ever had. That's a new technique which happens to also use technology in the most effective manner possible. Of course, it really helped that the teacher was a good one (he was relaxed, knowledgeable and would constantly insert jokes in the presentations). It really makes me wish more teachers would go away from the traditional lecturing for two hours straight that makes you bored out of your mind.

Only the Kahn Academy get's it right.

[twisting_department]

Using tech for teaching has been proposed ever since the 8 bit computers hit the world. There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to this concept apart the vague idea that "it's high tech, therefore it's good". There still isn't. Then comes Salman Khan and his Kahn Academy. Finally here is someone with a passion for teaching who uses the internet and simple tech in such a way that the perceived distance between him and a student is minimal. You can feel his enthusiasm. Salman manages to deliver a lecture and write the notes in the way the best of my lecturers did with a piece of chalk and a black board. Real professors in front of real students don't need any tech in the way. If I have the privilege to be a student in such a situation I want eyeball to eyeball contact with that human. Not a power point to stare at and later download.

A few observations from a real teacher

[ezratrumpet]

I've taught PK through college undergraduate, in nearly every discipline.

1. Societal advances in technology have been largely an effort at efficiency.

2. Educational applications in technology are rarely about increasing efficiency in student learning, but are occasionally about increasing efficiency in materials management for the teacher. Think electronic gradebooks: the reason they are nearly ubiquitous has nothing to do with administrative mandate, but with making things easier for the teacher. It's nothing for the computer to average grades? Weighting by assignment or category? No problem. Doing this with a calculator is a much more complicated proposition.

Electronic whiteboards are catching on for preserving lecture notes, but the real revolution here has passed - it was the change from overhead projector to video projector, especially if accompanied by a document camera. I use my projector ALL THE TIME for lecture notes, video, audio, still pictures - and when I have something to show I haven't captured digitally, I use the document camera.

The web-based communication tools allow me to post assignments and lesson plans online for involved parents and absent students. Video would help this, I suppose, but my classroom thrives on interaction - being a spectator to my lectures without being able to ask questions isn't the riveting experience I wish it would be.

Email allows an asynchronous communication between all of us, as do message board style discussions. These can have value among inquisitive students.

Here's the point, though: really inquisitive students are already doing inquisitive things that eclipse their peers' knowledge without huge effort. Extraordinary students drive their own learning. If I help a student become excited about a subject, and perhaps provide some resources & guidance for their own learning and research, then I've made the most important contribution. After that, it's a different sort of guidance than the "you need to know this so you won't be stupid" sort of instruction.

Ben Carson, head of pediatric neurology at John Hopkins, wrote about figuring out that he learned best by reading, and once he did this, he stopped going to class except for tests and labs. Instead, he read books. He read the assigned material, then read the source material for the assigned material, and then probably read more on top of that.

He redefined the whole field because he knew his strengths as a learner.

Anything technology can do to help a teacher advance that sort of self-knowledge is helpful, possibly important, and maybe even essential.

But if we can't state clearly how a technology will help advance student learning (or even improve teacher efficiency), we have no business expecting teachers to use that technology in their work.

TL;dr: use the best tool for the Learning, not the best tool available.

Three words:

[Pollux]

Conflict of Interest.

While I normally would begin this discussion by putting forth a rather common sense argument (simply put: a good teacher is not good because technology makes him good, but rather because he makes technology work for him), I believe that the discussion is a moot point. Here's why:

The director of the Office of Educational Technology (the agency that published the previously cited report) is Karen Cator. Just read her bio there, and you'll discover that she worked for Apple computer for a decade. Conflict of Interest. The recommendations put forth in this report are invalid, because the director's previous employer stands to gain billions in revenue if the recommendations in this report are implemented nationwide. And what does this director stand to gain by steering billions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of Apple?

Use iPads in the classroom, dammit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't people buying more iPads?

Please, use that government money to buy iPads for the kids, instead of hiring more, better instructors.

Re:Use iPads in the classroom, dammit

[ezratrumpet]

At the risk of commenting too much, I'm also a voracious reader and have used the Nook, Kindle, and Stanza apps on my iPad since I bought it.

There is huge advantage to ease of use. I can carry an entire library in that little slice of tech. Turning pages is a twitch of a finger, highlighting at least as easy as the paper version, and notetaking has potential (once I use a wireless keyboard and can get a copy of my notes as a single document, preferably with my highlighted passages included).

Even when I take notes by hand, it's much easier to stop tapping the screen, pick up a pen, and write than to get something to hold the book open or hold it open while I write.

We really haven't begun to recast the book as a text/video/interactive medium, but that time will come - we'll have embedded videos, connections to the bulletin board, and probably even connection to other resources and the author, all from the "book page."

