Science and Technology

Teaching: What is There to Love?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Dini Metro-Roland and Paul Farber offer an elegiac defense of traditional, face-to-face teaching in their 2010 essay, “Lost Causes: Online Instruction and the Integrity of Presence.” Their implicit critique of online learning is framed as a lover’s concern for the well-being of the beloved, in this case the craft of teaching. The authors note that there is a sense of inevitability to the growth of online courses, and, while noting that fiscal considerations play some role in this, they acknowledge that the online format confers certain benefits upon students. Believing that the most important difference between traditional and online settings is the form of presence involved in each, the authors group the perceived benefits of online instruction under the notion of “utility of presence” which they contrast to the “integrity of presence” that attends face-to-face instruction.

Utility of presence is premised on the freedom, flexibility, and control that online instruction offer to participants. Free from the constraints of embodiment, online students may engage their courses asynchronously at their own convenience and they may exert “maximal control over when and for how long one will do what is called for in making one’s presence felt.” Altogether the medium allows for “engagement constituted by patterns of individual choice.”

Metro-Roland and Farber correctly link the dynamics of utility of presence to the ethos of the broader online experience in which online learning is embedded. They note, for example, that, “Being online carries with it the ready capacity, moment to moment, to layer content (for example, background music, instant messaging, online gaming) or launch into other forms of activity altogether — whether course related or not — at any time.”

Consequently, the online learning experience privileges “the capacity to attend to just what one wants or needs right now and, recognizing the vast range of options, learning to dismiss or disregard the rest.” This form of “knowingness” is “not suspended when one comes to an online course.” In their estimation, the virtual presence that constitutes online learning is finally “the product of judgments as to how to gratify one’s inclinations and efficiently serve one’s purposes online.”

This is a point that is all too often missed. The medium of online learning is the Internet and the habits and practices that intend the medium, including for example fractured patterns of attention, likewise shape the experience online courses. Metro-Roland and Farber do not ground the elaboration of the “utility of presence” in an indictment of the quality of students who enroll in online courses nor in mere nostalgia for traditional forms. Rather, they ground their discussion in what they take to be the nature of the medium and the modes of interaction it necessarily elicits from users:

We speculate that the tendency favors the virtues of convenience, accessibility, efficiency, personal satisfaction, (and profitability). To take hold in the boundless context of mediated choice, all involved must be attuned to what they choose to bring to the transaction and the purposes they have for doing so. 

By contrast, embodied presence is constrained and bounded with regard to space, time, and self-presentation: “Students and teachers alike are branded by their dress, gender, and skin color and time-space constraints often contribute to our anxiety, frustration, and ennui.”

Yet for all of these limitations, the authors believe that what they term “integrity of presence” is an unpredictably emergent property of embodied classrooms that sustains the love of teaching. Quick to distance their notion of integrity from traces of elitism that term may invoke, they clarify the concept as follows: “Integrity as we are speaking of it is not a matter of the fixed character of an individual; rather it is inherent in the quality of attention, and arises as an effect of the engagement of those present.”

This kind of attention has the possibility of generating genuinely transformative encounters between embodied participants in the unpredictable and sometimes messy space of the face-to-face classroom. This kind of engagement is irreducibly embodied and, in the authors’ view, unattainable in online environments. As they put it, “Integrity of presence is thus tenuous and unpredictable, not the product of pure will.” Putting the matter thus reinforces the contrast with utility of presence which is characterized by the expansion of choice and exercise of will.

