said that they text: Deborah R. Tindell and Robert W. Bohlander, “The Use and Abuse of Cell Phones and Text Messaging in the Classroom: A Survey of College Students,” College Teaching 60, no. 1 (January 2012): 1–9, doi:10.1080/87567555.2011.604802.
when students are in class multitasking: Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, “Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers,” Computers and Education 62 (March 2013): 24–31, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2012.10.003.
A series of ads: “AT&T Commercial—It’s Not Complicated, ‘Dizzy,’” YouTube video, posted by CommercialCow, February 4, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYaSl_VgqbE.
the novelist Zadie Smith: See the acknowledgments in Zadie Smith, NW: A Novel (New York: Penguin Press, 2013).
to be unhelpfully nostalgic: Katherine N. Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention,” Profession (2007): 187–99.
“change that environment to fit the students”: ibid., 195.
“on the material being presented”: ibid., 196.
“we’ve got to work on that”: The Fletcher School, “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on ‘The New Digital Age,’” YouTube video, February 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGzB7uveh0.
how technology will “reshape” people: Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: How Technology Is Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business (New York: Knopf, 2013).
are being produced at six minutes: Philip J. Guo, Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin, “How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos,” Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale Conference (2014), doi:10.1145/2556325.2566239. See also Philip J. Guo, “Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement,” edX (blog), November 13, 2013, https://www.edx.org/blog/optimal-video-length-student-engagement#.U71MsxZFFBW.
what she calls “deep reading”: Michael S. Rosenwald, “Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Scanning and Skimming, Researchers Say,” Washington Post, April 6, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html.
depending on how attention is allocated: Wolf has a developmental argument for how capacity can be lost: “The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. When it comes to building this reading circuit in a brain that has no preprogrammed set-up for it, there is no genetic guarantee that any individual novice reader will ever form the expert reading brain circuitry that most of us form. The reading circuit’s very plasticity is also its Achilles’ heel. It can be fully fashioned over time and fully implemented when we read, or it can be short-circuited—either early on in its formation period or later, after its formation, in the execution of only part of its potentially available cognitive resources. Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read—and what we absorb from our reading—will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.” Maryanne Wolf, “Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions,” Nieman Reports, Summer 2010, http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102396/Our-Deep-Reading-Brain-Its-Digital-Evolution-Poses-Questions.aspx. And Wolf’s argument for plasticity gives her a specific anxiety: “My major worry is that, confronted with a digital glut of immediate information that requires and receives less and less intellectual effort, many new (and many older) readers will have neither the time nor the motivation to think through the possible layers of meaning in what they read. The omnipresence of multiple distractions for attention—and the brain’s own natural attraction to novelty—contribute to a mind-set toward reading that seeks to reduce information to its lowest conceptual denominator. Sound bites, text bites, and mind bites are a reflection of a culture that has forgotten or become too distracted by and too drawn to the next piece of new information to allow itself time to think.” See Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai, “The Importance of Deep Reading,” Educational Leadership 66, no. 6 (March 2009): 32–37, http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/The-Importance-of-Deep-Reading.aspx.
a new style of learner: John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
The web is their “information prosthetic”: Internet researcher danah boyd argues that the most important skill is now knowing how to look things up rather than knowing things. Her position implies that you need your phone with you at all times as an information prosthetic. See danah boyd, “Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle,” in The Social Media Reader, Michael Mandiberg, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2012). boyd makes the case that what you find on the phone allows you to make sense of things by connecting the dots. “Creativity,” she says, “is shaped more by the ability to make new connections than to focus on a single task.” The educators I interviewed suggest another view. It is important to have some material that you have made “your own,” by interest, in advance. The idea that all you need to do is “look up the relevant things” implies that you know what you are looking for, which, in the creative process, you often don’t. And you need time to process material—you’ll be able to do that with things you know “by heart.”
the presentation carries its own way of thinking: On this point, I follow the work of Yale statistician and computer scientist Edward Tufte. Edward R. Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006 [2003]).
what one philosopher calls “E-memory”: See Robert W. Clowes, “The Cognitive Integration of E-Memory,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4, no. 1 (2013): 107–33, doi:10.1007/s13164-013-0130-y. Also see Annie Murphy Paul in her weekly newsletter on the science of learning: Annie Murphy Paul, “Your Two Kinds of Memory: Electronic and Organic,” The Brilliant Report, August 6, 2014, http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/08/your-two-kinds-of-memory-electronic-and-organic.
their first choice for answering clinical questions: Randall S. Edson, Thomas J. Beckman, Colin P. West, et al., “A Multi-Institutional Survey of Internal Medicine Residents’ Learning Habits,” Medical Teacher 32, no. 9 (2010): 773–75, doi:0.3109/01421591003692698. Cited in Paul, “Your Two Kinds of Memory: Electronic and Organic.”
