Mark Bauerlein’s article last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education deals very specifically with some of the issues we have been discussing (or attempting to). This posting is at the request of Arts & Sciences faculty who found the article worthy of dialog.
Here’s the link: Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind.
I would be very interested in seeing people take some shots at this, either for or against. This is huge.
JMM
It’s Not Programmed Into Our Cells
By Kevin Brown
Like many professors, I have a policy about cell phones in my classroom. I struggle with this policy every semester, trying to prevent their usage from disrupting my class (trying to prevent their usage at all, in fact), but also recognizing that draconian measures might not have the best effect on classroom atmosphere. While I understand the thinking behind a professor’s policy I read about that penalizes the entire class if five cell phones ring during the semester or one that creates an instant pop quiz for the entire class upon one person’s cell phone ringing, I am unwilling to punish the innocent for the sins of the few.
In The Life of Pi, lead character Pi Patel, a Hindu, expresses his doubts about Christianity thusly, “Christianity had a reputation for few gods, great violence, but some very good schools.” When I first read this comment, I chuckled at the shrewd outsider perspective and, as a Christian educator, found it affirming in an ironic kind of way.
I’ve been thinking a lot, in light of our recent public conversations among the university faculty about Liberal Arts at a faith-based school. I’ve been thinking about it in the context of what Martin Buber called “The Narrow Ridge” in Between Man and Man: ‘‘I wanted by this [the Narrow Ridge] to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.”
We might take issue with the concept of leaving Buber’s “broad upland” so readily. As a faith-based institution, more specifically a Christian university of pronounced evangelical origin, one would presume that we not only like the idea of a broad upland of sure statements, but, like our student peer leaders at New Student Orientation, we proudly carry directional signs in our many disciplines to the promise of secure grazing pastures for hungry minds.
That being said, if we dust Buber’s concept off a little, we may find that we have more affinity with it than might at first appear, especially when we speak of “the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.” The Narrow Ridge for us may not be so much about the broad steppes of those “sure statements” to which we inherently subscribe in our mission statements, but about coaxing four thousand young people a year from the comfortable regions their minds have inhabited to the far more precarious ledges of inquiry and intellectual dialog.
Anyone who has taught at the college level is perfectly aware that luring students into the zone of questions and unfamiliar knowledge has never been easy and, with the rise of rapid-fire interactive technologies, seems to grow more daunting by the day. The college professor is not quite as responsive or interactive as the computer, the IPod or the cell phone. The professor does not have an on/off button, a mute button, a fast forward, rewind or pause. The college class is not like the popular SIMs game in which you can govern the actions of others. The student is forced to sit for vast wastelands of time and receive, at the mercy and discretion of someone else, whole dictionaries of terms and knowledge they aren’t entirely sure they wanted in the first place. This represents a serious challenge on both sides of “the ridge.”
Along these lines a new/old debate is raging with regard to the role of information and communication technologies, specifically the pre-eminence of constant connectivity and active participation in games and cyber-networks of various stripes. Research (largely paid for and conducted by organizations with serious Internet interests) has been hailing the positive influence of the Net on relationships and learning. However, this kind of perspective is similar to the glowing promise attached to the dawn of the automobile and the advent of television. In the rush to embrace the newer technologies, we have always been dazzled by the treasure trove of terrific things they have brought–so dazzled that we have been very reluctant to weigh the inevitable price to pay in the balance scale of life.
The automobile, without which most of us would be utterly disenfranchised on a socio-economic level, has brought countless blessings into our lives. But we rarely think of the pay-off: more than 40,000 accidental deaths per year in the U.S., the growing expense of ownership and maintenance, the decline of community, the loss in air quality, the disappearance of countless small towns due to the demand for Interstate Highways, the near crippling dependence on oil that creates all kinds of international political situations from our status in the Middle East to our relations with China, India, Venezuela and Mexico. When I roll my Nissan out of the garage every morning, I don’t think of China, or even Japan.
Do we need cars? One might argue that we don’t, in point of fact, need cars. But we have made ourselves need them and, from a practical standpoint, that may amount to the same thing as needing them. So that if someone came along with a survey and asked me to what extent my automobile has improved my life, my relationships, my socio-economic standing in the world, I would more than likely have a lot of ecstatic things to say. In fact, I could probably come up with as many thrilling metaphors as the ads from Ford, Chevrolet or Toyota. Zoom Zoom!
You can probably see where I’m going with this. The Internet has become the new automobile in many ways. In posting this blog, I am tacitly acknowledging the Net’s recently acquired status as Lord of Communication. I confess that I did not have this capability before the Net. I am grateful to the Net for this opportunity.
But before we start lighting too many candles at the Net shrine, we need to stop and talk about the pay-off. More specifically and intentionally, we need to evaluate the role of rapid, interactive communication technologies on the college campus. We need to talk about the expectations these technologies have created among our students. We need to examine what may or may not be happening to cognitive processes, patterns, or, at the very least, dispositions. As faculty–which by definition situates us in a prior generation–we need to ask ourselves where and when we should get on and off this bullet train.
Most importantly, we probably need to have this conversation with our students. If one of the expectations created by the new technologies is that face-to-face dialog is obsolete, should we let that expectation go unchallenged? If the new expectation is that students should be allowed to multi-task in the middle of class with their laptops and cell phones, perhaps this, too, warrants closer examination.
I don’t profess to have any answers at this stage. But perhaps we can co-opt the interactive cyber-tools we now possess to help us draw some conclusions that work for us. I hope you’ll join me in the effort.