Metro-Roland and Farber conclude by conceding that “embodied presence in teaching, even in optimal cases, is inefficient” and that “it is unclear that traditional instruction can compete.” Online instruction “promises egalitarian relationships of utility and a field of choices with which one can tailor one’s presence, secured from critical scrutiny and unwanted entanglements” and by do doing is aligned with culture’s mediated zeitgeist. But for all of its utility and efficiency, the online experience fails to generate the sorts of moments that redeem the practice of teaching. Describing those moments, the authors write,

Such things happen, as we all know, though we never quite know when, or why. Slogging along, grappling with the forms and content of face-to-face teaching, the endless iterations of classroom meetings, the situation sometimes gels. Most everyone has been there we suspect, though here we must appeal to your experience of things coming together — maybe not for all or all at once, but tangibly — it gets “real,” the body language changes, eyes brighten, a restless desire of some to jump in and take part becomes evident, perhaps a hearty gale of shared laughter, a plenitude of significant connections and avenues to pursue comes into view, the enervation morphs into heightened energy.

It is moments like these, that answer the most fundamental question: “in the embodied presence of face-to-face teaching, burdened as it is by spatial, temporal, and social limitations, just what is there to love?”

With an eloquence and style uncharacteristic of articles that appear in scholarly journals of education, Metro-Roland and Farber remind us that there is in fact much to love.

Disabilities, Bias, and Online Education

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

In “The Invisible Audience and the Disembodied Voice: Online Teaching and the Loss of Body Image,” Joanne Buckley offers a very personal reflection on the possibilities online education offers professors and students with physical disabilities. Buckley, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a child, found that her “experiences teaching writing online have been the most experimental, fruitful, and often the most intimate work I have done, mainly because I feel freed from the real—and perceived—constraints of my physical body.”

Buckley’s paper is based largely on the contrasting responses she has received in online as opposed to traditional classroom settings. She believes that in the online environment she is unencumbered by the biases that unfortunately confront physically handicapped professors. But not only professors: “The absence of barriers between students that may result from differences in age, race, and gender seems to help make communication among students easier and less restrained.”

Furthermore, while it is obvious that the online classroom relieves disabled students and professors from the physical constraints of inadequately designed classrooms, Buckley argues that the online classroom also confers psychological benefits. To a list of benefits that includes the privacy needed to write well, greater opportunity for participation, and personalized pacing, she adds “the chance to avoid being judged by one’s physical appearance.” Buckley also believes that greater credibility attaches to her person when she is communicating in disembodied venues. Finally, Buckley also contends that her wheelchair as well as the difficulty with which she stands up to write on the board or use the overhead projector amounts to a significant distraction from the actual content of her teaching.

For all of these reasons, Buckley is hopeful that the disembodied experience of online education will create opportunities for students to learn and express themselves without having to deal with the prejudices that sometimes shape fully embodied interactions. Moreover, the professor or student is freed not only from the bias of others, but also from the anxieties that attend the anticipation of such treatment. The online space then, precisely because of its disembodied character, becomes a utopian space where pure minds engage free from the complications attending the body and its particularities.

Underlying Buckley’s analysis is the assumption that the body and the self (or, selves) are only contingently related to one another. So, for example, she approvingly cites the following observation by a person interviewed by Sherry Turkle for Life on the Screen: “why grant such superior status to the self that has the body when the selves that don’t have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences?” Likewise, she borrows Emerson’s metaphorical rendering of soul and body as dreams and beasts respectively and suggests, again following Turkle, that computer mediated communication can, for a time, hold “the beast at bay in pursuit of the dream.”

For those with physical disabilities, a technology that enhances access to educational opportunities is a welcome development. Buckley reminds us that most of our thinking about online education is conducted through the lens of those whose bodies are whole. But one wonders whether in its hiding from view the body and its particularities, online education does not perpetuate, to some degree,  the very prejudices it purportedly overcomes. In fact, such prejudices are not overcome at all. It seems preferable to bring students together in a fully embodied context so that whatever prejudices exist are not merely bracketed, but rather confronted and truly overcome.

Online Education and Its Discontents

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A good deal of my course work over the last couple of years has been conducted in online environments. My university offers three types of courses: face-to-face courses, hybrid courses with online and face-to-face components, and fully online course. The majority of my courses have been either hybrid or fully online. On the whole, I’ve not been pleased. This is not necessarily an indictment of the professors who have supervised these courses. It is true that some have been better executed than others, but even the best have been a disappointment despite the professor’s best efforts.