The danger, of course, is that I also have some cool games and a web browser on my iPad.

TL; dr: only Apple could combine the White Magic of Endless Learning with the Dark Magic of Eternal Distraction.

Computers don't always make it better.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Use it where appropriate. Yes, housekeeping is a good use, why is that looked down on? The ability to post/get assignment, outlines, etc online. The ability to email the professor with a question. But as far as the actual teaching? In many math / science classes, a "chalk and talk" approach works better than simply showing slides (Powerpoint of Latex/pdf), and "smart boards" and the like can get in the way. The background information is available in textbooks (with the assigned readings), and the lecture can be used for going over material and examples.

In math classes, while knowing how to use programs like MATLAB is useful, much more important is understanding the fundamentals behind it first. Otherwise programs like MATLAB, Maple, or graphing calculators become a crutch.

In many lectures (in any discipline), "technology" doesn't add a lot in the lecture by itself. Powerpoint slides, OHP slides, writing notes on the board from the text all have about the same impact.

Working through a MATLAB example in front of the class may be marginally useful (again as a supplement to fundamental learning). Labs are a different story, where hands on with tech that may be the same (or similar) to industry is a useful skill (even if taught on a 5 version behind Windows 98 version).

There's this idea that simply having computers in the class makes more learning happening. I've had classes take place in the computer lab. Most students just surf around on the net and ignored the professor. Likewise any time I see laptops out in a lecture, in most cases it's used as a distraction, not to take notes. The number of laptops were inversely proportional to how engaging the prof was. The more laptops were out, the less attention people were paying to the professor.

Basically there's this ongoing idea that simply throwing technology at education (or any problem) will make it better. That's not the case. It should be used only where there's a tangible benefit.

Technology is no panacea

[Adrian Lopez]

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using 'clickers,' or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously.

You forgot Twitter. You can't have a proper classroom without Twitter!

Re:Technology is no panacea

[ezratrumpet]

It's coming soon, I'm sure:

Time for annual review. Do I suck? Am I hot-hot-hot? Vote now at ratemyteachers.com/teacherme.

Re:Technology is no panacea

[Vengie]

Re: Your signature. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Wd-Q3F8KM Great example of transformative use and a wonderful classroom example.

Do you have new senses tied to technology?

[Ultimate Heretic]

I have heard the "technology" argument since I was a kid in the 60's and 70's. Ever heard of "Tach-X" or "Controlled Reader"? They were the teaching technology of the day and abysmal failures. Why? Humans are visual and tactile sensors at heart, so seeing, hearing and touching stimulates our brains and allows us to learn. It does not matter the source of the aural or visual stimulation and cognitive processes that in turn get started. Learning requires repetition, so either you had it gone over in detail in class, or you read the material (or perhaps listened to it) many times before it can be actually learned. We also had a thing called the "overhead projector" that allowed material to be slapped up quickly; where do you think PowerPoint and its friends came from? Nothing new under the sun folks. Sure you can present better images, faster and simulations of processes or experiments, but do you really think you will better understand Spencer's "The Faerie Queen" by getting to vote on how you liked its presentation with a little clicker? Nope, only way is through reading/discussing and thinking inside your own brain. That is where learning takes place, not outside you on a screen. And a simple tidbit can show this. The reading level of high school students had been going down for decades. Ever pick up a history book from the 1950's meant for middle school students? The mere complexity of language makes modern textbooks read as if they were written by high school students. In summation, as others stated, technology is a tool and can be used well or ill, but it is no substitute for good planning, good reading lists (which can be on paper or screen) and good presentations + your own efforts.

High level matrix manipulations?

[mangu]

Computers only help out in crazy high level classes where you have to start doing things like matrix manipulations, etc.

I don't know where you studied, but I studied basic matrix operations like calculating determinants and inverting matrices in high school in Brazil. More advanced operations, like calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors, came in my first year in college.

In our modern life technology is very important for learning any subject. Even in social studies you can benefit from tools like search engines. Blogs and discussion groups help you communicate ideas. You cannot have a face to face discussion with someone from the other side of the world, but technology will enrich your life by allowing you to meet different ideas and concepts.

When I come to think of it, there's only one group that wouldn't benefit from the facilities in communications that our modern technology brings us: the religious fanatics.
 

Re:High level matrix manipulations?

[kidgenius]

Elementary matrix manipulations should most definitely be taught to do by hand. I was referring to doing larger matrix calculations, like those done in a finite element analysis, etc. Things I did in my junior year of college.

