One might argue that the history of education began "In the Beginning" when the first clear instruction was given: "Don't eat the apple." Ironically, this first effort at teaching opened the door to knowledge, making education necessary and we have been trying to figure out effective teaching methods ever since.
From these beginnings , I think it best if we skip forward a few years to a time where education takes a familiar form. The concept of the school seems to have begun with the Greeks, who made great efforts to safeguard and expand their political power through physical, religious and moral education. Schools and teachers trained boys primarily from the works of the great poets, emphasizing artistic, patriotic, religious, and ethical elements of Greek society. As intellectual life consolidated in Athens , practical and intellectual pursuits, including mathematics, geography, architecture and law rose in importance. Socrates and his disciple Plato added a new philosophical approach to teaching and learning with a shift towards intellectual growth and an emphasis on the search for pure truth. For them, and the philosophers and educators who followed, it was through dialog and rigorous examination of opinion that truth, insight and meaning were to be discovered. Technologically, of course, not much happened at this time-Socrates was in fact intellectually opposed even to the use of written material-nevertheless, this movement represented a dramatic change in the philosophy of education. The Greek influence on education continued and progressed during the time of the Roman Empire as well, with an emphasis on early childhood education and the development of a stepwise curriculum that carried through adulthood.(1)
With the fall of the Roman Empire, and as Europe slid into the Dark and Middle Ages, the evolution of education and the spread of literacy entered a period of rapid decline. The reasons given for the waning role of education and literacy in society are varied, including: shortages of papyrus and parchment, a trend away from 'social literacy to 'craft' literacy, and a tendency of the Church to see the importance of managing access to literacy as a means of keeping control over the ideas and thoughts of a diverse population.(2) Schools devolved into training venues for the Priesthood, or craft-based apprenticeships. Science was neglected and there was overt hostility towards secular learning. The personal search for truth and meaning was replaced by the notion of inherited wisdom and churchly authority.(1) And there things more or less sat for a thousand years.
But then something happened that changed everything. There are those who will argue that the invention of the printing press with movable type in the middle of the 15 th century was the most significant technological innovation in the history of humankind. Perhaps, perhaps not, but it sure was important. Within 50 years there were 8 million volumes published beginning a massive shift of knowledge to the printed page with books on science, philosophy, math, geography, anatomy, and physics. To become a functioning adult, the young would now require education, and schools were reborn, this time with a push from technology.(2 )
What of these schools? Near as I can tell, John Amos Komensky (aka Comenius) set the standards for practical education in the Mid-17 th century, setting up a sequence that was expected to take 24 years to compete. His curriculum had the ultimate goal of awakening in the pupil a love of learning. Subjects were grouped into sciences and arts with one teacher per subject. Each lesson built on what was learned before so that students could grasp causal connections. The availability of uniform texts was essential, with learning to be from both books and experiences, re-enforced through repetition, lectures and mutual questioning between teacher and pupil. Comenius suggested one teacher for 100 students, with TAs managing groups of 10 and correcting their work. Comenius set up a full structure for educational progress from the home school to elementary school on to "Latin school", academy and finally an academy of sciences.(1) It is striking how little our educational structure has digressed from this construction.
Time to hit the fast forward button again to the next big technological revolution to hit the classroom: chalkboards. Prior to 1801, teachers had no means of visually presenting information to a roomful of students all at once. Students had handheld black-painted wooden slates upon which to write assignments. Teachers would go from student to student copying, for example, a math problem onto each student's individual slate so clearly the wall-mounted slate board was a notable improvement. By the mid-1800s, chalkboards were in almost every school and remain perhaps the primary all-around educational fixture in classrooms. In fact at Lehigh, chalk (or white) boards remain the most often technology used in the classroom to this day! ( http://www.ergoindemand.com/about_chalkboards.htm )
So far things have been progressing rather slowly in education, with technology and the fundamental structures remaining largely unchanged since the 17 th century. But the 20 th century approached with another big invention, and this time the changes began to come quicker and quicker. Electricity paired with photography, soon brought the world into the classroom with lantern slides, films, film strips, 35 mm slides, overhead projectors and eventually sound that ran the various devices. Broadcast television became available to the schools in the 50s, and in the 70s, video tape was added to the mix. These devices enabled teachers to bring things outside the student's immediate world into the classroom to share as a community, rather than as individuals (via text). For good or for ill, technology entered the classroom and things would never be the same. Or would they? Fundamentally, what had actually changed from the days of Comenius? Education was still organized as it was-students followed a structured class progression and studied passively with lecturers, assistants and text books, but now occasionally supplemented by moving pictures and sounds. In terms of the process, though, not much was different.