Quick, accurate judgments depend on: Jennifer K. Phillips and her colleagues write of the relationship of expertise and decision making: “Experts have a broader and deeper knowledge base than journeymen and novices. They understand the dynamics of events in their domain. . . . Experts simply know more facts, more details.” See Jennifer K. Phillips, Gary Klein, and Winston R. Siek, “Expertise in Judgment and Decision Making: A Case for Training Intuitive Decision Skills,” Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making, Derek J. Koehler and Nigel Harvey, eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 297–315. The authors point out that this category of factual knowledge corresponds to John Anderson’s “declarative knowledge”; see John Anderson, The Architecture of Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
doctors used to build their own: Jerome Kassirer, “We Should Encourage Browsing,” British Medical Journal 342 (2011), doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d2182. See also Curtis A. Olson, “Focused Search and Retrieval: The Impact of Technology on Our Brains,” Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 32, no. 1 (2012), doi:10.1002/chp.21117.
“information that may be critically useful later”: Quoted in Paul, “Your Two Kinds of Memory: Electronic and Organic.”
“Outsource memory, and culture withers”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 197.
“trying to establish transcripts”:
Research on using computers to take notes supports this classroom experience. People who take notes on a computer turn into something close to transcribers. They have a hard time staying engaged with the content of the material. This suggests that there is a virtue in the “inefficiency” of taking notes by hand, a method that forces you to decide what to take down and what not. See Pam Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (2014), doi:10.1177/0956797614524581.
massive open online courses: In September 2011, Stanford put three computer science courses online. The first was Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s Introduction to AI. Thrun went on to found Udacity, a company to deliver online courses. Another of Stanford’s first online courses was Machine Learning, taught by Andrew Ng. When it is offered at Stanford, it usually draws over 400 students; 100,000 students signed up when the course was offered online. By January 2012, Ng and Daphne Koller, one of his computer science colleagues, had spun off a company, Coursera. It soon formed a partnership with Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and the University of Michigan with the goal of producing online courseware. MIT soon allied with Harvard to form edX, their online consortium. Other schools soon joined them, among them UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Cornell. By the summer of 2014, edX had over fifty participating institutions; Coursera had over eighty.
the year of the MOOC: Laura Pappano, “Massive Open Online Courses Are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace,” New York Times, November 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html.
you can easily test the result: MOOCs were hailed as a unique environment to learn about learning. Any instructional change can be tried on hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But, of course, the only pedagogical changes that can be tried are those that can take place on a MOOC.
more dynamic than what students had before: The movement for online education contains multitudes—those who see it as a way of getting more conversation into classrooms by freeing up teachers to spend more time away from the lectern, and those who imagine teachers as research professionals whose “rote” teaching jobs can be more efficiently done by machines. At a day of reflection on MOOCs at MIT in 2012, one presenter, very positive about online education, said that he thought a machine could replace professors in presenting content to students. But he didn’t know if it could respond to students’ questions. For him, the future of MOOCs depended on developing this artificial intelligence. You could never have enough professors to converse with the number of students who would want to take MOOCs.
some called it a tsunami: Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, described online education as a tsunami in a New Yorker article about the relationship between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Ken Auletta, “Get Rich U,” The New Yorker, April 30, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all.
“thinking about something”: Seymour Papert, “You Can’t Think About Thinking Without Thinking About Thinking About Something,” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 5, no. 3 (2005): 366–67.
“Ancient Greek Hero”: The website for this ongoing community is hour25.heroesx.chs.harvard.edu.
includes face-to-face encounters: The principal investigator, Shanna Smith Jaggars, is assistant director of Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. Her research compared online-only and face-to-face learning in studies of community-college students and faculty in Virginia and Washington. Among her findings: In Virginia, 32 percent of students failed or withdrew from for-credit online courses, compared with 19 percent for equivalent in-person courses. Shanna Smith Jaggars, cited in Geoffrey A. Fowler, “An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses,” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303759604579093400834738972.
“interpersonal interaction and support”: Shanna Smith Jaggars, cited in Fowler, “An Early Report Card.”
what classrooms teach: Andrew Ng, cited in Emma Green, “What MOOCs Can’t Teach,” The Atlantic, December 16, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/what-moocs-cant-teach/282402. Andrew Ng sums up the MOOC experience: “We do not recommend selecting an online-only experience over a blended learning experience.” Cited in Fowler, “An Early Report Card.”