Get your tech out of my classroom

[Bootes]

No, if anything they should be required not to use technology. As a current Computer Science student; I hate classes that "use" tech. The majority of it seems to be for lazy teachers, not to actually improve the learning process for students. Powerpoint presentations just leads to teachers going too fast and not paying attention to the class in front of them. Computer graded HW and clicker quizzes just turns the students into numbers and never helped me learn anything. I took Calc based Physics at two universities. Cornell, where we had homework/tests/quizzes with paper and pencils, and a professor who wrote everything on the chalkboard. My university, where we had a professor who used powerpoint, clicker quizzes, and HW submitted to and graded by a website. The Cornell class was much better. Technology can be used to improve communication with instant messaging and grades posted online, but the old fashioned ways are still superior for the majority of a professors job.

Re:Get your tech out of my classroom

[stewbacca]

Just curious how you learn computer science without tech.

Requirements are funny

[wembley fraggle]

There are two problems with the premise of this article. The first is inherent- while there are clearly better and worse ways to teach (and lectures in particular are usually pretty poor), there is no One Right way to do it. Teaching is like Perl. Different students require different kinds of experiences to learn stuff, and different material lends itself to different forms of teaching. Requiring "tech" is stupid. Teaching is a complex activity requiring specialized knowledge and skills, not just "tech". Requiring that faculty keep abreast of best practices in the field and implement those best practices is probably a good idea. Of course, that's not their job, which brings me to the other problem.

Faculty at prestigious institutions are hired for their understanding of the advanced content in their field, their ability to carry out publishable research in that field, and their ability to secure funding to do more research in that field. In other words: faculty are judged by how well they raise the profile of the institution. Faculty teaching ability is weighted at or near to last place when considering the "quality" of the professor. Sure, a good teacher is a good idea, but anybody spending lots of time on their teaching is taking away time from their research and grantwriting, which are the activities that will lead to tenure, promotion, and other forms of recognition from the broader community.

In short: as long as we keep selecting faculty based on their academic achievements, we will have faculty that's good at research but not good at teaching. No amount of anything will change that- teaching is a difficult job, and simply layering on requirements to use courseware or videoconferencing will not help.

I think it would be beneficial to humanity

[CrazyJim1]

Video recording your lectures for the world to see would be beneficial to humanity. But if every university did it, people could just watch videos instead of going to the universities.

Not Appropriate for All Disciplines....?

[cybin]

"Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using 'clickers,' or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously."

Just a few thoughts...

I'm a music professor... and I'm the _music technology_ professor at that. I don't think any of these technologies are appropriate for music teaching -- that's why I don't use them. I do teach blogging in my intro class -- but I don't use a blog to communicate with the students. I think a lot of other faculty members feel the same way -- they don't know how to match up the technology with an appropriate use -- a common problem in universities. They want to invest in technology, but they end up buying the wrong things or implementing things poorly.

I like the course management systems, but I only use it for the gradebook and for handing out readings. Clickers are, IMHO, incredibly stupid. It only proves the students can push a button -- not articulate an intelligent answer. I suppose we could have guest speakers via videoconference... *shrug*.

  If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears!

"Clickers"

[Carik]

My university started using them 7 or 8 years ago. They're the biggest boon ever to students who want to skip class.

You just bribe a classmate to bring it with and answer quiz questions for you, and you get all the credit and the teacher thinks you were there. I saw people running four or five clickers in a single class period.

Re:"Clickers"

[misexistentialist]

That's a pretty blatant misuse of technology that was designed to give professors anonymous feedback during lectures.

Re:"Clickers"

[Carik]

These ones weren't designed to be anonymous -- they've got a unique ID that gets tied to he student's name. They're mostly used in 250+ student lectures so that the faculty can see who's paying attention and what people aren't getting... and, incidentally, for keeping track of attendance.

It's a neat concept, but whoever designed it didn't consider the fact that students don't always tend towards honesty and a desire to learn.

Re:"Clickers"

[cherry-blossom]

And they cost the student about $40 at the bookstore. Completely mandatory for the class.. All for the sake of 'encouraging' students to show up to class.

Re:"Clickers"

[Carik]

These days they're RF, with all sorts of built in functions, and run about $65... but yeah. The theory is good: here's a way to find out immediately, in class, with no pressure on the students, whether people get the concept. You can put a question in your powerpoint presentation, and the class can send in their answers, and you can find out whether you need to clarify, or can just move on.

The problem, of course, is that reality isn't the same as theory.

Re:"Clickers"

[gatzke]

Thanks. I was thinking about using clickers this Fall, but now I probably won't.

I don't take attendance, but I do hand back papers to individual students (they can't pick up their buddies papers). It is just as good as attendance.

As for technology, I tried using a tablet last year. The resolution was so bad the notes looked worse than usual. Plus students stopped taking notes and coming to class as a side effect. I went back to chalk talks...