A smaller time jump now to not too long ago when very large heavy objects appeared on the ceilings of our teaching spaces and dim, somewhat blurry images from computers filled the pearly white surfaces that flapped in the front of the room. Over time, these projectors shrank, grew brighter and sharper, and PowerPoint was born enlighten us with the ever-popular bullet list. It is reported that PowerPoint dominates the presentation universe with a 95% market share, over 300 million users, and reportedly 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day.(3) Edward Tufte, an authority on visual display of information, argues cogently that PowerPoint, with its emphasis on the bullet list, constrains the presenter in very negative ways, reducing complex ideas to bullet points and limiting the creative and spontaneous interplay that should be the hallmark of learning environments. Bullet lists serve well as note taking guides but offer little to enhance attention, comprehension, or retention, especially when compared to well-crafted pictorial or graphical representations. If you wish to pursue his argument in depth-it includes a fascinating discussion tying the O-ring failure and subsequent Challenger space shuttle disaster directly to a PowerPoint bullet list-I recommend you track down a copy of his essay: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.(4) Julia Keller, in an article published in the Chicago Tribune (3) suggests that PowerPoint might be thought of as "technological cocaine"-easy to start, hard to stop and not very good for you.
Now, those of you who know me might in all fairness ask: "You teach PowerPoint, you use PowerPoint and you even use bullet lists in most of your presentations-massive quantities of bullet lists-can't you say anything good about PowerPoint?" Well, yes. Clearly I do find value in PowerPoint, but the idea that images, charts, drawings, and exemplars are better learning enhancers than bullet lists is an important one, and I hope the exaggeration may lead to at least the consideration of expanding one's PowerPoint vocabulary when preparing for classes. More importantly, I referred to PowerPoint as 'technological cocaine'-well I didn't, Julia Keller did and I think she is wrong. I like to think of PowerPoint as technological marijuana, a 'gateway' drug, one which, with any luck, will lead the user to sample the harder technology drugs which I will describe shortly. However, if as Tufte does, one treats PowerPoint as an end-stage drug, one that the user gets hopelessly addicted to, then it seems to me that the prognosis for progress in teaching and learning via this medium is not good. Anyway, drug metaphors aside, I would argue that the introduction of a computer and a projector to the classroom changed things a bit: the pictures were different and they might be animated; an instructor might now easily show students some very interesting and useful things-but still, on a fundamental level little changed with the advent of computer projection.
Obviously, though technology has changed education, so when did this change happen? When was the tipping point reached where a new technology matured enough for its true impact to be felt? I would argue that the answer is now; right now. Two things happened with the turn of this century: First, technology caught up with learning theory with the rapid and recent deployment of collaborative tools that offer radical new ways to structure the teaching/learning experience, and second, a new paradigm for instruction offered a significant threat to the high priests of the academy with the growth of on-line instruction by for-profit virtual institutions that threatened the very foundations of traditional University education. Frankly, there is nothing like a swift kick to the fiscal butt to motivate change. Due to the confluence of these two developments it is possible, in fact it is my hope, that classroom teaching may never be the same.
Here are some of the innovations that I think have the potential to cause a paradigm shift in education:
- Course management software such as Blackboard offers many tools for faculty including one which I think is very important: the threaded discussion list. Henry Perkinson, an author, philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Educational History at NYU, has argued that most learning takes place when students do something. Moreover, he believes that education is a process of evolution or growth, and that the task of the teacher is to facilitate that growth. Perkinson believes that this growth occurs through modification of knowledge that students already have-theories they create to make sense of the world around them. In his view, the teacher presents material to the students-through lectures, readings, or demonstrations, but actual learning takes place when students create their own understanding of what was presented to them. The role of the teacher, he says, is not just to present the material to students but to help them make sense of it through active and persistent discussion, as step by step the student's understanding of the material evolves and grows. A Perkinson assignment was always returned covered with comments and invariably ended with "what do you think?" This highly interactive model of teaching, a combination of the Socratic Method and Karl Popper's notion of fallibilism, is ideally suited to exploit the power of the discussion list.(5) In a recent correspondence, professor Perkinson indicated that if he was teaching today, he would be willing to give the threaded discussion board a shot.