I’m not sure how typical my estimation of online education may be, but The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that the growth of online courses has slowed and may be approaching a plateau. Here are some of the findings of the survey of more than 2,500 institutions of higher education:

  • An online course is now part of the experience of 31% of all students
  • Enrollment in online courses grew by 10%, considerably less than last year’s 21%
  • 67% of academic leaders rated online education as the same or superior to face-to-face learning
  • Fewer than one-third of chief academic officers feel their faculty “accept the value and legitimacy of online education. This percent has changed little over the last eight years.”

For my part, and take this with a grain of salt, I suspect that “academic leaders” may be driven by considerations that have less to do with quality education than with other benefits that may arise from the implementation of online classes. More online classes, for example, mean growing the student body without necessarily expanding the physical plant which is always an expensive venture.

Online classes do confer certain benefits on students, of course, flexibility being only the most obvious. Again, though, I wonder how many of these benefits are related to the actual educational quality of the online experience. I realize that face-to-face classes in many instances will also leave much to be desired, but based on my limited experience, I’ll take an imperfect face-to-face class over an ideal online class in most cases.

Ultimately, I attribute this to the manner in which the medium abstracts the body from the learning experience. In the next day or two I’ll be posting some more reflections on the topic. If you have had any experiences as either a student or a teacher in an online environment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Cell Phones and Longbows: Watershed Moments In History And The Technologies That Facilitate Them

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In a recent NY Times editorial, historian Paul Kennedy drew our attention away from developments in consumer technology and toward what he called “the hard worlds of economics and politics.” Kennedy believes that we may be passing through a watershed moment in human history largely unawares because we are distracted by less important facets of present circumstances.

Rather than obsess about the latest gadgets that come on the market, we should be paying attention to at least four developments that are, according to Kennedy, of momentous import. They are, in his words:

a. “the waning of the dollar’s heft”

b. “the unwinding of European dreams” of political union

c. “the arms race in Asia”

d. “the paralysis of the U.N. Security Council”

These are indeed significant developments and one should hope that they are not being ignored, by either the voting public, or those voted into office to steer the ship of state through these turbulent waters (although on the latter see the last post.) But it is unfortunate that Kennedy opposes attention to these economic and political developments and attention given to technological developments.

It is unfortunate, and also curious given some of what Kennedy himself alludes to in his essay.

Describing two previous watershed moments in the history of the West he writes,

“No one alive in 1480 would recognize the world of 1530 — a world of new nation-states, Christendom splintered, European expansion into Asia and the Americas, the Gutenberg communications revolution. Perhaps this was the greatest historical watershed of all time, at least in the West.

There are other examples, of course. Someone living in England in 1750, before the widespread use of the steam engine, would have been staggered at its application 50 years later: The Industrial Revolution had arrived!”

Well, as I think about these moments of great historical change, it seems to me that technology was inextricably implicated in each. Technology, or better, technologies were not the sole factor driving historical change in these instances, but it would be hard to imagine the change taking place without the technologies.

Notably, Kennedy later refers to the critical role of the printing press in a rather odd paragraph:

“So what about today? Many newspaper correspondents and technology pundits point excitedly to our ongoing communications revolution (cell phone, iPad and other gadgetry), and to its impact upon states and peoples, upon traditional authorities and new liberation movements. The evidence for this view is clear across the entire Middle East, and even in the very tame “Occupy Wall Street” movement, although one wonders if any of the high-tech prophets proclaiming that a new era in world affairs has arrived have ever bothered to study the impact of the Gutenberg printing press, or of F.D.R.’s radio chats to tens of millions of Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s.”

This is an odd paragraph because the events it cites seem to undermine the gist of his argument, and because of the closing line. I’m not sure which “hight-tech prophets” Kennedy has in mind, but, in fact, the printing press is often enough cited as a precedent of note when exploring the social transformations wrought by technological change. While I doubt her work informs much of the popular level discourse, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial two-volume, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change certainly explores the consequences of the printing press in fine-grain detail.

