You Can’t Make Me Drink the Kool-Aid: Part Two

While I’m on the subject of enormous wastes of funds for completely unnecessary tools that students have almost no desire to use, has anyone seen those classroom clickers around a lot lately? HMM.

You might be saying “well there’s no organizational or personal need for Facebook, but students use it all the time anyway so you’re just a BIG DUMMY!” I’m getting there.

If I were a professor designing a course, any course, I would ask myself all of the following questions long before day one: (FLOWCHART ALERT)

1. How can I enhance my course using instructional technology?

There are almost always some answers to this one, let’s say I settle on one way. I want to install a class wiki for English 101.

2. Do I really need to use this technology? Is this the best way to achieve an academic goal?

What if the answer is “no?” I decide under the guidance of the Division of Teaching and Learning technologies that I really don’t need the wiki. THAT’S OKAY! It’s part of the greater process of deciding what works and what doesn’t work, in the context of a particular class, and if I’ve made some sort of relationship with a sub-organization that can help me in the future (DTLT), all for the better. I’ve also saved myself and my class a TON of work, because I realized before the class started that it just wasn’t going to work.

What if the answer is “yes?” I decide that the wiki is the best possible space for creating (for example) a class literary glossary.

3. Can I come up with a persuasive, needs-based argument to explain my solution to the class?

If I answered number 2 “yes,” I should be able to create the argument. Maybe I won’t get everyone super-engaged in my solution, but at the very least, they’ll understand how it makes sense, and take it seriously. Some of them might be inclined to do the work.

4. Do I have an effective method of teaching the technology? Do I need assistance from an ITS?

This can be hard to do. On one hand, many students like technology, and are more than willing to “try it out” and mess with a particular system until they get it right (it’s called nerd theory). Most students, however, have better things to do with their time than technological experimentation, and would rather have an explicit “crash course” on how to use it.

Students who don’t understand how to use the technology will either not use it, or use it begrudgingly. It might seem like I’m really restating the obvious here. In that case, I give anyone reading this a challenge. Ask a student who has a UMWblog why their subtitle says “just another umwblogs.org weblog.” These students are obscenely easy to find. Once you’ve done that, ask them how they can change the subtitle. I guarantee, GUARANTEE that you’ll get the following response at least 70% of the time:

“UHHHHHHH…..”

I’m not faulting anyone for not teaching how to change a blog subtitle, if that’s what’s going on, it seems like a pretty benign, mundane thing. But can students really be expected to navigate the system, post, edit, and make comments if they don’t understand that they can change the subtitle of their own blog?

This scenario is so obvious, no wonder students feel awkward and uncomfortable asking questions about it. The reality is, technology needs to be taught so that questions don’t need to be asked. Again, critical course time which could be used for teaching the content is wasted in favor of technology training seminars.

5. How can I engage my students in my course technology?

I have my wiki, and my training days. I’m ready to teach this course, but something is still wrong. Why, oh why, oh why aren’t these students getting into it? AAAARRRGGHHH!

This is the ultimate question, isn’t it? Again, there’s no “miracle answer.” Students are still selfish, arrogant, stubborn, lazy bastards, but let’s go back to the Facebook example for a second.

If every college professor were as effective as Facebook at engaging students, academic woes would be over. What is it? What’s the magic secret? Is it that I can go and drool over pictures of Jeff McClurken whenever I want to? That I can exert my lovelorn gaze upon the profile of a cute sophomore history major? Is it the fascination with Steve Greenlaw’s similarities to Santa Claus? That’s all part of it, but it’s more in how Facebook is implemented. In fact, any amount of truly engaging content works the same way, Internet-based or not.

Conventionally, technology is implemented using a push system. That is, the technology is introduced in an organization, and its members are expected to use it. “All employees are expected to use the new BlackBerries within one week.” Email was pushed until it became a global communication standard. Basically, the technology is “pushed” to the user, who is expected to use it. The result is hardly engaging.

