Faculty Focus: Doug Marshall

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 by Rob

The Luddite Professor: In Defense – nay, Praise – of ‘Chalk and Talk’

Permalink for this paragraph 0 by Dr. Doug Marshall (Sociology)

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Let me clarify right up front that my Luddism is but relative. I write not to argue that technology has no place in higher education, nor that a live lecture course is always and everywhere superior to its electronic alternatives. Neither do I write to defend that bastardization of the lecture, the mere recitation of aged notes into ever-newer generations of student notebooks. What I do contend – as both an experienced college teacher and as a social scientist – is that the venerable lecture course must retain a central place in higher education, including here at South. For all of its wonders, educational technology is most significant as a means of augmenting, not replacing, the live classroom experience.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 The crux of my argument is that the purpose of college education isn’t only, or even primarily, about the mere transfer of practical information or skills – though these are among its more tangible fruits. What universities have historically been uniquely able, and
necessary, to provide is something more fundamental: The socialization of students into an intellectual culture, cultivating in them both the appetite for knowledge and the critical habits of mind with which to analyze, evaluate, and use it. The goal is to equip the student to partake fully of human culture, to participate fully in human society, and by doing so, to perpetuate human civilization.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Though it certainly includes the transmission of information (and, perhaps more than many, I would maintain the importance of such dissemination), socialization is a much larger process that relies upon older and more fundamental mechanisms. Having evolved in our decidedly non-virtual ancestral milieu, such mechanisms capitalize on the states evoked in us by the unmediated copresence of other human beings. Anyone who has decided to attend a live play instead of staying home to watch TV, who goes to church instead of listening to the service on the radio, or who partakes of a live concert rather than plugging in their ipod understands well the subjective experiential chasm between actual copresence with the performers (and, just as importantly, other audience members) and the mediated and asynchronous facsimile that technology makes possible. This subjective contrast reflects, and is a direct function of, the two experiences’ differential potentials as occasions for socialization.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Because it borders upon my own work on ritual processes, I am tempted to dissect the live experience into the multiple mechanisms (e.g. autonomic arousal, emotional contagion, deindividuation, etc.) by which it facilitates socialization. But since this would quickly exceed the bounds of this newsletter (and most readers’ interest), allow me to oversimplify their cumulative effect with my own gloss on what is unique about the live lecture experience. What a good lecture has in common with the theatre, religious rituals, and concerts, and what gives all of these experiences their distinctive power to change the way people see their world, is the sense that something special and utterly unique is being created here and now.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Despite the script, bulletin, sheet music, or outline that roughly sets the course of events, what actually transpires is a joint function of these guidelines, the instructor’s mood and interests, the audience’s attitudes and knowledge, and, most importantly, a particular moment in social and cultural history. The analogy I’ve made many times is to improvisational jazz, in which the lead sheet can be almost incidental to the music being made. The exciting sense that something brand new is being created ricochets and intensifies among all present, creating an immediacy and lasting impression that is hard to obtain in any other way.

Permalink for this paragraph 1 To those who argue that because students today spend their lives doing everything else in an on-line environment, education must do the same or be left behind, I must take exception. It is the very fact that everything else comes to them through the same electronic portal that makes it so important that education not. The live experience makes it clear that what we’re providing is not just another channel of “content” always available for “consumption.” More cynically, we must recognize the reality that in an on-line environment, we as teachers are competing head-to-head with every single member of our student’s social networks, with entire industries of determined commercial interests, and even flocks of angry birds for our student’s limited (and arguably shrinking) attention. I’m sorry to say it, but we as a whole are not going to win that contest.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 To be sure, most students will eventually watch or read their way through the class materials, contribute the requisite posts to the discussion board, and pass their exams. But research suggests that they will do so using tiny chunks of attention wrested from other, more compelling on-line attractions (some research suggests that when they can, students check their email or facebook wall 30-40 times an hour). There is a real possibility that the resulting lack of experience with the discipline of sustaining one’s attention for the purpose of understanding a concept, solving a problem, or completing an assignment exacts serious if hard-to-measure cognitive costs over the long run. For our purposes, it is safe to say that thus reduced to just another asynchronous mediated experience among many others, the on-line classroom has a reduced chance of producing a lasting impact on students.

Permalink for this paragraph 1 Let me leave you with one last thought. As its critics have often pointed out, the University model has changed relatively little over the last few centuries. For all of its well-known foibles, shortcomings, and absurdities, it has undeniably fostered staggering progress in human knowledge, technology, culture, lifespan, and social values (Yes, I know, it’s awfully easy to identify all the new horrors it has also spawned, and I’m hardly modernity’s cheerleader. But ask yourself, honestly, would you really rather have lived a thousand years ago? Five hundred? Two hundred?). In short, it is a model of higher education that has demonstrated its efficacy over the long haul. We must understand that to the extent that we abandon it for an untried alternative, we do so at ours and our culture’s peril.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Click here to return to the ILC eNewsletter Home Page

This entry is filed under Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

1 Comment on the whole page

Philip Carr April 10, 2012 at 8:10 am

I find much of interest here and think Doug makes a compelling case. I teach courses fully online and other courses with “eCompanion” and I taught prior to there being an eCompanion. I agree that there are many ways to augment the traditional classroom with technology. The face-to-face classroom augmented with eCompanion, soon to be SAKAI, is my preferred way to engage with students. I learn various things about my students from our classroom discussions, especially before and after class, and often different things from our threaded discussions. One interesting point Doug makes is the importance of the interaction in the classroom to create “something special and utterly unique.” As I read this, I thought “wow, I want to do this,” and I was struck as I develop my lectures that this is not always in the back of my mind, but more often simply conveying course content is my primary concern. I conclude that I need to have this idea more in the front of my thinking as I prepare a classroom experience for students. Another related thought is that I am unsure that students come to our classes thinking they will have such an experience or very prepared to participate in making such an experience. These thoughts also must inform the creation of classroom experiences. Finally, I would suggest that if those of us who teach at the university do not develop and hone what makes the classroom experience worthy and unqiue, we will find ourselves out of a job.

Reply to Philip Carr

Doug Marshall April 7, 2012 at 1:15 am

A different line of reasoning suggests that a wholesale transition to on-line education is an economic imperative. I’d like to briefly address this argument in this aside.
While there are obvious savings from the reduced need for bricks-and-mortar classrooms, there are reasons to doubt whether the economic advantages are truly as great as often touted. For example, one of the true and great advantages of the on-line format is that it can increase the amount of interaction between faculty and students, especially those typically too shy to participate in a live classroom. But such discussion is itself time-intensive, and sets a hard limit on just how scalable this model is. There are only so many students at a time with which an instructor can carry on quality, enlightening discussions. Theoretically, the resources to do this are freed up by allowing faculty to invest less time in giving and preparing lectures, but the risk is that faculty swamped with discussions would be tempted to put off updating and refreshing course materials for longer than they should, stultifying the course. Put simply, on-line courses’ freedom from physical constraints on class size should not blind us to the other, equally real constraints they impose on size, and thus, cost effectiveness.
Another element of the economic argument contends that providing on-line programs allows the university to attract students from a larger and less local pool, thereby increasing enrollment and tuition dollars. But I see three real risks to this strategy.
First, it is not as though we are the only school pursuing this strategy: To the extent that by putting programs on-line, we abstract our identity from a particular place, we also invite our local students to consider other on-line schools they might not otherwise have considered. More generally, in recruiting on-line students from elsewhere to enroll at South, we are competing in a much larger pool against some better-known, more practiced, and in some cases less ethical alternatives, so it’s hard to be sure that the extra on-line students we attract would necessarily counterbalance those we lost to other on-line programs.
Second, even if our on-line offerings do help attract more students, this could be outweighed by the problems it creates for retention. Students leave school for a lot of different reasons, but we know that students often stick around because they have become attached to a particular set of classmates, professors, places, and the campus culture in general. By streamlining their academic experience to the bare necessities, we lose out on these auxillary attachment’s power to keep students in school. A student who withdraws is not only no longer paying tuition, but in the future may well also negatively affect our state appropriations.
Last, and relatedly, if students aren’t on campus to make these connections to our particular facilities, faculty, and student body, can we really expect them to retain the kind of loyalty to us that makes them active and generous alumni in the future? In sum, let’s not be too confident that on-line education is necessarily going to be economically advantageous to us as a University in the long run.

Reply to Doug Marshall

0 Comments on paragraph 8

1 Comment on paragraph 9

Doug Marshall April 7, 2012 at 1:49 am

On a more constructive note, please allow me to briefly describe the way I personally feel that the incorporation of new technologies into higher education at South should proceed.
First and foremost is the issue of academic freedom, broadly defined. That is, why would we ever want to take an instructor who comfortable, practiced, and demonstrably effective at delivering live lecture courses and coerce them into teaching in an on-line format for which they have no enthusiasm and may well be unsuited? But at the same time, those that have a penchant for online, blended, or other course formats should be equally free to teach their classes in whatever format they believe they do their best work in.
That said, we do need to recognize that different courses and programs lend themselves to different formats and needs. Online programs and courses seem to work best with student population who are already to some degree socialized into intellectual culture, have a well-defined academic goal, and are proven self-motivators, thus the success of our on-line nursing programs.
More generally, I would argue that live lower-division and general-education courses are necessary to establish the socialization and attachment to place that will allow students to excel at their upper-division courses, whether live or online. This is especially true for student populations such as ours, that are typically first-generation college students. Additionally, those courses most explicitly about intellectual socialization, i.e. much of the Arts & Sciences curriculum and capstone courses in most any discipline, are also likely to be most effective in the live format.

Reply to Doug Marshall

ILC eNewsletter