The New Pedagogy--Part II: Is New Technology Teaching or Entertaining? Taming Teaching Technologies Mike Field ------------------ Staff Writer It was the revolution that was going to teach us how to think anew. Instead, to many critics and teachers, it became the rebellion against thinking at all. Television entered the mainstream of the public consciousness during the 1950s, or, to frame it in terms of university education, just slightly more than two generations ago. Almost at once, professional educators--particularly at the primary school level--proclaimed the technology a new and powerful weapon in the arsenal of pedagogy. In a number of experiments that brought TV, and, occasionally, TV cameras, into the classroom in the 1960s and '70s, researchers looked to find the appropriate means of harnessing the new technology to improve teaching, enhance education and raise the achievement levels of students engaged in the learning process. The movement reached its apotheosis, perhaps, in 1969 with the nationwide premiere of Sesame Street, an enormously successful cultural phenomenon that was given the educational seal of approval by virtually every governmental, parental and professional education association involved in teaching the young. Unfortunately, during this time and thereafter, educational achievement levels as measured through a variety of standardized tests--including, most notably, the SAT--continued to drop. Nor was it simply standardized testing results that seemed to be in decline. A growing number of faculty across the country complained that the cognitive skills and overall levels of academic achievement among students at the university level were in a state of steady decline. Remedial curricula, aimed at bringing students' basic skills up to a level that would enable them to participate in college-level learning, were introduced at many colleges and universities, including some of the most academically selective in the nation. Ostensibly designed to satisfy the needs of the small segment of the student body economically disadvantaged (and thus often at an educational disadvantage as well), the courses were in fact needed by a much wider range of student, many of whom came from typical middle-class backgrounds and, presumably, from "good" schools. The surprisingly widespread need for such courses and the increasing lack of adequate preparation on the part of substantial numbers of students alarmed many, both within and outside of the education establishment. Soon, a nationwide "crisis in education" was declared, culminating with the publication, in the 1980s, of A Nation at Risk, a government-sponsored report that warned Americans their education system was failing them badly. As the problem in education unfolded, a small but influential group of theorists and social critics began to point their fingers at television--the very technology that was supposed to "revolutionize" education and improve learning--as a primary culprit in the decline of cognition. NYU professor of communication arts and sciences Neil Postman summarized the educational argument against television in the form of an indictment in his 1984 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. "Whereas a classroom is a place of social interaction," Professor Postman wrote, "the space in front of a television set is a private preserve. Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television demands attention to images .... Whereas in a classroom, fun is never more than a means to an end, on TV it is the end in itself." This idea--that recent generations of students have experienced education as a passive activity in which they expect to be entertained--was frequently cited among the Hopkins faculty interviewed for this series. Said one professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences: "Education has to change because students want to be entertained. They've gotten used to TV and, consequently, presenting information in a coherent way is no longer adequate; you need to provide additional motivation as well." Little wonder then, that after experiencing the previous "revolution" in pedagogy represented by television, there are many among the faculty who question whether the latest technological innovations will in fact enhance educational outcomes--or make much of any difference at all. Yet many involved in using computers, CD-ROMs, the Internet and other new technological tools are excited by the possibilities they are experiencing in their classrooms; they claim these new interactive technologies are effective precisely because they are so different from TV. "Television has always been a one-way medium, but a computer is different," said Candice Dalrymple, associate dean for external programs in the Whiting School of Engineering and chair of the Committee on Electronic and Distance Education. "With the computer, you have to learn to explore." If the lecture, the seminar and the other hallmarks of traditional university pedagogy are to endure--and there is a widespread consensus they will--it seems likely that forces both within the academy and from the outside world will reshape these methods to reflect the opportunities presented in a new generation of interactive technologies. One of the first educational impediments to fall to these new approaches is the distance barrier, a development driven forcefully home in recent months when Stanford University announced plans to offer teleconferenced classes in Annapolis. "It is clear that the demographics are changing and the rules are changing," said Michael Karweit, research professor in Chemical Engineering and director of the School of Engineering's instructional television facility. "For an institution to survive we will want to look at other dimensions of education; if we don't they will bite us." Karweit helped design and install the Engineering School's state-of-the-art ITV classrooms and teleconferencing facilities in the early 1980s. With