Engaging technology, on the other hand, uses a pull system. I realize I keep going back to Facebook for this, but it’s a brilliant, brilliant example. Pull systems use a series of incentives to “pull” the user back towards the technology, again, and again, and again. Facebook says to a new user: “use Facebook to…keep up with friends and family, share photos and videos, reconnect with old classmates,” etc. Nobody “pushed” me into using Facebook, but those are some pretty strong incentives to get me to join. I might not necessarily need to use the service, but boy howdy that sounds like a lot of fun, I sure want to.

Once I’ve joined, the incentives continue. When someone posts on my wall, or tags me in a photo, I get an email, giving me a pretty big incentive to go back to the site. It’s a masterful exploit of self-interest. Eventually, I don’t even need the emails anymore (I opted out after a while). I have become engaged so far into it, I can’t easily get out.

Blog comments work the same way. When someone comments on my blog, I want to go back to my blog site to read it. I might counter-comment, I might read their blog, I might even post again. Who knows, but I’m more engaged than I was before I got the comment, even if I’m the laziest student alive. As Serena poignantly pointed out to me yesterday, “everybody is a comment whore.”

Not that it’s really feasible to say: “let’s create a class blog based entirely on a pull incentive system.” That’s really hard, although it could be doable, maybe by Gardner. There is, however, a lot more freedom to experiment with incentives in a classroom setting as opposed to, say, a corporate setting. It could be possible, even, to create an environment in which students, normal students who otherwise would be quiet, to go beyond what they would normally do. That is, go outside of the “comfort zone,” as Gardner says.

Why are incentive-based technologies mutually beneficial? They engage the students, for one, and they also engage the professor. Let’s say I’m a professor who stresses the importance of blog commenting, for example. In addition to the built-in, self-interest incentive, I tell the students that their final grade will be raised by one full letter if they regularly reflect critically on their own content. “Regularly” remains intentionally undefined. Some may call foul on the ambiguity, but in essence this isn’t really any different than saying “20% of your grade will be based upon class participation” which is also a very nebulous concept.

Suddenly, people are posting comments on blogs, and at the very least, they are slightly more technologically engaged than they were before. Engaged in the content, class, and themselves.

There’s another, much simpler way of getting the students engaged. Once I, the professor, get past the initial moans and groans (remember how I did the needs-based explanation, so the students are taking me seriously) of teaching the technology, it’s a lot less work to post journal entries on a blog than to write them in Word, print them out, bring them to class, etc. It seems really obvious and mundane, but I just eliminated a lot of intermediate steps. Plus, it’s encouraging to students when they understand that blogging isn’t quite as formal as regular classroom writing, and typically isn’t graded as harshly.

Has anyone tried this before? I don’t know, but I imagine that there are plenty of other ways to give students a reason to WANT to use the technology. Here are a few that I came up with:

1. Controversial Subject Matter: Students are very, very vocal about what they think, and they are not afraid to say so. In fact, the like talking about it. I certainly do.

2. Enabling the Curious: Students are very curious. Once they firmly understand how to use something, introduce a way to make their job even easier. How might you integrate flickr into a blog post or wiki, for example?

3. Free beer. Wait, what?

No solution is going to engage all of the students at once, there’s always going to be pissants.

It’s hard to come up with new ideas for teaching and learning, especially as a student. I’m a student. I’ve done very little teaching, and I appreciate how hard it is. I’m just saying, here’s what I observed, I’ve been here for four years, and here’s what I think about it.

I’m also not blaming any one group for the lack of learning engagement. Students are often obnoxious, and always difficult. Professors often jump bandwagons. Let’s face it, most new media software (wordpress, mediawiki) is not terribly student-friendly, but that’s not really my realm. And some people will just never, ever care, no matter how much pushing or pulling a professor may do. Unfortunate, but true.

With that I would like to propose a Faculty Academy presentation and discussion on this sort of thing. Maybe collectively, students and faculty can come up with some solutions on to how we can better engage in instructional technologies.

Thanks for reading. PS. Thanks for everyone who commented so far.

All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall…