The teaching happens in the comments
I keep being asked by my institution to explain to non-technical beings why I keep moaning about the learning management system in universities generally and about Blackboard in particular.
I have tried many ways to explain. I asked my friend and colleague Alan Levine to wax lyrical about the importance of a permalink for web dialogue and he humoured me with a great interview, the first in a series of ‘The web for martians’ I am developing for my students.
I have explained that it is not the same to use technology for automation as for augmentation, thanking Gardner Campbell for introducing me to associative trails and Laura Gogia for turning it into the cool activity of associative trailblazing.
I tried to explain that using a computer is not the same as using a computer. This got some results. IT might now add a survey to the course next time it runs so that we can establish what students can actually do with the computer and assess how good their fit is for what we are trying with digital fluency. This is not a great result but there you have it. I am still struggling to explain why my teaching is not easily contained in the ready made template IT has for ‘the content of the course’. I am with Laura Gibbs in that higher education would be in much better shape if we invested in relationship.
And then it hit me.
I think I now see what is different in my idea of teaching and that of the powers that be at my institution. They see my teaching as happening in the content modules. This is what they pay me to do and design fees are not paid until all content modules are complete. In my university, it is even unusual for ‘instructors’ (forgive the quotes but I have concerns about describing what I do as instructing) to engage with the students at all on the discussion boards. They want video lectures, content, stepwise assignments. They want me to fragment and fragment and fragment the students’ learning some more so that we can be certain about how they can count the exact number of points needed for that degree. I don’t teach in the ‘module’ and what I count as learning cannot be measured only in degree points.
To be honest I don’t think we even need a ‘module’. Content and activities abound in the open web. So what the heck am I getting paid for (all be it poorly)?
I teach in the course blog comments and in the discussion boards I am not supposed to visit. ‘They’ see my teaching in the static ‘permanent send’ mode of the ‘module’. This may be obvious to others, but it was not obvious to me until I found myself resisting the requests from IT to offer checklists served up with deadly talking head videos on a course that is about mindful communication!
Conversing well with others does not happen in a disembodied module. It happens in a reciprocal attentive connection with others. My teaching is in the comments, I repeat. I read a student’s post and I respond. I join a discussion board conversation and I converse; part of this will be resources that might help understanding, questions to help expand our collective thinking, personal experience that speaks to their questions and concerns and anything else that helps move the conversation forward.
It is what we build on top of the static content that makes the learning.
Participatory connected thought happens in the comments and the linking. It is how we enact what the content describes. This is the essence of teaching online or offline for that matter.
We are so blinded by a teaching-as-a-commodity metaphor that we keep attending to the residue of the teaching process and argue about who owns it and for how much. Well, I am with Jim Groom about the irrelevance of massive open online courses to my teaching. These courses sell content and ‘content is nothing more than the post-facto evidence of a relationship happening in space and time’.
This semester has made it clear to me that I am just not interested in the kind of teaching that does not allow me to converse meaningfully with all my students and allows my students to converse with each other and with me.
I can see a lot more clearly now that the content residue that remains after we finish a course of study is useless unless it becomes the start of a new conversation with new participants to augment and enact the old content in a new way.
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Published in Higher Education Revolution