“What’s striking is how similar”: Lawrence Summers, “The Future of X: Lawrence Summers on Higher Education,” The Atlantic (video), July 9, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/259430/the-future-of-x-lawrence-summers-on-higher-education.
“When a question is asked”: Daphne Koller, “The Online Revolution—Learning Without Limits,” YouTube video, posted by CCNMTL, April 17, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc8Yl094KOA.
no one in the front row who will upstage you: Some students tell me that online lectures are preferable because they don’t have to deal with students who ask the professor off-topic questions or who talk just for the sake of talking. But perhaps this is a skill that, along with overcoming shyness, it is good to go to classrooms to learn.
“confined to a computer screen and digitized feedback”: Nwadiuto Amajoyi, “Can Online Courses Replace Classrooms?,” SF Gate, February 15, 2013, http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Can-online-courses-replace-classrooms-4283110.php.
you might see something unexpected: Physicists work hard to create “the reality effect” in their lectures. This is the illusion that they are thinking on their feet because most often they are not. Why do they try to create the reality effect? They are trying to model the way creative moments in science happen. You make a mistake, you take the wrong path, you go back and make a correction, you see something new. They want their students to see how this happens in real time. Arthur Zajonc, a professor of physics at Amherst, tries to capture what creative moments in science are and are not: “People have a wrong kind of idea of how discoveries happen in science. They think you kind of calculate your way towards the discovery. It never happens that way. You know, you may embed yourself in the math, you may study it thoroughly, you may have data sets that you’re poring over, but the insight comes in a flash.” “Holding Life Consciously,” narrated by Krista Tippett, On Being, National Public Radio, November 10, 2011, http://www.onbeing.org/program/holding-life-consciously/transcript/293.
nothing he wrote on the discussion board: Bucciarelli notes: “You may well wonder about the value of this experience. What have I learned? I read, watch a video lecture clip, respond with what I value as creative commentary—but how good is it? Is it sophomoric, impulsive, a-historical, all-been-said-before? I don’t know. I have attracted no critique. And besides, if a fellow student does offer praise or take me to task—how do I judge the worth of that? It’s clear what is needed—a teacher’s response. . . . Here lies the Achilles’ heel of the MOOC. A MOOC’s massive number of registrants work against students’ opportunities for real learning through exchange with faculty and staff. . . . Knowledge as information, no matter how artfully, dramatically, convincingly, portrayed online is not the driver in the education of youth. It’s what the students themselves bring to the show, how they engage the material, under the guidance of an experienced teacher that matters. The discussion forum moves the students to write, the talking head may enlighten, but if the student[s] [are] to learn, they must be challenged to reflect on their contributions. For this a teacher is essential to encourage critical thinking, reflecting, (and rewriting).” Louis Bucciarelli, MOOC Thread Commentary I, unpublished manuscript, 2014.
They saw the classroom as a place: For more on the Athena experience and its lessons, see Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).
Bettelheim is a controversial figure: See, for example, Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
&nbs
p; why not an actor indeed?: Online classes have already experimented with using models as students. Apparently, it is easier to watch a beautiful set of student “learners,” even if they are not learners at all. Models were used for a videotaped class with Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen. The “students” had instructions to look puzzled when he spoke about something complex, to nod when he clarified it, and seem fascinated when he did anything to explain it. Jerry Useem, “Business School, Disrupted,” New York Times, May 31, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/business-school-disrupted.html.
set aside for reflections on teaching: MIT, “MacVicar Day 2013,” MIT Video, March 17, 2013, http://video.mit.edu/watch/mac-vicar-day-13993.
might not be worked through or popular: As I make this point about the importance of visibility, I am respectful that anonymity on the Internet has been important to allow the fullest expression of thoughts for people who feel or who are unsafe in their communities.
his biggest challenge as a professor: Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, “Sex, or the Unbearable: Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Conversation About Their New Book” (discussion, Tufts University, Somerville, MA, February 28, 2014).
life repays close, focused attention: Not everyone characterizes the lecture this way. I am intrigued to discover that if you equate biometric measures of arousal with pedagogic success, experiments on the lecture show it to be under par. A group of students wore wristbands for a week that measured skin conductance as an index of “the arousal associated with emotion, education, and attention.” The sensor recorded regular, strong spikes during periods of study, lab work, and homework, but the readout flatlined during two activities: attending class and watching television. From Eric Mazur, et al. “Blended Models of Learning: Bringing Online to On-Campus,” MIT, March 21, 2013, citing Ming-Zher Poh, N. C. Swenson, and R. W. Picard, “A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 57, no. 5 (May 2010): 1243–52, doi:10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487.
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