more than a decade's worth of experience transmitting classes between the facilities at Homewood and the Applied Physics Lab, he believes the usefulness of such technologies will reside primarily in their ability to bridge distances, rather than opening new methods of teaching and learning. "There is so much hype associated with this, you aren't likely to know what's really possible and what isn't unless you are intimate with the technology," he said. "Does this capability increase learning? I don't believe so. But it does serve a useful purpose in giving our students an increased access to courses." The Engineering School's ITV classroom was recently supplemented by a second facility on the Homewood campus, located in the basement of the New Engineering Building. One of three Bell Atlantic classrooms at the university (the other two are in the Montgomery County Center and on the East Baltimore Campus) and 270 such sites planned for development throughout the state, the new electronic classroom allows instructors and students at up to four sites to link together for fully interactive video, audio, computer and fax communications. Sherri Wood, a student in the Master of Science in Information Telecommunications Systems for Business program at the School of Continuing Studies, became one of the first distance learning students to use the Homewood facility beginning in September. "In this particular case the advantage is it allows me to overcome time and distance by enabling me to forgo the drive to Montgomery County," said Wood, who agreed to act as a "test student" for the course. After some initial bugs, the system appears to be working smoothly, and both Wood and Virginia Jenkins, the Continuing Studies adjunct professor who teaches the course, are enthusiastic about using the classrooms. "The biggest challenge is to tear down the walls no matter where the students are located and make them feel part of the class," said Jenkins. "I try to speak to the person in the remote classroom as often as anyone else to keep them involved, but other than that I don't look at the TV monitors all that much. You get used to it. As class goes on I see all of us getting more comfortable with being on TV." Both Wood and Jenkins term the electronic classroom an "enhancement" that extends the range of the course and increases the convenience of the students enrolled, rather than an innovation in the way the subject matter is taught. Yet there are others who believe a genuine revolution is at hand. "I think the way some of us are teaching is changing," said professor of English and departmental chair Jerome Christensen, who teamed up with Mind/Brain Institute biophysicist Harry Goldberg to found the Center for Digital Media Research and Development (The Gazette, 9/18/95). "We see a project-oriented approach to education evolving in which students work more independently and develop more fluid and versatile skills." This new approach is similar in some respects to the research-based education, which was Hopkins' signal contribution to the development of 19th-century American education. Both emphasize student initiative and something of a peer-to-peer relationship between instructor and pupil. Yet Christensen sees some fundamental differences between the two stemming from the realities of the research laboratory. "Project-oriented education is not as hierarchial as research," he said. "In the typical research setting, which is usually only open to science majors, the student will have a passing acquaintance with the head of the lab, a closer working relation with a graduate student or postdoc, and a degree of expertise in one small area of the overall research. In project-oriented research students from the arts as well as the sciences are involved in a more applications-oriented effort that diminishes hierarchies and rewards innovation." These efforts range in scope from publishing an interactive, subject-focused home page on the Internet to the creation of a complete interactive CD-ROM. "Learning has always been composed of some mix of seeing, hearing and doing," said Joanne Riley, a humanities discipline specialist at Homewood Academic Computing, whose task it is to help faculty employ the new interactive computer technologies in the classroom. "In the past, to a great degree, doing has not been part of the standard collegiate education. The previous model positioned teachers as funnels of knowledge that stood between the student and the mass of information and delivered select pieces, usually in the lecture format. In the future, the teacher will facilitate more than instruct, and it will be the students' responsibility to find and arrange valuable information by using computers and other tools at their disposal." The possibility--or, for some, the reality--of a new pedagogy developing out of new technologies has never seemed more likely. Enthusiasts talk of a community of teachers and learners linked electronically if not physically, intellectually engaged in challenging the boundaries of current knowledge and understanding. "Ironically, we find ourselves returning to Jefferson's notion of an 'academical village,' not linked physically around a common library, but electronically around common interests and ideas," said Lee Watkins, assistant director of Homewood Academic Computing. "If you imagine the total absorption and real challenge provided by electronic games you can begin to appreciate the potential in these technologies. The test is whether we can bring the same level of involvement to pedagogy as to entertainment. Some of that is purely money. If we had the same kinds of economic resources as the game makers just think of the things that could be done!" ***************************************************************** Next: What possibilities--and problems--can faculty expect from the classroom of tomorrow? "The New Pedagogy" concludes next week. *****************************************************************