- Collaborative software tools such as the BlackBoard plug-ins "Teams" and "Journals" or Macromedia's "Open Mind" enable students to work in groups on projects in real time.
- Computer gesture and sound recording systems such as Camtasia offer a means to develop training modules, enabling instructors to easily 'off load' some of the 'how to' material from the classroom environment, freeing up class time for other more valuable activities.
- Centra, Horizon Live and other real-time distributed learning tools, offer a fully functional interactive classroom experience without the classroom, or they can also be used to combine smaller learning spaces into larger collaborative environments
- Wireless networking combined with Laptops or tablet PCs can take class participation to new levels. There is a demonstration classroom at Stanford where students using wireless laptops can either send material from their laptop to the communal projection screen or use their mouse and keyboard to manipulate whatever display has been sent by others to that screen. In this environment of technological anarchy, not collaborating is almost impossible! Commercial software packages such as Silicon Chalk and DyKnow offer potentially powerful note taking and collaborative tools.
- Thin-profile displays with interactive overlays and white boards combined with annotation and capture tools, such as those offered by Smart Technologies and Polyvision, get faculty members out from behind the instructor station, and offer quick and easy ways to save and distribute board work or brainstorming type sessions.
- Automated room control systems with remote monitoring facilitate more complex AV installations without placing undue burdens on the users.
- Audience response systems or "clickers" can be used to break the barriers to participation in large or small classes serving as polling tools, ice breakers, and informal assessment tools.
- And while we are not quite there yet, we are approaching the possibility of simple and widespread availability of Internet2 based video conferencing technology. I2 enables the walls of the classroom to crumble-with students, instructors, and 'experiences' available from anywhere, live and two-way, with high resolution and full motion, opening new opportunities for collaborative learning. Lehigh's recent success with remote electron microscopy is one example of the potential of this technology.
All of these technology tools have something in common: They have the potential to foster interaction, discussion, and personal growth through active learning and inquiry rather than passive learning and indoctrination. In time, the successful of these tools will become ubiquitous and transparent-that is they will be so easy to use they will become as accessible as chalkboards. I see in these tools the opportunity not to revisit (again) Comenius, but rather Socrates! These technologies offer the opportunity, for the first time in centuries, for thoughtful academics to do something different, completely different, in their classrooms.
There are a few things, however, that threaten progress in integrating technology into our learning environments. I have already talked about PowerPoint, but let me add what one of our more technology oriented faculty members teaching in a large lecture hall reported on a classroom use survey. She said: "I don't think [technology] impacts their learning at all..I love using it; I think they like seeing it and expect to see it. Does it make them better Learners? I doubt it. What still counts is what they do on their own, and I think we're creating a class of students who now think the technology does it for them." She went on to wonder if the providing of lecture notes before class (via PowerPoint and BlackBoard) doesn't lead to disengaged students who demand and expect that the teachers and the technology do more and more for them.
Keeping with the theme of expectations, Gavriel Salomon in his book Communication and Education suggests that people's beliefs about a medium affect what they seek out from that medium. For example, he argues that over time a TV viewer learns that television is a source of entertainment, developing anticipatory schemata that lead him or her to expect entertainment from television. After a while becomes very difficult to prevail against that belief and so, "instructional television" may be treated habitually with the same shallow depth of processing by the viewer as a situation comedy or reality show. This does not mean that a learner cannot invest more mental effort in television viewing when required to do so, but overcoming this mental inertia is a challenge that has to be considered when using video materials in a classroom setting.(6) This notion may give us pause when thinking about other schemata-other habits of use-that our "digital ready" students bring to the modern classroom, with for example, computers (think video-game arcade, juke box, and x rated movie theater) or e-mail (think flame wars and grammatically marginal instant messaging).
A third concern is the potential of computer based teaching and learning to isolate the student, reducing the social-learning component of the classroom while at the same time, rendering the professor anonymous. Faculty leading on-line classes, for example, have reported that these students do as well as those in the traditional classroom, but the on-line students tend to like the professor, a virtual stranger, less well.
