Evangelists for wikis say that type of Web site, which anyone can edit, is the perfect technology for encouraging collaboration among students. The same kind of teamwork used to hone entries on Wikipedia can be used by students to jointly create projects, papers, and Web sites.
But Glenn J. Platt, a marketing professor at Miami University, in Ohio, has tried wikis and just doesn’t like them. The hallmark of the wiki—its feature that allows groups of people to write and edit—terrifies students who are too timid to stamp out a classmate’s contribution. And if a student does rewrite someone else’s text, Mr. Platt has a difficult time assigning credit—figuring out exactly who did what.
“It’s one of those technologies that everyone jumped on, and only later realized that maybe it doesn’t do everything we need it to do,” Mr. Platt says.
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Tools that truly aid teaching aren’t new to academe—professors have been applying chalk to blackboards since the 1800s, and using overhead projectors since the 1950s. But as consumer technology becomes ubiquitous, faculty members must sort through a bewildering array of options to figure out which new gadgets and software are worth keeping, and which belong in the reject pile. The process is all the more tricky because some corporate marketers and campus-based technology experts may be inclined to push the latest gizmo regardless of its effectiveness in the classroom.
Some professors argue that a useful tech tool must pass two filters: It has to be relatively easy to use, and it has to enable students and professors to do something they could not do before.
“Simplicity is often a virtue,” says Eric Mazur, a Harvard University physicist known for his work in science education. Mr. Mazur rejects PowerPoint and interactive whiteboards because he thinks they add little to what a blackboard offers. He says he encountered a “ridiculous” misuse of technology at the Connected Summit, a conference on mobile technology in education held in February at Abilene Christian University. At one session he attended, audience members were required to submit questions to the moderator via text message on their smartphones. The moderator then read the questions to the presenter. People were looking down at their phones to type in questions, and losing track of the discussion, Mr. Mazur says. Such a framework would be “totally crazy” in the classroom, he argues, since the technology would get in the way of the social contact between the presenter and the audience.
“It’s the gee-whiz factor,” Mr. Mazur says. “People don’t think about outcomes. They’re naïve in the belief that doing what we did before, only this time with technology, must make it better.”
Mr. Platt agrees that simple tools are best. After he gave up on wikis, he turned to the humble Internet discussion board, a technology that dates to the early 1990s. In a history class, he says, the threaded discussions made possible by a discussion board would do a better job than a wiki of allowing students to interact and see how they bring their own unique perspectives to the interpretation of historical events.
Other tech tools that Mr. Platt thinks may be on the way out include wireless clickers, which allow students to respond to questions during class using a hand-held device and instructors to immediately display the results (he says they can be expensive and the technology sometimes fails); Second Life software (a virtual version of a class; in most cases, it doesn’t add much, he says); and Smart Boards (a type of interactive whiteboard that he says can get bogged down by drained batteries and complicated pen attachments).
“If you can imagine how someone might use the technology—what the experience is actually going to be like—you can avoid some of the pitfalls of jumping on a tool simply because it’s hot and it’s hyped,” he says.
Derek Bruff, an assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, doesn’t agree with Mr. Platt on clickers—in fact, he’s written a book championing them (Teaching With Classroom Response Systems, Jossey-Bass, 2009). But Mr. Bruff has had his own disappointments with technology tools.
Several years ago, he thought he had the perfect teaching aid when he began teaching a statistics class for engineers. He had found Mathematica, a computational software program, helpful while working on his dissertation, so he assumed it would be useful for his students as well. But Mathematica’s interface can be confusing for newcomers, he says, and his students had trouble keeping track of what they were doing.
“I spent a lot of time trying to get them comfortable with the software, and that took away from the time we had to actually talk about statistics,” Mr. Bruff says.
The students were familiar with Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet application, which they had to use in an introductory engineering course. So Mr. Bruff switched from Mathematica to Excel—and stuck with Excel in two subsequent offerings of the course. “If the students had questions, they were questions about statistics,” he says. “They weren’t held up by software that they didn’t know very well.”
Advocates for technology say the sheer number of technology tools available today means that persistence and experimentation is likely to pay off.
“It’s easy to get drawn into the sense that there’s a technology answer out there for every problem,” says Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology at Duke University. “There isn’t necessarily a silver bullet. The good news is there are more and more diverse tools out there every day. With enough time to look around, there’s probably something out there that meets your needs.”
Some professors are especially wary of commercial technology modified by corporations so that it can be sold for classroom use. Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University (and a contributor to The Chronicle), points out that iPods were designed for music, Second Life for role-playing, and the technology behind clickers for remote controls.
“We invited business into academe, and businesses did what they always do—they billed us and gave us things we didn’t really need,” Mr. Bugeja says.
Linda Haynes, an English-composition lecturer at Purdue University, has firsthand experience about the limitations of the iPod.
In 2007, she had the “marvelous idea” that the device could be a solution for classrooms that were woefully underequipped, in her case having only overhead projectors and TV’s with DVD players.
Her breakthrough: load PowerPoint lectures onto her iPod and plug it directly into the TV. “It would have taken care of the budget problem,” she says. “At the time, we just didn’t have the money to have computers and projectors put in the classroom.”
The idea worked in a test run, but bombed when she made a formal presentation to her program director and the introductory-writing committee. After 15 minutes of fiddling, she gave up, and never figured out exactly what went wrong.
“It was a miserable failure,” she says.
The committee rejected her proposal, and composition instructors slogged along with the existing overhead projectors until last fall, when money finally came through for a full-scale upgrade to new computers and projectors.
Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University (and a contributor to The Chronicle‘s Brainstorm blog), had a different goal: getting technology out of his classroom. Even though he is the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), Mr. Bauerlein is no Luddite. When lecturing about the Beat poets, he loves to tap on a console and bring up YouTube videos of authors reading from their works. “You can get a clip of Ginsberg reading from ‘Howl,’” he says. “It really brings the poem off the page.”
But he’s never been a fan of students who use their laptops in the classroom, and he hit a breaking point in the spring of 2009 in an American literature course while reading from The Awakening, the 1899 novella by Kate Chopin. As the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, was swimming deeper and deeper into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually to die, several students were looking down at their laptops.
“When she sinks beneath the waves, and they’re smiling, something is not connecting,” Mr. Bauerlein says.
The next time he taught the course, in the spring of 2010, Mr. Bauerlein announced that he was banning laptops from the classroom. Half the class applauded.