I suspect that Kennedy may be mostly distraught by the attention given to something like the release of the latest iPhone and the ensuing consumerist frenzy/orgy. Fair enough. But when we consider the larger “communications revolution,” to use Kennedy’s own formulation, of which the latest iPhone is but a bit part, then the focus on technology is not at all misplaced.

In fact, I wonder whether technology could not be implicated in the four developments that Kennedy himself lists from the hard world of economics and politics. I suspect so. For example, I would think it impossible to discuss the current monetary situation and fluctuations in currency values from the interconnected world of electronic, computerized buying, selling, and trading.

Finally, it was Kennedy’s conclusion that led to the train of thought developed in this post. Kennedy wrapped with the following:

“It is as if one were back in 1500, emerging from the Middle Ages to the early-modern world. The crowds at that time were marveling at a new and more powerful longbow. Surely we can take our world a bit more seriously than that?”

The irony here is that if you consider Lynn White’s work on medieval society, then you might conclude the attention to the longbow was not at all misplaced. White’s thesis taken by itself is probably reductionistic, but it does point to important factors. He argued that the feudal system and the consequent social order was premised on the invention of the stirrup which led to the appearance of mounted, armored soldiers and the rise of wealthy, landed aristocrats  who could afford to maintain mounted knights in their service. This social order was itself challenged by the invention of the longbow which, given its long range and armor piercing capability, drastically undermined the combat effectiveness of mounted knights. Historian Theodore Rabb, in The Last Days of the Renaissance, has likewise argued for the analogous role played by gunpowder in the evolution of the modern nation state.

Looking only at technology, especially if by that we mean consumer electronics in suburban context, is certainly too narrow a frame by which to understand our times. But the reverse is also true: trying to understand political and economic realities while ignoring the underlying technologies that shape those realities is likewise ill advised.

Technology, politics, and economics — not to mention all of the other complex social realities we too neatly compartmentalize by the very act of naming them — these are all recursively interrelated and entangled in fascinating ways and we do well resist the temptation to take refuge in explanations and understandings that refuse the complexity by unduly privileging one dimension of social reality over all others.

Froissart’s “Battle of Crecy”

Weekend Reading, 11/5/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Alright so here’s our reading for the weekend. We start with four pieces on brain science and philosophy:

“Telling the Story of the Brain’s Cacophony of Competing Voices” by Benedict Carey at the NY Times: Discussion of the life and work of neuroscientist and professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga on the brain, freedom, responsibility, and law.

“A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain” by Samuel McNerney at Scientific American: As the title implies. Focusing on the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

“Raymond Tallis Takes Out the Neurotrash” by Marc Parry in the The Chronicle of Higher Education: Profile of Raymond Tallis whose made a reputation for himself challenging reductive theories of the brain that, for example, reduce things like love to neural impulses. If you click through on this one make sure to listen to the audio of the exchange between Parry and his editor on Tallis. In fact, listen to that rather than read the article if you have to choose. You can also read a longish essay by Tallis on the subject here: “What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves.”

“Your Brain Knows A Lot More Than You Realize” by David Eagleman at Discover Magazine: Excerpt from Eagleman’s new book, Incognito, on how much our brain does without our conscious awareness. Interesting case studies, good read.

We’re following that up with a couple of pieces on advertising, and the segue is legitimate if not entirely obvious:

“Thinking Vs. Feeling: The Psychology of Advertising” by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: Light blog post, true to the title.

“Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we’re hooked on it” by George Monbiot at The Guardian: Hmm, well, that title pretty much says it all no? It’s a rant, enjoy.

And finally, to wrap up with a lighter piece:

“Dialing Up Twenty Years of Gadget Reviews” by Walter S. Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal: Nice retrospective jaunt through twenty years of consumer tech history beginning with those brick phones.