One more thing: changing the curriculum is hard work. Changing from overhead transparencies to PowerPoint requires some thinking and keyboarding. Including some of BlackBoard's capabilities in a course adds some additional thought and work. But changing a class from a traditional lecture-based delivery to a collaborative, inquiry-based approach will likely require a total rethinking of course content and objectives. This will clearly represent a tremendous amount of work on the part of the instructor and will probably also require much more from students who participate in this aggressively active (and interactive) learning style.
Engagement, habituation, isolation, and required effort then are just a few things that we must keep in mind as we develop the 21 st century curriculum. Other issues of concern in a technology-based teaching environment include the high cost of technology hardware and software and pressure to see positive return on investment while at the same time remaining competitive with peer institutions. In addition, faculty have to be alert to the frustration that may be caused by rapid change and the need to maintain the currency of technology-rich classes, while support staff must evaluate and introduce new resources while at the same time continuing to provide support for legacy programs. These issues should be part of any discussion of technology-based education, and I offer them here not as roadblocks, but as challenges to be overcome.
Now, at last, let's talk about furniture. To my way of thinking, and expanding on Marshall McLuhan's oft cited notion that the medium is the message (7), what we do in a space is largely structured by that space. For example, in a typical auditorium one finds fixed seats, facing the front which is elevated slightly. There is usually a box-like structure full of electronics behind which stands the lecturer. The auditorium resembles nothing if not a place of worship, and indeed, what goes on in the auditorium is very similar to what goes on in the sacred spaces of religion: A wise and ordained individual speaks, motionless, from behind a lectern on an elevated pulpit, offering commentary on the text to the gathered brethren and expecting little more than the occasional "amen" in return. The congregation (er, students) are expected to sit quietly and attentively, absorbing the message of the lecturer. (I note with some amusement that the biggest growth segment in the Audio Visual industry is the installation of projection systems in churches! Even the sermon, it seems, is no longer safe from the bullet list!) While instructors are sometimes successful at educing response from students in an auditorium, this is generally not typically 'the way of the lecture.' I believe that this behavior is at least in part informed by the nature and structure of the learning environment.
The typical classroom offers a variation on this theme. The instructor is no longer elevated, and the congregation is smaller. The seats typically remain organized in front-facing rows and the instructor still has a large boxlike station to stand behind. Smaller class size, the lack of a platform, the presence of writing surfaces, and the reduced distance between instructor and student do enhance the opportunities for interaction, but these spaces still lend themselves best to the lecture teaching style. However, I have seen that in a clearly intentional act of subversion, some faculty at Lehigh, particularly those in the humanities, have been observed moving the furniture, a rranging it in circles, clusters and other odd configurations. How dare they! Well, I suspect they do this for a reason: by moving the furniture, faculty break down the implied one-way communication of front-facing furniture. They sit with their students rather than stand in front of them. By this simple act of moving the chairs, the learning environment and the communication that goes on there is transformed.
Seminar-style rooms, of course remove all doubt as to what is expected. Here the class size is very small, the table is very large and all are expected to sit around it. There is no instructor station, and while there is a 'front' usually dictated by a screen or writing surface, it need not dominate the room or what goes on there. The seminar room and its furniture scream out: "let's talk about this".
So, as we consider incorporating the technologies I mentioned a few minutes ago into our classrooms, what should we do about the furniture? At Lehigh, our recent classroom technology build-out was, for the most part, done in existing rooms, and followed typical models for each of the classroom types I just described. However, as you all know, technology ages very quickly, and the wise manager makes plans for life-cycle replacement. However, given what I have said here today, replacing equipment as it ages may not be enough. We also have to consider changes to our learning spaces and the furniture within them. Here are a few examples of what we are thinking about at Lehigh:
The Media Center classroom began as a technology-equipped space that we could use to relocate classes that required technology support (it was often easier to move classes than equipment). Demand for the room decreased as our tech-ready rooms approached 80%, and so we began to think of ways to get more use out of the space. What we came up with is a test-bed for the collaborative tools that we might integrate into our classroom feature set as we manage future life-cycle developments. The proposed room consists of movable tables and chairs offering multiple configurations. We would remove the instructor station, retain the existing projection system and add an interactive SMARTBoard on the opposite wall. In this way we eliminate the "front" of the room while retaining good sight lines from anywhere in the space. Other proposed tools include a white board capture system and a wireless control system that doubles as a writing surface. Tablet PCs will be provided and from these students will be able to pass information to the projection surfaces. A clicker/response system will also be available. The redundancy of collaborative tools in this space will enable us to see which work well and which prove to be simply too much trouble.
