ProfPost

by Jenny Wolfarth, MA

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should start by clarifying that I’m not a technophobe. Once a rabid photocopier who generated reams of handouts for my students, I’ve been on the Blackboard bandwagon nearly since its introduction at UC. I’ve happily and, I think, successfully employed useful tools like online-discussion boards in meaningful ways outside of the classroom, and my students can find fresh, and often interactive, online content on a weekly basis. I am gradually incorporating multimedia assignments in my curricula, am venturing into the world of podcasting, and have even converted my own professional portfolio into a snazzy digital experience that I can share with my students.

But I’ve found myself occasionally rebelling against the inevitable push to fully digitize the teaching and learning experience, and I think it has more to do with the lamentable absence of thoughtful interaction and our culture’s digitally impaired communication etiquette than the fact that I may be a little resistant to change my ways.

It started with email. Sure, it’s an incredibly efficient, convenient form of communication; I’m sure I’d miss it if it were gone tomorrow. But its prolific popularity in our culture hasn’t come without undesirable side effects, and the ones we see in our students are, quite frankly, royally annoying. Who among us hasn’t received the unsigned email, or the message sent from an unidentifiable quirky email handle such as liltweetybird18@yahoo.com or studmuffin83@gmail.com? I already have to start my day by purging my inbox of filter-resistant spam messages peddling various anatomical enhancements or dirt-cheap gold watches, but then I face challenges sorting through the legitimate emails from students—many with nothing written in the subject field to help me navigate the onslaught of correspondence.

Part of my frustration, I know, comes from my persnickety obsession with grammar and syntax, but my students should know better, after all, given the fact that they’re emailing a journalism professor and they aspire to work as professional writers or editors themselves someday. I expect a written message—whether it’s created by hand or pecked out on a keyboard—to have a clear and logical purpose. I’m not asking students to submit formal business letters every time they have a question they want to ask me, and I know minor typographical errors do slip through, but I expect students to take the time to clearly present their inquiries in at least a halfway coherent manner.

My sister teaches high-school students, and she keeps ominously warning me that the next generation of college students, who will be so adept with text-messaging lingo that they routinely write entire sentences with no vowels, will be a shock to my system. They probably will.

Is it really too much to ask our students—and ourselves—to use technology in intelligent and engaging ways? The ease and convenience of email shouldn’t mean that we send off half-cocked messages before fully determining if we could answer the question on our own first. Should any of us really have the gall to expect that an email sent at 11:45 p.m. the night before a deadline legitimately earns consideration of an extension? I wonder if some of our glorified, whiz-bang technology isn’t just making us intellectually lazy in a visually enhanced way.

Think of the travesty PowerPoint has wrought upon oral presentations in the classroom. Now, instead of reading from index cards in their hands, students simply tilt their heads upward and read their notes, verbatim, from the PowerPoint screen, which all of their audience can read from, too. Some technological tools are like ibuprofen: They may mask the symptoms, but they won’t cure the ailment. If we want students to engage in critical thinking, we may need to temper the use of technology we employ as part of their—and our—”thinking.”

I’ve heard horror stories from professors whose classes are interrupted with cell phones ringing—or, worse, bursting into the tinny melody of the latest hip-hop chart topper—and I’m thankful I’ve managed to escape that disrespectful fate in my classes. But I am growing increasingly suspicious of the student with the laptop who never engages in discussions and never makes eye contact with me or other students.

Let’s get real here: My lectures—when I actually give formal lectures—aren’t so earth-shattering that they require constant note-taking, so I know a student who’s silently pecking away at her keyboard throughout class is likely being distracted with some other endeavor. Perhaps she’s emailing a Facebook friend (and probably not with an enthralling account of what she’s just learned about in class), finishing up homework for another professor, randomly surfing the Net or ordering a new T-shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch. Naturally, we want our students to be fully engaged in what’s going on in class, and sometimes technology helps us meet that goal, but other times, technology creates a barrier that prevents that meaningful, intellectual exchange from occurring.

Last quarter, I made my students write—you know, with pens, on paper—a lengthy essay response on an exam, and you would have thought I’d asked them to pump water from an underground well or churn butter by hand. Ten minutes into the exam, their hands ached and their undisciplined script sprawled out across their pages in random slants. Worse, they told me, they actually had to sit and think before they began to write, because they wouldn’t be able to cut and paste ideas with such practiced ease. What a travesty, I told them teasingly, that you had to think about what you wanted to write before you began. Most of them smiled sarcastically, bent their heads down and buckled down to string together some pleasingly coherent thoughts, despite the fact that their fuddy-duddy teacher made them do it the old-fashioned way.

Maybe I am old-fashioned—I still keep track of my weekly schedule in a pocket-sized paper calendar, and not a fancy-fangled Blackberry, after all—but I’m going to continue to critically assess the technology I bring into the classroom. If a new tool encourages the intellectual interaction I want to see in my students, then I’m all for it. But if the bells and whistles are just a way for me to gain a little more street cred with our digitally inclined scholars, then I’ll simply unplug, before the electrical energy of a true intellectual connection is lost altogether.

Jenny Wohlfarth, MA
Field Service Assistant Professor
English & Comparative Literatures
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio

Tags: Blackboard, cell phones, critical thinking, digital communication etiquette, digital professional portfolio, email, Facebook, lectures, multimedia assignments, online-discussion boards, podcasting, PowerPoint, technology