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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.........
Any word on what percentage of them shudder and/or spew corrosive bile if you sneak up behind them and whisper "Blackboard!"?
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.
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.
As a doctor who has been involved in the start of multiple electronic records systems in multiple clinics and hospitals, I can answer your question partially. Really it's two reasons:
1. Privacy. In some ways it's easier to lock down paper charts than networked records systems. You have a chart, one person has that chart at a time, and it's in one physical location. Networks get hacked, electronic charts can be viewed by multiple people at the same time, can be copied and pasted into emails readily, etc.
2. Proprietary lock-in. The rush toward electronic records is heading us to one of the biggest fuck-overs in history because many hospitals rely on proprietary software for their charts (e.g., EPIC). It doesn't have to be this way--there are open-source records system, and the VA system has and is working on perfectly usable open records systems. Most of the time, though, that's not what administrators do. If you use paper charts, you can write on them with whatever pen you want. You can put them in whatever file cabinet you want. You can put whatever paper you want into them. Now, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people's hospital charts are being put into a proprietary format that's locked to a specific vendor.
Electronic record systems are great and simple in theory, but they're subject to the same problems as any other software, and the stakes are higher in some ways when you're talking about serious medical conditions for huge numbers of people. Imagine all your concerns about app store control, but now it's tied to whether or not someone needs brain surgery.
Digital is great, but not *always* better than analogue. I wish people wouldn't assume that.