Re:"Clickers"

[Carik]

I will say the faculty here love the clickers -- they mostly figure the students will fail the exams if they don't show up for class, so having them fake attendance isn't really a big problem. My view on it is purely the view of a former student and current IT support worker.

Bad analogy

[jpmrst]

"If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed."

This analogy is lousy. What I don't want to hear from a doctor is "I've poured all my time recently into slick presentations, so I can treat you only with the medical techniques I learned years ago in medical school, but I can explain them in a much less boring way than they were explained to me."

Re:Bad analogy

[maxwell demon]

Another thing I don't want to hear from a doctor is: "Oh, there is a proven and very reliable cure for it, but it's quite old and using it would not be modern enough, therefore I'll give you that more modern treatment, which has only a fifty-fifty success rate, but it's all modern."

I don't want the newest cure, I want the best cure. I don't care if the best cure was found thousands of years ago by the old Greek, or last year by a top researcher.

And likewise, I don't want to be taught the newest way, but the best way. If the best way to teach a certain subject is to use the blackboard, then for god's sake, use it!

Makes Me Want to Burn Someone's House Down

[dcollins]

Higher tech for the sake of higher tech is the worst thing you can do with technology. It's a scam. Examples:

(1) My home state of Maine gives every kid in school in the state a laptop. It's a scam so someone can say "look, we're hi tech". Teachers waste time on discipline problems, tech breakdown, being forced unnecessarily into using tech-driven instruction so as to not waste the laptops. I'm told that every day there has to be a UPS delivery to every school in the state from Apple with replacement laptops.

(2) Dean at prior college (non-union-strong) had a meeting where he demanded instructors use overhead projectors because of the expense of installing them, so we could show off how high-tech we are. If I put it up to a student vote ("Do you like PowerPoint instruction, or not?" -- "Do you like group projects, or not?") they usually decline. Scam.

Unfortunately, higher education is plagued by the need of education experts/PHDs to make careers/publication by "some new thing", anything whatsoever. That's why you get ridiculous churn in methods, teaching styles, group work, hands-on, technology, etc., etc. And it works hand-in-hand with book publishers who use the same as a reason to churn new book editions every so years, so that old editions can't be re-used.

Here's a completely crazy idea -- base decisions like these on research as to whether it helps students (and not on just whether it makes some salesman/budget-administrator cream in their pants). Does such research exist? Consider this article in the last issue of the AFT's American Educator:

Can research provide any guidelines as to which classroom applications are most effective?... The studies on these point to two conclusions. First, the mere presence of technology in the classroom does not necessarily mean that students learn more. Second -- and, perhaps, a corollary of the first conclusion -- using these technologies effectively is not as obvious as it might seem at first. [American Educator, Summer 2010, Daniel T. Willingham, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?", p. 26]

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2010/Willingham.pdf

In short: The "hi-tech uber alles" fetish is, mostly, another in a long series of time & money-wasting scams perpetrated on the education system. There's little or no evidence that it helps student learning, and there is evidence that the time required to manage/prepare/leverage technology resources is directly lost from the educator's other existing duties of teaching, assessment, and feedback.

Also, there is the eraser!

[Anonymous Coward]

I once took a class ( it was in high school ) where the teacher was in the habit of throwing the eraser at sleeping students. Aside from chalk marks, no harm was done to the no longer sleeping student. You can only do that with old technology.

Re:Also, there is the eraser!

[Crippere]

Did you also get drop slips stapled to tests that scored too low? : )

Academic quarter

[Misagon]

When I went to college lectures, more often than not, the lecturer spent up to a quarter of an hour of the beginning of the lecture trying to hook up his laptop to the auditorium's projector system and getting the PA system to work properly.

And these were classes in Computer Science, mind you ...

So no, tech can even be a hindrance to education.

Re:Academic quarter

[stewbacca]

That's lack of preparation, not tech, interfering with your learning. As usual, the human is the problem.

The best lectures I've had

[MattskEE]

Some of the best lectures I've had were from professors who are just able to go up to a chalkboard and start writing. They usually have a textbook or lecture notes handy for reference, but they understand the material well enough that they can lecture off the top of their head. Technology has nothing to do with it, it's the professors knowledge and their ability to communicate it in their lectures and (hopefully) online lecture notes.

The one "technology" thing which I think all professors should have is a course webpage which includes things like lecture notes, homework assignments, homework and test solutions, and maybe links to useful papers and other references.

I'm split on the idea of blogs. I think that lectures, lecture notes, textbooks, and office hours suffice well for learning the material. But suppose the professor has had a few people asking him the same question, maybe he will write a quick thing about it on his blog so that he doesn't need to get behind schedule by covering it again in the next lecture. But I have doubts about whether it should be an integral part of the instruction process.

