Lynn Baynum, an associate professor of teacher education at Shippensburg U., talks with students at the university’s model elementary school. “I’ve learned not to make assumptions about what they know,” she says of her college students. Bill Smith, Shippensburg U.
At 67, Madelyn Ball says she is “so blooming old that in my first teaching job, I taught typing on manual typewriters.” But nowadays she’s as likely as not to be making videos with her smartphone for a course called “Tech for Instruction and Management” that she teaches in Notre Dame of Maryland University’s School of Education.
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Lynn Baynum, an associate professor of teacher education at Shippensburg U., talks with students at the university’s model elementary school. “I’ve learned not to make assumptions about what they know,” she says of her college students. Bill Smith, Shippensburg U.
At 67, Madelyn Ball says she is “so blooming old that in my first teaching job, I taught typing on manual typewriters.” But nowadays she’s as likely as not to be making videos with her smartphone for a course called “Tech for Instruction and Management” that she teaches in Notre Dame of Maryland University’s School of Education.
“Every student must plan a technology-enriched lesson plan,” says Ms. Ball, an assistant professor of education. “They have to make it something that will enhance the instruction and improve student achievement.”
Where once she taught how to set margins and tabs, now it’s her responsibility to expose her students to teaching and assessment apps and make sure they can be persuasive advocates for classroom technology, capable managers of data, and effective online communicators. “I’ve run the gamut,” she says. “You have to change with the times.”
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
At a time when the gap may seem to be widening between digital natives and those old enough to remember rotary phones and room-sized mainframe computers less powerful than today’s iPads, there are nonetheless plenty of gray-haired faculty members who don’t have to turn to their grandchildren for help with the latest technology. Power users among senior professors say that while not all of their peers take the time to master the latest technological offerings, many live as comfortably with digital advances as anyone can in an age preoccupied with changing passwords and charging devices.
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Indeed, Ms. Ball is eager to update the technology course, which she didn’t create herself and which she’s afraid isn’t keeping up. “Technology changes so fast, and new apps come up all the time. It still has a lot about how to use the Microsoft suite. But when I teach PowerPoint, I tell them, Let’s also look at Google Slides and Prezi.”
Richard Shingles, a lecturer in biology at the Johns Hopkins University who says he is “61 and two-thirds,” turned to technology 20 years ago, when he was teaching two sections of the same course and wanted to avoid doing everything twice. He created a website for the course and loaded it with his PowerPoint slides and other material, saving a lot of time. In the years since, he’s become so interested in classroom technology that it’s now his primary scholarly interest, supplanting membrane biochemistry.
“I’m doing teaching research now, looking at different ways to engage students in different situations, looking at group work, cooperative learning, different types of active-learning strategies,” he says. A 600-student general-biology course he teaches, for instance, served as a testbed for the use of clickers at the university, and succeeded well enough that now courses all across the campus use them.
The clickers are used in various ways, but mostly for quizzes. “Faculty members will sometimes do a little pretest to see what a class already knows about a topic. That helps us. Do we need to spend a little time on this, or a lot of time?” he says.
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The biology course relies on other technology as well. Every lecture is recorded on video, complete with PowerPoint slides and any notes Mr. Shingles writes on his tablet PC as he lectures. And students buy an e-textbook that he can annotate, telling the class what sections to skip or updating material according to the latest research. The e-textbook comes with workbook problems that Mr. Shingles doesn’t assign, but he can see that two-thirds of students do them anyway. Surprisingly, he adds, about half still buy the print textbook in addition to the digital version.
Plenty of gray-haired faculty members don’t have to turn to their grandkids for tech support.
Technology isn’t without challenges, of course. The recording software on his tablet has been giving him fits — “I tend to get a lot of fails” — and like anyone, he worries about standing in front of a full lecture hall and having a tech meltdown. “It’s an embarrassment. Here’s this world-class scientist, works with all this big equipment, and he doesn’t know how to turn his tablet on.”
