The out-of-control adoption of all these ridiculous and useless “technological solutions” is one of the reasons why college tuitions are rising and professors’ salaries stagnate. I love gadgets as much – and probably more – than the next person but I am absolutely 100% convinced that clickers, schmickers, Turnitins, electronic workbooks, Quias, Supersites, and all the rest of that hugely expensive stuff are very easily dispensable.
There are schools that actually ask professors who interview for jobs what kind of “technologies” they are ready to use in the classroom. The obsession with quantification has led many administrators to believe that the quality of teaching can be measured with the number of gadgets a professor uses. This insanity is now even spreading to research, forcing people to create ridiculous “digital archives” and open positions in entirely meaningless “digital humanities” while courses on Cervantes don’t even get taught because there is no funding.
People, I’m not a Luddite. I live attached to my cell phone. My Kindle is practically a limb. And it is precisely as a result of my immersion in gadgetry that I have established with absolute certainty that good teaching does not necessitate gadgets. If you try really hard, good teaching might remain not entirely crapped up by the introduction of gadgets but that’s it.
Enormous amounts of time and money are spent on adoption, training and renunciation of technological solutions that get outdated even before they hit the market. Committees are formed, paperwork is generated, training workshops and seminars are conducted, conferences titled “Quia or Supersite?” are organized and the result of all that busyness is soaring tuition and harried, exhausted professors.
People, enough already! Let’s stop gadgeting and go back to teaching. Let’s push back whenever semi-literate bureaucrats try to make us feel deficient for not using clickers and Turnitin in our teaching. Academia belongs to us and it’s up to us to set the tone. Let’s stop worshiping on the altar of technology and start making people who push these expensive licences and gadgets on us feel ridiculous and stupid.
Clarissa's Blog 
Exactly! There are very few situations where the use of any technology beyond a very good supply of pens, paper, chalk and blackboard space improves the quality of teaching. There are at least as many where it impedes good teaching.
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“There are very few situations where the use of any technology beyond a very good supply of pens, paper, chalk and blackboard space improves the quality of teaching”
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Chalk-and-talk all the way! However, I would add that white board and markers have been a great improvement — I no longer leave the classroom covered in chalk dust and the contrast is better between colorful markers and a white board than it is between chalk and a black or green board that doesn’t get properly washed more often than once per fortnight.
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I suspect a lot of this reliance on technology is so the administrations don’t have to pay good teachers for their teaching skills whether they are adjuncts or not. My university decided that 80% of classes in a particular majors such as business or accounting should have an online component. I’ve taken several such courses and I can legitimately say that I cannot evaluate the instructor’s teaching skill to any great degree through an online component. Maybe I can say, “Congrats on picking the supplemental videos and the textbooks– but that’s it.” I can also say I’ve had exactly one good math teacher in my entire life: and that person did not use @#$% Pearson.
I do well in Pearson and I feel like I don’t quite understand what I’m doing. I do badly in Pearson and I still feel the same way. LMAO. I can’t decide whether it’s because I’m not playing to my actual strengths (aka not STEM) or it’s the design of these courses. I navigate these courses like a multitasking ADHD addled rabbit and have about 7 tabs open at once. Maybe this model works well for “how to use this program” but otherwise it seems odd.
The university also charges more per credit for these online courses than courses with instructors. Zuh?
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This is precisely why for years I have pretended to use the “electronic component” of our language courses but I never even accessed it. It’s needless, confusing busywork that doesn’t help students. I feel appalled that they are forced to pay for this crap but there is nothing I can do. 😦
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So no, it’s definitely not you. It’s the idiocy of this form of surrogate teaching.
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In Israel the trend seems to be true for schools too. I heard that some schools demand each teacher to give X % of all lessons in computer laboratory. May be, it makes school subjects more interesting for children and teens?
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It’s more that schools pay for these useless labs, have no idea how to justify their existence, and come up with strange ways to do that. At my dept, for instance, students have to spend a certain number of minutes per week physically in the lab in order to pass the course. What they do in there is of no interest to anybody. Of course, I never even considered following this regulation.
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I hate this obsession! In my university, clickers are being pushed left, right and center by administrators and lecturers alike. (Our lecturers are non-tenure track faculty who don’t do research and mostly teach lower-division courses.) Those of us who lecture and chalk-and-talk are constantly shamed by administrators and lecturers for not “modernizing” our classes.
Fact is, I, along with many others in my department, teach heavily mathematical classes. You can’t learn the concepts in these classes by reading books alone — you need someone explaining the intuition behind the math, which no books will do. So you do need an experienced lecturer who really understands the material and can explain why it is the way it is.
And you do need chalk-and-talk, if you are to teach serious math. I have never seen anyone teach serious math well with powerpoint.
But of course this entire point is lost on administrators, who fail to appreciate technical depth and subtlety.
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It’s the same here! I’ve tried to explain that in the area I teach, there is literally nothing we could achieve with clickers. It’s something one could use to kill 10 minutes of time when there’s nothing better to do but there’s zero educational value in it.
The best I can do in my discipline is engage with students in direct, unmediated conversations.
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Anon, I completely agree. I also teach heavily mathematical material and nothing beats chalk-and-talk, where you can draw and write and derive things on the fly, and take questions and digressions that stem from what that particular class is finding interesting or perhaps challenging.
I always have very high course evaluations despite the fact that I have very strict grading policies. Students are not stupid; they know when they are learning and when they are not, and most actually want to get an education and appreciate being actually taught — this means I will explain things many different ways until each student finds one that clicks, and I will take the time that’s needed to do so, and I will adjust the tempo and content to what they need.
Computers as part of my class, but generally students use them to do parts of their assignments, and I use it on a rare occasion to specifically show an image or a video. There is great value in having students learn some basic scientific programming that leads to compelling data visualization (how to plot 2D and 3D data, how to make a movie to present more complex dependencies, etc.) and for many these programming assignments really re-enforce the math and physics discussed in class.
But I am sick and tired of the stupid flipped classroom and clickers being pushed on us like they are. It’s a cost saving measure (pre-recorded lectures are the only way to scale up to booming enrollments without actually, you know, having multiple sections and multiple teachers). What I hate is that we are all supposed to pretend it’s for the students’ good instead. It’s disgusting and disingenuous, especially in the light of skyrocketing tuition — reduced access to teachers, huge classes, bullshit technology, and increasing prices. WTF? The least I can do is not be complicit in the collective Koolaid drinking that it’s all for the good of the students, cause clickers are the future!
(Sorry for the rant. )
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But Clarissa, don’t you know that professors who use PowerPoint and read the text of their slides verbatim in class every day are much better instructors than professors who simply engage in meaningful, thought-provoking discussions about the course material with their students? 🙂
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Oooops. The smiley-face emoticon should be at the end of the last sentence.
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Yes, it’s WordPress’s new thing. It takes your emoticons and sticks them arbitrarily wherever it wishes.
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