The "clickers" are what they use in big lecture classes to try to force students to actually show up when the material is too easy or not interesting enough to keep the students in lecture. It's not even hard to bypass, the simple way is to ask your friend to bring your clicker in class so it looks like you're attending and responding to questions. And there are plenty of students who have hacked these devices so that one remote can act like yours and your 5 friends, or even spoofing a remote on your laptop which waits a few seconds to see what the top answer to the last question was, then selecting that one. And the remotes are expensive to boot, something like $30-50.

Videoconferencing can only alleviate the inconvenience of the professor being out of town and missing the lecture. If the professor wanted to do the best job possible, he wouldn't miss lectures. Unless it refers to the student videoconferencing in presumably because they don't live anywhere near the school, in which case they are missing out on a lot of the one-on-one interactions that make learning and exploring problems easier.

Digital rights

[cpotoso]

You know, if I am going to have one of my lectures videorecorded so that the University can use and re-use it again then they'd better improve my compensation packet. As of now, I do not grant them the right to re-distribute things indiscriminately. It is sort of the re-negotiation of contracts for actors after VHS/DVD/BD came along... Each new medium for the producers to make extra $$ then the people who actually work in making the product should get extra $$ too.

Bureaucracy and liability.

[aussersterne]

I teach at the university level, and would suffer sanctions or at least be spoken to if I just used:

- Blogs
- Websites
- Online tools

In class willy-nilly. I can't even create a discussion forum for us somewhere or email the students directly using their preferred email address (instead, I am stuck using school addresses that many rarely check). Instead, I am usually bound to a pre-determined, certified list of internal tools of which the most infernal is Blackboard, which seems to be the "technology tool" of choice at every campus at which I've taught. Too bad because its user interface is so absolutely poor that students who spend their days entirely online still can't figure it out; its compatibility is so bad that trying to use it in a course is a sure way to spend at least half of a class if not an entire class talking about required browsers and how to install them; and its stability is so bad that you'd better not rely on it for evaluated exercises, because half the students will say "it was down, I couldn't do the assignment" and a quick exchange with IT will reveal this to have been the case.

From the other technology tools that seem to make their way onto campuses, the electronic blackboard/whiteboard tools are cute but are so expensive that they tend to be locked away / disabled and require that you file in advance for access on the days that you're "planning" to use them, necessitating a visit from an IT tech before and after class. And predictably, half the time when they get there with the key and switch you on, you find out that the system is damaged in some way and doesn't actually operate, but nobody has reported it or performed maintenance / swap-outs in that room for ages and despite your need and reporting, their ETA for repair, once scheduled is sometime after the semester is over.

The one university I taught at as an adjunct that issued new ThinkPads to its students and had campus WiFi also locked them down completely with just IE and Office and not even Flash, meaning that many online applications and tools of various kinds couldn't be used.

Basically, I could just bring MY laptop and students could just bring THEIR laptop and we could use the WiFi and OUR OWN accounts and whatever software we wished, my classrooms would be FAR more technologically enabled. With all of the requirements, it becomes far more practical and easy to simply do a better job doing what good instructors have always done: stand at the front of the classroom, talk a lot and ask a lot of Socratic questions, and write on the blackboard with chalk or on the whiteboard with a marker. That, at least, tends to be accessible everywhere and very fail-safe.

Maybe....

[Tangential]

We should adopt technological approaches that actually improve the quality of the educational process.

Technology for the sake of tech doesn't necessarily meet that goal. The cognition issues tied to improper use of presentation technologies like Powerpoint (or Apple Keynote or OpenOffice or etc...) raise serious questions about its use in the educational process.

Only if it helps

[interkin3tic]

On the other hand, it takes a while to become a good teacher. Some great professors have been teaching on chalkboards for decades, they've become adapted to it and it works. Don't fix what isn't broken or you'll go from a professor who is very effective at to an older person bumbling around on a computer.

use tech to get rid of textbooks

[kencurry]

When I was an undergrad in the early '80s books were an expensive add-on cost to education that sometimes seemed completely worthless. My daughter is now a college sophomore, and I see that nothing has changed. If anything books are even more expensive than ever.

Course material should be public domain and electronic.

Re:use tech to get rid of textbooks

[wardred]

Yeah, well, the electronic book is here, but the college version of it.... *shudder*. You might spend less for that book - but only have access to it while the class is running...or in my case up to 1 or 2 days before the last day you can schedule your final that counts for 70% of your grade. (Yes, I've been studying, but there's always some last minute niggling thing I want to go over.)

If it were public domain - and CA is trying to do just this - and unencumbered by DRM, or even an e-pub, mobi, or PDF where you can keep the book, that might work, but it seems the mighty scholastic publishers are looking for ways to make you rent books for short periods rather than buy them. The funny thing about that is if they'd just let me have the silly thing I'd only access their site once to get the book, rather than every time I wanted to read it during the course of the class.

Don't interfere with education

[Improv]

Let professors teach the way they see fit, provided their teaching is effective.

And the research says...

[Dr_Ish]

Well, as someone who has done, and published, some empirical research on the use of technology in teaching, the one thing we know for sure is that any 'one size fits all' approach will not work well. There are some classes where using technology can be useful. For instance, in a class which involves analyzing passages of text, being able to project the text can be handy. However, in such a case, this is only useful if students can download the text ahead of time so that they can annotate it in class. However, there are other classes, say in mathematics, where technical aids are merely a distraction.

There is an unfortunate tendency in higher education for technology enthusiasts to make a great deal of noise, which can garner attention from the admin types, while the same individuals have a poor grasp of the underlying technology. This situation often leads to expensive train wrecks. Another problem is caused by the folks who are weak faculty members who use technology to cover their shortcomings. Interestingly, blogs are a great favorite with this type.

Really, the issue here is that technology is not an automatic panacea. Moreover, integrating technology into teaching has to be done carefully and in a controlled manner. Different technologies need to be deployed experimentally and incrementally, with a great deal of attention paid to effectiveness. Unfortunately, this happens all too seldom, as the evangelists all too often get the ears of the administrators. However, they are the ones which end up with failed projects, while I am the one with successful projects and publications!

technique, not technology

[Tom]

We geeks routinely overestimate the importance of technology.

The purpose of teaching is to get knowledge into people. There are various ways to do it, but the major advantages in the field have not been technologically, but psychologically and pedagogic.

So, how about focussing on what works, instead of what sounds cool?

Dyknow is great... Blackboard is not...

[cherry-blossom]

My CS proffesor used Dyknow last semester to teach a discrete class. In class he would use a tablet to write his notes which were then displayed trough a projector. The notes and sound were recorded in real time, then posted online so that students could download then listen and watch the lecture again. This type of recording technology was great. One thing I hate as a student is an over reliance on Blackboard. This application works okay for administrative tasks but really sucks as a teaching tool. Online discussion, quizes, and teaching material on this platform has always been slow, unreliable, and had little learning value for me.

here's why no one cares

[Goldsmith]

I've spent the last 8 years training to become a professor. (Yeah, undergrad doesn't count.)

The "teaching" part of that training consisted of one class on teaching, and nine months of part-time teaching experience, which mainly consisted of grading. That was 7 years ago.

The "research" part of that training consisted of ~12 classes, and 7 years of full time research work. My faculty applications will be judged almost exclusively on my research experience and ideas. My professional advancement as a professor will also depend almost exclusively on my research.

There are exceptions to this, I'm generalizing.

Of course, if we really want to train people as well as we can, the apprenticeship model used in research labs works quite well (and fits well with the realities of the current research funding model). It's hands-on, small group, with personalized lectures and lots of opportunity for interaction and collaboration.

Do we need lectures?

[drolli]

The main shortcoming consists in the idea of still giving lecture the old way (at a given time 1 professor, 80 students). Using tech to spice the lecture up a little is a waste of time. To be fair thats from somebody who believes lectures are a waste of time. I learned better in the library, from a book. The idea of having a *good* interactive book where you can run simulations of an experiment and change the real experimental parameters for sure is intriguing. The class of exercises you could do with that is a completely different one from the exercises you can do now. But i acknowledge that some of my fellow students enjoyed going to lectures for reasons not obvious to me, as a kind of social event. So no, i think the professor should not be forced to use "clickers" or something. Every course should have a forum in the web, where students can discuss, the exercise supervisors can help, and one time per week the professor should meet informally with small groups of those interested to explain the biggest questions which arose. So no, io dont think lectures need to change. Lectures need to stop.

As long as you consider technology to make a better video player of a better quiz, you are not using the full potential.

Stop the bad customer service from schools.

[MikeFM]

And because it's what students want and students are paying for the service. We should stop letting schools and teachers get away with bad customer service. It's just bullshit that they shouldn't have to provide good service to their students because students should respect their elders/educators.

Encouraged? Sure. But required? No.

[dn15]

I do tech support and staff training in K-8 schools. I've covered the whole range from complete technology immersion (1:1 student/laptop ratio) to classes that don't use computers at all.

In my time doing this job I've seen plenty of people take the attitude that there are two kinds of teachers -- those who use technology and those who suck. But even as a techie myself, I feel this is a very shortsighted opinion.

You could make the argument that, all else being equal, an environment rich in technology is more conducive to learning. But I've also seen plenty excellent of teachers who don't use computers for anything but state mandated testing, which is all online now.

