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Why Professors Love (and Loathe) Technology
dougled writes "A survey of 4,500 college professors (and campus technology administrators) reveals what faculty members think of digital publishing (they like it, but don't do it very much), how much they use their campus learning management systems (not nearly as much as their bosses think), and how digital communication has changed their work lives (they're more productive, but far more stressed)."
I can tell you, working with some very smart profs, that they fall into the exact same classes that you find anywhere else.
You have people that are unreasonable (wanting things to be perfect in an imperfect world), you have people that can't apply basic common sense to using their computer (someone today, for instance, that they can have unlimited disk space and has magical thinking about the situation), people with poor problem solving skills, oldsters whom the world changed around and can't deal with it, people that can't use google, etc. etc...
So I guess what I am saying is that sometimes I wonder if singling them out as a class has any use at all. They're simply people.
Man..glad they didn't have this crap when I was in school....I just wanted to get in there, listen, take notes....and GTFO. I just need enough interaction to take the test and make the grade and get out to get a job.
Strange tho...I'm actually quite a sociable person...outside of the class and work, I have lots of friends and go out, have fun, I have no problem talking to strangers and making new friends.
But at school, and usually at worksites...I'm there to go in, get a job done...and get out. I'm not there to make friends. I don't hardly ever socialize with co-workers. I didn't ever want to really socialize with anyone in my classes, hell, I never really knew anyone's name in the classes (unless it was a good looking girl I'd like to meet and bang)....
I dunno....i guess to me, work is work...get in, get it done, get out...and then go into "real life" mode..where I have my friends and my fun.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It does the simple stuff so we can focus on the hard stuff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The professor of my computer science class used open book tests but forbade any type of technology being used. No laptop, no phones, no tablets, etc. The concern is that someone else will remotely take the test for them. Too me, it seems a bit on the luddite side for a comp sci class, never mind the fact that there is no situation in the real world where I would not have access to the full power of the internet or would ever need to write code with pen paper. In any event, the concern about cheating is about to be moot. Once people have contact lense screens with augmented reality all bets are off. Students will be able to access anything they want with no outward evidence that they are doing so. Unless they want to jam cell and wifi, the way we look at and think about tests will need to change.
Any word on what percentage of them shudder and/or spew corrosive bile if you sneak up behind them and whisper "Blackboard!"?
of use and understanding of classroom technologies among my professors. Some are very skeptical and perhaps a little afraid of using the management software (we use CTools which is open source and pretty awesome). The biggest difference in adoption that I notice is between colleges. The professors in the school of education use way more technology and with much more confidence than my liberal arts professors.
I'm easily over 50, even after my pre-filters for listservs. Most of these 50 require conscious reading, processing, and some sort of action.
To be fair to us in CS, we are probably used to high levels of email and are resigned to the load.
In other words, professors are ordinary human people?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'd like to know why the medical profession isn't embracing technology. They still use antiquated 20th century tech: i.e. fax machine. It would be nice if you could email your doctor and save yourself time and money with a followup visit. The doctors could determine from the email if patients needed to physically come in or the doctors could determine that the patients didn't have to come in and they knew enough to prescribe the next step. If it is about wanting you to come in for a follow-up visit so they can charge your insurance money, then why don't then do what lawyers do and charge you when they respond to emails. We could save money at not having to pay the copays, the doctors would still be able to charge our insurance companies, and doctors' offices would be crowded less with people who didn't have to be there. It would also be nice if everyone in the medical field would adopt electronic patient records that patients can be in charge of: i.e. Microsoft Health Vault. That way a patient's medical records would centrally stay with the patient instead of many different doctors.
The professors I know say that "technology" has had a bigger effect on their students than it has on themselves -- specifically, their lack of concern with plagiarism. Having grown up with Google and the Internet, when asked to write a paper discussing, say, the contributions to Twentieth-Century culture of recently-deceased Lithuanian tennis champions, the students' normal way of research is to Google the topic, find a relevant web site, copy the material, and present it.
