[Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class

[Dr. Steve Eskow]

What is happening here may be making genuine intellectual disagreement 
difficult by insisting that all such encounters are "trolling."

If the paragraph Dr. Johns cites is in any sense trolling, I'll apologize. 
It seems like a piece of a position to me.

The new communication technologies--the technologies with which this list is 
concerned--suggest a rethinking of the foundations of the college and the 
university.

The "campus" and the "classroom" as the spatial and temporal shapers of 
instruction need to be made visible for the role they play in defining 
learning.

The passive and active resistance of undergraduate students to what goes on 
in the lecture hall and classroom needs, I believe, to be discussed openly. 
The correlative practices of compulsory attendance via grading systems, and 
their impact on genuine learning, and the possibilities for other ways seem 
like important topics.

So, again: there is this possibility:

The campus and the lecture hall and the classroom as containers of learning, 
and the instructional practices to which they have led, are ancient 
technologies.They are the "commonsense" of current higher education, and 
often invisible to those who use them.

In 1841 Carlyle predicted the transformation of the university by the new 
technologies of mass printing which he felt would make the physical 
apparatus of the medieval university unnecessary. He was wrong. So was 
Edison, who predicted that the motion picture would undo the university. And 
the university form, the university organizing technologies have 
successrully reisted the telegraph, and radio and television.

The new ICT may similarly be absorbed within the present technological 
framework of buildings and curriculum and syllabi.

There is some countervailing evidence, in the form of the spread of open 
universities in the world that use communication technologies to instruct 
hundreds of thousands of students.

And the distance learning movement is flourishiing in the US.

There is much talk now of "blended learning": bringing together the 
traditional classroom and the instructional abilities of the new 
technologies. There is growing evidence that the old and the new 
technologies often do not blend well, and that when students are given the 
opportunity they desert the old forms for the new.

Sunday's New York Times featured an articles of the inability of Africa's 
brick-and-mortar universities to cope with Africa's needs for tertiary 
education.

If there is not enough brick and mortar in the world to build the 
universities Africa needs, how can the technologies we are concerned with 
here be mobilized to help?

Steve Eskow




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark D. Johns" <mjohns at luther.edu>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class


> Dr. Steve Eskow wrote:
>> ...
>> If I were in your position, without tenure and with an institutional 
>> climate
>> that doesn't allow for differences in practice, I would undooubtedly do 
>> as
>> you are doing--in order to collect my paycheck. I will think about 
>> whether I
>> would defend those  practices--compulsory attendance, "points" awarded 
>> and
>> deducted, etc.-- in public....
>
> Gee, and just the other day I was chiding my friends on this list for
> taking troll bait, and now look at how I've spent my day! Only a true
> ivory tower academic would vilify the notion that an education ought to
> actually help prepare students to bear some responsibility for their
> actions and inactions. I have better things to do than to read further
> condescending posts.
>
> No more time to play this game. There's work to be done.
> -- 
> Mark D. Johns, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor and Head of the
>  Department of Communication Studies
> Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA
> http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/
> -----------------------------------------------
> "Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
>     ---Mark Twain
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