Academic technologies and their discontents.

Technology has transformed education, as it has most fields, through connecting users to information and other users, decreasing the time it takes to circulate information, and increasing the options for creating, collecting, and assessing projects.

I can still vaguely recall the day in the late 1990’s I was asked to attend a meeting on a new tool that the university was developing to handle course materials. It was crude, but it enabled instructors to put course syllabi and lesson plans online and perform some basic interactions with students. Course Management Systems have come a long way since then, and online education continues to grow its market share.

However, technology isn’t only for online courses. Even in face to face courses, as educators we may feel under pressure to incorporate technology into the classroom, whether it’s through creating course wikis or podcasts, developing blogs, or using computer simulations. It’s easy to believe that we simply have to use technology, in some cases, simply to hold the students’ attention. Kansas State University associate professor Michael Wesch is a professor who’s been on the forefront of using technology in his classes, but as a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article notes, he’s rethinking the subject — not rejecting technology, but rethinking its advantages and limitations in the classroom — and focusing more on the ways in which different teachers reach their classes in different ways, as he discusses in this anecdote about observing another professor, Christopher Sorensen:

As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen’s class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: “He’s a lecturer. He’s not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That’s my thing, right? But he’s totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics.”

It seems the key here is the connection, not the tools used to make the connection. Do you use technology in your classroom? Has it worked? Has it not worked? What other methods do you use to make those connections with your classes, to put you “in tune with where they are”?