They're often shocked when the plagiarism is noted and the fail the assignment because, after all, the paper is on-topic and factually true (let's suppose); what's the issue? The concept that one needs to come up with his own ideas and opinions is often a foreign one to someone who has grown up using the web as an immediate source of all the world's knowledge. I suspect, but of course cannot prove, that developing one's own opinions was an easier and more natural thing when one had to search multiple libraries for bits and pieces of the subject matter here and there; often your opinion developed over time, based on the facts you were able to find, and the order in which you found them.
Students (and professors) have been plagiarizing since the second piece of paper was made, of course; the new issue is that many students today do not see a problem with it. Because of this, the highest level of technology some professors use is their plagiarism-detect software.
Buying books for class? You'd better buy the new book, with the online access code. That way you can access your online assignments and do your homework. God forbid you buy the used book and fail the class.
The book racket has reached a new level of thievery. How much for the access code you ask. That depends. It could be as little as $75, but is could be a real value at $150.
I'm an adjunct professor at three local colleges, so I get to experience a variety of educational technologies and IT departments. My frustrations don't come from the technology itself, but from the policies administrators and the IT staff implement. All three schools have a campus email system for students, faculty, and staff. But two of them are web-based systems that do not allow auto-forwarding. I have to manually log in to the clunky web-based system and sift through a mountain of intra-spam. The feature exists on these platforms, according to my research, its just been disabled. I guess they want to make sure we're all using the outsourced webmail system they spent millions of dollars importing from the late 90's.
When it comes time to submit my grades, one school's system flips a coin each semester to decide whether it supports Mac users. Not whether it supports Safari, not "the Mac version of Firefox" or even "the Mac version of IE" but logging in from a Mac computer at all. When I call the registrar's office, they claim to have never supported Mac. Except, they did. Last semester.
One school has a laptop loan program for faculty and students. We can request to borrow a laptop to run our classes with. For one month. Then we have to return the computer and resubmit the request. The same school installed 3M Smart Boards in many of the classrooms. They have loads of cool features, but the remote controls and digital pen devices you need to use them all disappeared within months of installation. Now they serve as very expensive white boards.
The list goes on . . . None of these are failings of technology, but how technology is implemented. I often get the impression that the people in charge of acquiring, installing, and managing tech at my schools are being brought in from the business sector. They are attempting to implement methodologies and policies suited to smaller, homogeneous work environments. Classrooms aren't office buildings; faculty and students use tech differently from the office staff.
Yes, I am a college professor.
Paraphrasing does not free you from plagiarism; paraphrasing without attributing the source is plagiarism.
You can legitimately create a work consisting mostly of (properly cited) paraphrases and quotes, while completely avoiding personal opinion or analysis. This is called a literature review, and there are times when they are completely appropriate (in the introduction to a graduate thesis, for example). Where plagiarism comes into play is when you state or imply that an idea is your own without properly crediting the author from whom you obtained the idea. It's not a question of identical wording, but of the idea expressed by the words. You can rewrite a sentence so that it doesn't contain a single word found in the original, and still be guilty of plagiarism.
When I evaluate student essays and reports, I'm not only judging your ability to find and summarize relevant information from other sources, but also your success at analyzing, interpreting, and responding to the information using your own creative thinking skills. To pass off someone's analysis of the issue as your own without clearly identifying it as such is indeed plagiarism... all you've done is performed a literature review, but left out the citations.
As a CS instructor, I use Blackboard for homework and program submission, for posting solutions and for recording grades. Nothing else. Making a full-fledged web site out of Blackboard is too terrible to think about.
Me too. We have lock boxes for the remotes but whenever I actually remember the darn thing what I want is not in the box.
IT is underfunded and they seem to have temp student workers as filler for real IT. I had to fight to get external email access which they do not advertize but I knew they had it. They will not turn on IMAP or POP even though I know their server supports it. They had unix systems and now it is all windows crap; including the incorrectly implemented MS DNS server and the occasional issues that causes with it's odd caching scheme. The top IT are real IT staff from industry and while the head guy is a unix person he's given in to using windows because it is cheaper (that is, they don't have to hire somebody who can use a real server.)
