I feel a little bad that I’ve lobbed an education grenade in and run away. To be honest, I am also not a wholehearted techno-booster – I hate “DO VIDEO GAME DO GOOD CHILD EDUCATION?!” as much as the other questions I’ve mentioned.
PatrickD, yeah – clickers and online polls are more helpful for huge classes, or when there are students who are too shy to speak up. And I’m with you that we shouldn’t exclude students who don’t have high-end tech. Cell phones were sort of standing in for “technology generally” in this episode; they’re really there because people were asking Google this weird question.
pjcamp, yes, I agree: multitasking is bad, and we’re all going to need to societally acknowledge that, rather than pretending it’s one of the benefits of technology.
But as an educator, particularly at the college levels (I taught a year at a liberal arts college, in addition to various shorter-term, summer-or-afterschool education gigs), I strongly feel that it is up to students to learn how to manage their time, and if we keep them in a complete state of surveillance and demands on their time, they won’t learn that. I didn’t come up in school at a time when tech was a distraction in class, but I did come up at a time when it was a distraction at work, and like everyone else, I’ve had to learn one way or another how to manage my time on the job. My default is saying to students that I’m generally not going to ding them for fucking around on the internet or their phones in class, but it sure is likely that not paying attention will hurt their grades, and this is up to them. And I’m absolutely merciless with grade-grubbers.
Demanding that students give up their phones at the door of the school – which many New York City schools do – is ultimately disempowering and problematic for students, and that’s mostly what I meant to address in the episode. See the first example in the episode: parents may need to get in touch with kids for important reasons.
The Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow study from the early 1980s also stays in my mind. The study found that one of the reasons teachers often didn’t adopt or allow computers was they were not prepared for student-driven inquiry, for letting students take the wheel, and for the inevitable student interaction and extra noise and excitement that involves. We need to be ready for technology challenging our assumptions about what learning looks like – including dealing with our feelings that were are not “in control” of the class.
PatrickD, I was surprised to hear you were a linguistics professor. Much of what I studied was sociolinguistics – I’m assuming you’re more into the Chomskyan mechanics of things? One of the things sociolinguistics suggested to me (I’m going on James Paul Gee’s work, here) is that students are less engaged when the discourse worlds they live in at home are not engaged with in the classroom – the ways of speaking, and how those shape their sense of who they are. Mismatches of home and school also impact how we use technology in the classroom, and whether students follow our lead. Many teachers are certainly introducing students to ways of using technology that look nothing like how they and their families and friends use technology at home. This is great when it gets students to expand their repertoire – say, working on a Wikipedia article rather than just copy-pasting its contents for a paper – but can also be alienating, say when students use shorthands and emoji at home, but a teacher demands they email in a form of “proper English” from which they are excluded.
Students are not empty vessels to be filled (as cognitive science and much of educational philosophy also backs up); I’m sure most of you on here who are educators agree. If students are not engaged, as other commenters have said, there’s probably a good reason why. It might be because they’re working two jobs and have kids! If they’re outright bored and distracted, it might be because they haven’t yet seen a way that the material connects with their lives.
Personally I’d feel it was a colossal tragedy if students – working-class students in particular! – were disengaged in linguistics class. There is so much in linguistics which can help students validate their race-, class-, or gender-tinged experiences – stuff they might not ever hear anywhere else. Linguistic discrimination is so rarely talked about.
(Caveat/detour: I went to Hampshire College, where we had no tests and no grades. I learned by being given enough rope to hang myself with. I wouldn’t trade that for anything; it’s how I learned to start and finish things, to give up on lingering half-finished projects, and to not fall into procrastination or beating-myself-up habits which were mostly formed by being told what to do by someone else. Also I learned that sociolinguistics is fully awesome.)