As the cliche says, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Just because it makes some people more effective teachers doesn't mean it's the only way.

Heck No.

[bkaul01]

It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.

Having taught a junior level engineering course (Applied Thermodynamics) for a couple of semesters while finishing up grad school, I'd tend towards the opposite conclusion on this particular point. If I just flashed stuff up there for an instant using PowerPoint, it would be very easy to go way too fast and skim over details that are intuitive to me since I know the material well, but are a mystery to the students who haven't seen it before. I found that the "old school" approach of using the chalk board (or white board, etc.) helped me keep the pace to something reasonable for the students to be able to have time to both take notes and also pay attention to what I was saying, and allowed for more interaction and free-form explanations. I did use PowerPoint to show some charts, pictures, etc. but found that for the material I was teaching, the chalk board was better for the bulk of the equations/derivations/example problems I was putting up there.

There are definitely some courses where the material lends itself more to being presented via PowerPoint or the like. There are some courses where visual aids would just be silly most of the time (e.g. some of the best history professors I had never used any). There are some courses where writing on a board works best. I had a few programming courses where code examples were shown on the big screen, and that would certainly be silly to spend all one's time writing out by hand. Mandating a one-size-fits-all approach of "thou shalt use this technology because the University spent money on it," would be counterproductive to say the least. Leave it to the professors to decide which technologies help and which would only be distractions or hindrances.

Re: Elaboration?

[Wyatt Earp]

PowerPoint leads to reducing complex issues to bulleted points and that is detrimental to the decision making and learning process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641

Crazy Idea

[Shazoom]

Just completed an MSc in UK. The best lectures didn't use power point and required us to take notes and read real papers. Requiring tech is a great way to make a whole bunch of hoops to jump through which will guarantee nothing but waste time which could be spent more appropriately for the lecturer on their course or students.

Probably been said already but just to be clear: there is a certain kind of lecturer who relies on powerpoint etc. who would thrive in such an environment while students suffer with canned presentations which could have just as easily been read from a coffee shop or even in bed.

Re:If the tech's unusable by ordinary users ...

[Backward Z]

We would offer classes to the faculty on how to properly use the equipment--it's really not that hard if you take an hour to learn how to use it all. The problem is that most professors don't care enough to show up.

Back in the day, recording labels and studios (i.e. Motown) would have recording boot camps for all signed artists. They would learn how to properly use microphones and the basics of the other gear, gain structuring, etc. There's only so stupid-user friendly you can make gear before you're just up against the laws of physics.

Go search Youtube for one of Christina Aguilera's live performances. Notice how she works the mic. There's no substitute for knowing how to do that as a performer. There's nothing an engineer can do to even approximate correct microphone technique.

The problem isn't typically with the gear--it's with the user. Just because the gear doesn't operate like your imagination would like it to doesn't mean it's bad gear.

Re:If the tech's unusable by ordinary users ...

[wardred]

If you want to record a particular lecture so it can be re-broadcast, better to have somebody who knows how to do the recording to it then force a professor who doesn't want to try to learn it. Every piece of recording equipment I've ever come across is different, and uses different interfaces, and there are tons of different front end programs to make an end product of the recording. Further, unless you're trained, lighting, placing the mic, etc., etc. aren't things the teacher is going to know how to do, nor should we be wasting their time forcing them to learn. Finally, in a lot of schools, even some universities, many computers the profs have aren't setup to be media editing machines, so they're going to be slow and unwieldy.

Recording a lecture by somebody who knows how and has the equipment - cool.

Trying to record the lecture by somebody who doesn't know how, who should be teaching the class, who doesn't have the time to edit it, etc.? Why bother? You're actually detracting from the class and frustrating both your professor and your students.

Adopting new technology points to an open mind !

[CalcuttaWala]

As a university teacher myself, my credo is that i do not teach, i help my students learn. One of the key components of learning, as opposed to acquiring facts, is the ability to push the borders of the known and seek out something new. So I always encourage my students to explore what is new even it is in something as traditional as -- say RDBMS.
In this context it is important that the teacher walk the talk and prove to the students that he or she is also pushing the borders ... and yes I do try to use whatever technology I have access or can afford .. and this includes stuff like Wiki, Blogs, social networks, YouTube, Print-On-Demand. Some of these have proved to be successful and some have failed. We rejoice when things work out but we do not regret our failures.
Unfortunately many of my colleagues see all this is a waste of time.