Whiteboards smell and it bothers me. Chalk boards were replaced; whiteboards COST more and are more environmental the dust isn't really a problem.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In the past, I've got a very smart IT prof who was raised on unix and couldn't get used to his windows PC. I loved seeing him open notepad, where text like this appeared:
iSomeStuffkkkkk :q! :q!
At the end, he would get mad about the user-unfriendlynes of windows compared to unix. This went on for a few lessons, until someone took pity and told him about telnet and he started using his laptop as a multi-GHZ VT100
Communication is more than just text. Many technologies do little to actually benefit the communication of information which is part of what lectures are for. I can see why some prof who knows the tech ends up under utilizing something that only helps in certain situations or requires so much more work the benefit is not worth the investment.
Somebody in person getting help with something is not the same as an email. An interactive lecture that almost resembles a discussion is more than just a tradition, it works the best. If you just play back a speech then one may as well go watch a video by a great orator with high tech illustrations posted on youtube. Given the lack of student participation (non traditional students are the exception) I've often thought of just producing or buying videos for them to watch (naturally I'd have to quiz on them because no students actually do what you tell them to do outside class... except non-traditionals.... Perhaps college should be for 25-35 year old students only???)
Problem solving is dead. there is google. There is also more wrote learning and recall going on in schools because students seem to memorize facts and think that is enough and any critical thinking can be found online. It takes a lot to try to force them out of the habits they come in with. Studies have shown US students entering today have less of an idea between the difference between fact and opinion! WTF?!
Thanks to the evil lawyers I'm stuck with a brain dead grading system when I should be able to just hand out what grade I think they should have; they should have an appeals process naturally. I can tell TALKING to a student how well they know the material but here I have "A level" students who clearly are not at an A level but will get just enough help to earn that grade. They work the system (and will try to work you as well; teenagers are laughable but the older ones are worthy of study some are so good.) It really doesn't matter how well you make up the material or exams these humans are quite clever at working around unintelligent systems; they've had a lifetime to master all the typical school metrics. For lab classes, I get some 1:1 time with EACH student and I know way more than any bureaucratic measurement system about them by the end. If you really want people to learn something it has to be more like coaching the student as they progress towards mastery; a coach doesn't need to test his players and it likely appears to be a silly concept to them. Naturally, the student has to WANT to play the game and those who do and can put in the time I rarely ever have somebody not do well. Nobody seems to tell students that a full time student spends 40 hours a week outside class doing schoolwork. That is what it USED to be but has never been near that in my life time. I lose at least 5 per semester because I get at least 9 and average 11 hours from them and they are shocked I actually mean it when I tell them upfront. I do not fear flunking the whole group and they know it. None of that collective understanding they just have to do about as well as the other students... and no curve! (curves are foolish to put it mildly.)
After a decade, I think the traditional model is only ideal for a few fields and the rest fit better into a modern form of the master/apprentice system. An older mature and already employed apprentice is motivated and there is also no reason conventional classes can not be sprinkled into their journey - some topics, like programming are ideal for this model of learning. The master also decides when the student is ready to advance and their skill reflects upon the master... I don't like passing students who I do not feel are ready yet but the time limit is up and the points are totaled... sure I could fudge the numbers to make up for those strategic planners who only did certain assignments but that gets into problem areas. Only the high school kids can be pushed around; the older ones won't-- we've had students take the college to court over flunkin
Firstly: ...
COPIED from Barlett's
"If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) is is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
OK, so when a student makes a cogent, well developed, and factually correct conclusion using bibliographically supported statements, but it differs from the unsupported opinion of the "professor", who then 'flunks' the student ... who is REALLY at fault?
Secondly:
"own ideas and opinions" versus "ain't no new thaing" - I am laughing at the arrogance of someone who throws that old line out and expects anyone to think it is original. (Tee Hee!) When the students become the masters - should they then throw away all that went before them?
This is really interesting, as there is some anxiety within the public university system about tenure and LMSes, and how with the private institutions you have the freedom to implement them, whereas with public universities, there is a lot more resistance to things the faculty sees as wasteful.
Also, to run a really good flipped class, the time investment is rather insane. You might be spending less time working on powerpoint or whatnot, but you've got an email queue to deal with.