That said, technology can come to the rescue, too. When a snowfall closed the university the day before an exam, Mr. Shingles replaced his scheduled office hours with a virtual equivalent. “I just set up a Google doc and the students put their questions in there.” At 3 p.m., he started working on a video to answer their questions. “They really loved it,” he says. “When I looked at the number of people who looked at that video, it was most of the class.”
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But constant technological advances can present a problem. “Technology changes every six months,” says Lynn Estomin, a 67-year-old videographer who is a professor of art at Lycoming College. “I teach web design, animation, and graphic design. I teach eight to 10 different software packages. There’s this constant thing of keeping up. The worst is web design, which probably changes every five minutes.”
Her response has been to use new technology in her own work during the summers, so that she learns it well enough to be able to teach it to others. Two of her recent projects have been interactive art sites, she says. “I don’t come from a coding background. Now students have got to be able to code if they want to get a job. If you can’t read code, you can’t troubleshoot.”
And keeping up requires a fair amount of effort. “That time commitment to learn the stuff and then use it may be an issue for older faculty. Younger faculty have been using it all along. Kids now are born with a mouse in their hand — actually, an iPhone. They probably don’t even know what a mouse is.”
Today’s students don’t know everything, however, as Lynn F. Baynum found out one day while showing her class at Shippensburg University something on her iPad. “I was cutting and pasting from one document to another, and they said, Wait, what did you just do?” recalls Ms. Baynum, 54, an associate professor of teacher education.
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“I’ve learned not to make assumptions about what they know. They’re going to teach me and I’m going to teach them.” Ms. Baynum doesn’t pretend to be a tech whiz herself — she says the TV remote flummoxes her — but she’s got a strategy that works for her: “Jump right in.”
“I watched YouTube videos on how to use a lot of tools, and that really helped, because then I also started following some different colleges, different school districts, teachers who were using tools and doing professional development on YouTube to teach other teachers how to use tools. Then I looked at my syllabus and started plotting out when I might want to use some of the tools.”
She’s also moved away from textbooks. “I’ve gone to using electronic periodicals. So I’ll search at the beginning of the semester for articles I want to use, instead of a chapter in a book. They’re already on our database at the university, they’re free to students, and I think students should be comfortable reading about their profession in that way.”
What can’t she cope with? “Smartboards! Schools use them all the time. But here on our campus we have movable smartboards, and so they need to be calibrated every time I go into class. If someone has moved the smartboard, it takes, to me, too much time to use it. So I usually don’t.”
Annet Couwenberg, a faculty member in the fiber department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, uses digital technology in her own work.Courtesy of MICA
“Jump right in” is also Annet Couwenberg’s approach to technology. A faculty member and former chair of the fiber department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ms. Couwenberg, 67, uses computer-guided cutters and routers in her own work, and has a show called “From Digital to Damask” on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art until next February. She also teaches a course called “Unravel the Code” that pairs “weaving with digital algorithms, origami with parametric laser cutting, and handwork with cybernetic systems of control.”
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“What industry is asking for is all technology,” she says. But in class, “we really want to look at traditional craft and how that influences emerging technology, but still have that dialogue — What can we do better on the computer? What is better by hand?” Her own art has been affected, too: “You can reimagine things really fast, You can make the scale totally out of control. You can make it really tiny. You can make it really big. You can see what it does in an environment. And you can repeat it.”
“I’ve always been very interested in seeing how information translates from one source to the other,” she says. “So when I have an object in the world, and I look through the microscope, or when I scan it and then bring it into the computer, how does that information migrate and shift? The meaning maybe shifts. And the resulting data from that becomes malleable for me. And that’s what I find amazing.”
Ms. Couwenberg describes acquiring all these new technological skills as something of a roller coaster. But she also notes that weaving has relied on algorithms for centuries, and that Jacquard looms began using punch cards in 1804. “I keep saying to myself, It’s a tool,” she says. “It’s another hammer, it’s another screwdriver, it’s another knitting needle.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
Lawrence Biemiller was a senior writer who began working at The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1980. He wrote about campus architecture, the arts, and small colleges, among many other topics.
