Sherry Turkle's essay in Sunday's New York Times, "The Flight From Conversation," raised several critical questions about how our desire to be connected via technology can also be a powerful mechanism for avoiding significant human contact. Turkle, a psychologist and professor at MIT, is no technophobe. She argues, though, that the tiny "sips" of contact through social networking "no matter how valuable ... do not substitute for conversation."
As I finished Turkle's essay, I thought about the implications of her argument for education. Many of our students today are convinced that their ability to connect to several things at once, to deal with feeds coming from blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube while they sit with classmates and professors, is a sign of their increased capacity for learning. They are, it seems, "processing" more data all the time. And many faculty have celebrated this polymorphous plugging-in. They argue for either the wisdom of crowds, or the importance of "flipping" (a favorite word) the classroom so that clickers can inform the professor about how much learning is going on. Clickers are oh so much more efficient than talk, so much easier to track than the effects of a professor modeling inquiry and communication.
It is clear enough that the multiplicity of overlapping digital networks brings students and teachers new ways to conduct research, to establish communities of interest, and to facilitate learning. Partisans of the power of networks love to tell anecdotes of how a mathematician's complex problem was solved through a blog's crowd sourcing, or how an intractable issue in the life sciences was substantially clarified by marshaling the intellectual power of thousands of thoughtful experimenters. These accounts are not careful considerations of new processes of discovery -- that would require some analysis of how network methods compare to other methods over a large number of cases. Instead we get curiously old-fashioned success stories. Look, the mathematician's blog worked! Math should now be done with blogs!!
It seems like every day we can read another story about how substantial learning can take place online, especially when we use the tools of social networking. To be clear: I have no doubt that many skills can be developed online, just like (in the old days) many skills could be learned by watching television, or listening to tapes. These technologies have always been able to facilitate progress on specific tasks with right or wrong answers, or develop skills enhanced through repetition.
I do want to call our attention, though, to what one learns in classes small enough for conversations guided by teachers who have dedicated a substantial part of their working lives to understanding more about the subject at hand. One of the first things students learn is to expect ambiguity, to anticipate that there will be differences of opinion among thoughtful people. Then, they learn to navigate in that ambiguity. To get the most out of a discussion of a difficult text or of a complex event, students develop a mode of attentiveness combined with patience so that they can see things from a variety of points of view. This takes time, because in a conversation-based class there will be a layering of perspectives, hypotheses, and interpretations. It's not only bad manners to sneak a peek at your twitter feed during the seminar; it's also a failure of learning, a sign of an inability to participate in an inquiry that requires face-to-face acknowledgment and receptivity.
Sherry Turkle writes that she "learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are." One of the wonderful things about teaching through conversation is that we get to help our students unplug from the inputs they have customized to reinforce their own tastes, expectations and identities. We get to introduce them to stories and poems, historical events and paintings, scientific experiments and political debates that they might not have attended to, even googled, on their own. And then we get to learn with them about how these complex cultural artifacts can be understood in relation to our present. In this way, we develop a richer sense than our little devices can give us of who we are. More important, we develop a deeper sense of who we might become.
Superficial layer of bits and pieces from information, is like living on "crumbs" from the table of the "banquet" of scholarship!
Then supplemented by zeroxed notes. Why stay awake?
Who can blame students when their classes are led by a 'machine'
I teach college and generally what I see is their addictive immersion, usually in the back row in furtive mode. It is possible some might view their activity as “increased capacity for learning,” but I highly doubt it. With the consumerist culture and grade inflation so prevalent in universities and colleges, many realize it is possible to get a good grade without learning anything. The outcomes are consistent: those texting and twittering in the back row are least likely to understand assignments, take notes, grasp concepts because at best they are half-listening.
As long as it doesn’t bother anyone else, I’ve decided not to police it; I’m not an addiction counselor. Sadly, someone’s tuition money is being wasted.
Finally, my institution, as well as others I would surmise, take an inverted view of this and offer seminars for faculty on how to make the best use of Facebook IN the classroom. It’s less a case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” than “as long as the tuition check clears.”
Flipping actually increases conversation.
I'm not sure you're right, but I'm VERY sure that's quite an important qualifier, and that in the rush to profit from integrating technology into education at all levels, quite a lot of inappropriate use is going on.
(I see this as the road to privatization and union busting: first you gut the system, make it an emergency, quantify as much as possible, destroy the reputation of the teachers and administrations, and then step in with your magic fix: the private sector.)
Sweet Pea, create reality. I've taught four year olds and fourteen year olds, if they believe in you you choose what matters.
Students of today are lacking social skills. Kids need to be in a classroom and taught by a teacher. Technology is great for many things in our classrooms but it will never replace the role of a teacher. Teacher's are role models, they inspire our students to thrive and succeed. They see potential in students and encourage them to try harder. We look for signs of abuse, or drug use, or problems at home, we look for learning disabilities, better ways for them to learn, we care. A conversation online is not the same as face to face, with 25 other students in the classroom listening. Students ask questions, we want them to ask questions, that is part of critical thinking that is required in every grade in every subject, who would monitor those questions and answers? All students participate in those questions and all students reflect on the answers which lead to great discussions. Some questions do not have a right or wrong answer, something just to ponder.
Take that away- you have students who will think just like their parents, no answers out of the box.
We lead all wealthy nations in the percentage of adults who are functionally illiterate, over 20%. Every high school graduation adds another approximate 1 million to the cohort.
1. Present day New York
2. Present day small town in the U.S.
3. Present day Saudi Arabia or Kenya or Thailand
4. 15th Century Europe or Middle East.
5. Ancient world.
I reckon the average length of each interchange is longer as you go down the list.
People in small towns, countries with premodern social cultures speak at length. We exchange sentences. Can you imagine having a conversation where one person in a group speaks for ten or fifteen minutes? I have had many conversations like that. Most not in the West.
Now consider Huffpost. Today I criticized a Green blog and right away I get slammed by another green who first of all has to label me then castigate. I was pointing out the need for taking a critical approach to the failure of the green movement to be central in contemporary politics. That is apparently not allowed. Failure is caused by corporations etc. Yeh!
The loss of conversational skills among progressives relates in part to political correctness. There is a strong desire to be compliant, to be one of the group and a strong desire to flail anyone who is deviant, an outsider that conversation ceases. It is not required or desired. In its place we have a kind of ritualistic prating, preferably highly abstract. The abstract is so safe.
For some reason, many of my friends/acquaintances are perplexed by my voting Democrat and attending Church. The ones who strike up a conversation about it and listen to me get it and respect it. The others just laugh it off. It is a very disturbing trend I pray our society does not follow.