Shoe on Wrong Foot

[b4upoo]

This is a further extension of an issue with teachers in the lower schools. Professors or "teachers" are not required to teach anything at all. What teachers and professors do is offer both information and a way of life to students. The students are the ones charged with the task of learning. And students usually are free to use numerous tools and methods of learning. Both the students and hopefully their parents can and must find ways to make learning stick in the students' minds.
                          I found that I was required to have total recall on quite a few facts and figures while in school. I quickly learned to shut off the TV and the radio and repeat to myself as fast as I could a fact, sentence or paragraph over and over until it stuck. Sometimes I jumped all around the room repeating the item until I could spit it out precisely at any time of day or night. My method might work one heck of a lot better than high resolution, 64 million color displays that a student can fall asleep while watching.

No

[jandersen]

Yes. Not because it's inherently better (it's not), but because it's what students can expect to be exposed to for the rest of their lives/careers. So they might as well become used to it.

I disagree. The first duty - possibly the only duty - of a teacher should be to teach their subject in the best way possible. Just because people believe it is much better/easier to use some tech media doesn't mean that it is. Take Powerpoint presentations, for example: most people think this is an effective way of communicating, but studies have shown that in fact, the speech and what goes on on the slides disturb each other, so the audience actually get less out of it. Add to that, of course, the effect of a bad set of slides and a speaker who can't present, and you have something in an altogether different league of horror.

And apart from that, teaching is not just about presenting a subject to a class, it is also about meeting the students where they are, mentally, as individuals - all these cool blogs and what have you are not adequate for that; it is too much of a one size fits all. Some students have brilliant ideas, but are afraid of looking stupid, so they need to be enticed out of hiding; others are not nearly as clever as they like to think and probably need to be slowed own a bit with a sledge hammer to their foreheads. "Cool tech" just isn't up to the challenge, and a teacher can all too easily waste lots of time trying to (badly) master all the coolness.

What use would a blog be in teaching?

[RockDoctor]

When I am learning something, I have little interest at all in whether or not my teacher has laid a good cable that morning, or shouted at the TV because of "X". So what benefit would there be from a blog - a semi-continuously updated description of the professor's life, activities and thoughts?
Now, if I were a researcher working with a professor, when every day at the coalface is likely to bring something which is actually NEW ... then yes a blog is appropriate. For the 17th presentation of the isotope geochemistry course, where nothing new has been added in the last half-decade, I fail to see the relevance of a blog.
Course websites, containing relevant paperwork (referenced papers, lecture summaries/ synopses, etc), assignments, apologies that Proff Bloggs will be taking next Monday's lecture, and an invite to buy the professor beer on Friday afternoon - that's relevant. Updating the site to reveal more parts of the course every few weeks may also be relevant (you don't want people rushing too far ahead, or doing all year's assignments in the first week). But a blog? Give me a break!

Mr. Miyagi...

[stewbacca]

just rolled over in his grave.

Practice makes perfect

[jcorno]

In my experience, the more often I teach a particular lecture, the smoother and more effective it will be. Forcing someone to change a lecture because the students expect it is unreasonable. Granted, some changes are simple (PowerPoint instead of overhead slides, lecture video available for download, electronic copies of handouts, etc.), but really, a halfway decent lecturer will understand where improvements can be made, and no amount of technology will make a bad teacher much better.

Besides, anyone who thinks college courses are intended to prepare you for the real world either never went to college or never had a real job.

Good Teaching Tech...

[stewbacca]

is above the level of skill and time the average educator has. I have an MAEd in Computer Education (how to use computers to improve education, not how to use computers) AND I design computer-based training for a living. Even a simplistic interactive quiz is too complicated and more importantly, too time consuming for the average educator.

It's also very expensive. For moderate levels of interactivity, a good average time for development is about 450 hours for one hour of lesson plan (instructor led) training. Multiply that by a typical rate of about $100/hour for corporate training development, and it gets too expensive, too quickly to outsource.

A better alternative would be to abandon the pipe dream of highly interactive, "exciting" training in favor of things that most people already know how to do (blogging, for example).

Re: Elaboration?

[stewbacca]

Either you are a talented public speaker and in the 1% of the population who can use PowerPoint effectively, or you are being intentionally obtuse. I'm pretty sure most people know a bad PowerPoint presentation when they see one (hint: nearly all of them). I can imagine they would only be worse with an under-motivated tenured prof. of Econ-101 who has little incentive to make better PowerPoint presentations.

It's outside the classroom that the tech counts!

[Masarand]

Tech can certainly help in the classroom, but the great thing about pens and white boards is that nobody can write faster than students an read. Plenty of academics can deliver really effective lecturers with almost no technology to assist. It's outside the classroom when the tech helps. A well mediated online discussion helps consolidate learning, good online material fills in the gaps (do you really want to cover everything that will be examined in lectures?) A quiz can help students assess how strong their understanding is. Twitter can help stimulate students thinking between lectures. Best of all, tech provided a host of ways students can talk to their lecturers without trudging across campus and hoping they strike it lucky!