Technology in the University Classroom: Luddites Welcome
I’m an unashamed advocate for some technology in the classroom. I use it in all of my University classes. I have many colleagues, who are excellent teachers and who are fierce opponents of any such approach and will ban laptops, phones and mobile devices. So here’s why I advocate for it, under carefully controlled conditions, so that it assists with the teaching and learning, and doesn’t get in the way. But I don’t insist that good teaching requires technology.
Distraction
The average attention span for people is 10–15 minutes. Once an activity goes over that, there will be distraction. Whether the distraction is provided by laptops, fidgeting, talking or any other route, it will happen. I can always tell when my students start to lose it, because the chairs start squeaking while people do backside oscillations. Academics should be aware of this. They have to sit in lots of long meetings. Do they pay attention all the time? Do faculty sit in meetings without laptops and tablets or phones in front of them? When we go to conferences, how many talks can you sit through before you get distracted? For me, the answer is “Not Many”. So academics should be able to relate their own experiences to those of the students. It may come as a shock that your wonderful, fluent, intellectually challenging, enthralling lesson may not be any of those things to the audience. As any actor or comedian knows, you have to carry the audience with you, and that is not a passive thing, it requires effort.
Activity
Regardless of whether you use technology in the classroom, a good teacher will vary the classroom activity with different types of learning activities and exercises. This has nothing to do with the discredited “learning styles” idea, but is simply a pragmatic approach to get students to refocus on a new task to prevent distraction. There are plenty of ways in which you can shake things up in the classroom — group activity, breakout groups, quick-fire discussions, mini debates, think-pair-share. The list is very long, and will depend on the type of class being taught. Sometimes technology can help with that, by giving different options. Some groups of students react differently to using technology. My gadget-mad engineering students are much more enthusiastic users of classroom response systems than my science students. Making sure they don’t get distracted by the technology is always on my mind.
Information
Sometimes we want our students to arrive well prepared and informed. Done the reading ahead of times, be ready to speak. But a crucial aspect of teaching, often neglected, are the library skills:
1. Information retrieval. For example knowing the right questions to ask a search engine.
2. Critical thinking to sort the useful information from the irrelevant or downright wrong.
Students have far more information at their fingertips now than we did. We have to teach them to think critically, and use the information wisely. Sensible use of technology in the classroom lets you bring in the information, so that the teacher can guide the student through the maze of information overload. This is a big change in the educational experience, and I don’t see many University courses really address this. Still on the same old lecture/seminar teaching because that’s how most Professors were taught, so it must be okay.
So my advice
· Think about what you are teaching
· Think about how you teach it.
· Think about how the students receive your teaching
· Think about how students digest your teaching
· Think about how students expound what they have learned.
It’s perfectly possible to do this without technology, but sometimes it makes sense to use it. Students are surrounded by technology in their everyday lives. To put them in an artificial environment where it is banned may not have the desired effect. Unless you want to be considered a Luddite, of course. Because the best teaching may require no technology at all.