Another notion we hope to explore soon is to see if we can update computer lab space to offer our students a more collaborative work environment. In some rooms, we are considering replacing some rows of computers with large flat-screen displays, tables, computer, wireless keyboard, and a laptop interface. In others, we might try to create a more comfortable work environment, with the tables replaced by the soft furniture much favored by today's students. It has been asked: "Aren't you making the classroom more like what students had in Kindergarten?" In some ways we are, with the movable furniture, cubbies for "toy" storage, soft furniture and "play" spaces. Perhaps this is not a bad thing. After all, what did we learn in kindergarten? To share our toys and to play nice together, and isn't that the goal of collaborative learning?
So, furniture works with the technology to encourage interaction and collaboration. But is it really all about the furniture? Of course not. Like McLuhan, I tend to hyperbole, but furniture and the way we organize our learning spaces plays a critical role in the educational process and must be included as an important part of any technology implementation program.
I'd like to conclude with a bit more philosophy of education. While I am confident that the innovations I mentioned a few minutes ago can exert a positive influence on our instructional environments, I would be remiss if I did not add one final caveat: Neil Postman, in Teaching as a Conserving Activity argues that one of the most important things education can do is to act as part of a social and cultural thermostatic system. That is, when the environment is innovative, the role of education is to be tradition-bound and when the environment is static, then education has an obligation to be innovative. The goal over time is to provide a balance in order to keep our culture in working order.(8) So, when our innovative technology environment offers up (NetGen) students who prefer cryptic instant messaging to face to face meetings or phone calls; multi-tasking to concentration; Google and the Web to Library catalogs, databases and primary sources; digital stories to essays; bloggers to professional journalists; or Grand Theft Auto and reality TV to reality, then perhaps the academic environment might best be served by a curriculum that emphasizes discourse, face-to-face participation, reading, team based activity, and in-depth, grammatically and linguistically correct research-based writing. So, what I'm wondering is this: Would it be possible with careful arrangement of the furniture to reach Postman's thermostatic balance by incorporating some elements of technology into some aspects of teaching to achieve a marriage of modern educational technology, and the ancient's approach to teaching where 'knowledge' came from discourse, from experience, and from community? Conserving and innovating at the same time. The best, perhaps of both worlds!
Finally, does all this mean the end of the lecture? The lecture as a component of the educational process has proved to be most durable, perhaps because it proved to be an effective and efficient means of transmitting at least a portion of our educational curriculum. Socrates worried about this in the Phaedrus, where as I mentioned earlier, he noted his opposition to writing in education. He believed that the printed word was no good because you could not ask it a question.(9) Well, hand-written books did not kill the lecture. 550 years of printed books did not kill the lecture. Some 50 years of filmstrips, slides, overhead transparencies and television did not kill the lecture. What are the chances that a few computer programs will kill the lecture? I'll get back to you in about 50 years.
References:
(1) Weimer, Hermann (1962). Concise History of Education: From Solon to Pestalozzi. New York : Philosophical Library
(2) Postman, Neil (1982). The Disappearance of Childhood. New York : Delacorte Press
(3) Keller, Julia (2330, January 22). Is PowerPoint the Devil? Chicago Tribune or http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT465/management/juliakeller1.htm
(4) Tufte, Edward (2003) The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire , Connecticut : Graphics Press LLC
(5) Perkinson, Henry J. (2002) The Critical Approach to Social Work. Journal of Social Work Education, 38(3)
(6) Salomon, Gavriel (1981). Communication and Education: Social and Psychological Interactions. Beverly Hills , California : Sage Publications
(7) McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The extensions of Man. New York : McGraw Hill
(8) Postman, Neil (1979). Teaching as a Conserving Activity . New York : Delacorte Press
(9) Neil Postman in: Howard Weinberg (Producer). (1998) Learning: From Socrates to Cyberspace [Videorecording]. Princeton , New Jersey : Films for the Humanities
|
