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Why Professors Love (and Loathe) Technology

Posted by Soulskill on from the cellphones-going-off-in-lectures dept.

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)."

6 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. working with them.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:working with them.... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Interestingly enough Max Planck said the same thing back in 1948 about the dogma and institution of Science:
          "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

      Or para-phrased:
          "Science advanced one funeral at a time"

      The old want things to remain the way they always have been.
      The youth want things that will be.
      Society is a balance of these two diametrically opposed ideologies.

      Reference:
      http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

    2. Re:working with them.... by cpu6502 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The administrators appear to be out touch too (see below). Frankly I don't understand the obsession with posting video lectures. I've found copied handouts of the prof's notes (and also homework solutions) much more useful than a meandering talk. I can scan the notes far, far faster than I can scan a 50 minute video.

      "
      Administrators believed that 73 percent of the professors at their institutions used data logged by the LMS either âoeregularlyâ or âoeoccasionallyâ to identify students who need extra help..... In fact, only 51 percent of faculty reported doing so. About half of the administrators estimated that professors regularly or occasionally posted video-recorded lectures into the LMS, but just 25 percent of the faculty respondents actually do. Nearly 80 percent of administrators said their faculty members regularly or occasionally used the LMS to track student attendance; the professors clocked in at 44 percent."

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
  2. Hmmm... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Any word on what percentage of them shudder and/or spew corrosive bile if you sneak up behind them and whisper "Blackboard!"?

  3. Students by dtmos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Policies, not Technology by paleo2002 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.