Technology in the Classroom -- Student Version

"Indian School" from Memoirs, official and personal; with sketches of travels among the Northern and Southern Indians; embracing a war excursion, and descriptions of scenes along the Western borders. Second edition. (On the origin, history, character, ... wrongs and rights of the Indians, etc.) by McKenney, Thomas Loraine, 1846. (c) British Library

The discussion of technology in the classroom disappoints me after the several successes I've had [here and here], especially as folks confused technology with electronics, as if chalk and board are not technologies themselves.

So recently, when addressing engagement with an educator, the issue of "devices" came up, as it inevitably does. I admit, I once had a no-phone policy in the classroom because -- as I argued to myself -- having the temptation of texting would keep the student from fully engaging, etc. That's the simple argument. But two years ago I removed that from my syllabus because I realized that

a) if the student wasn't engaged, that's more my responsibility than his girlfriend's texts;
b) a student can be looking straight at me and be a thousand miles away, disengaged -- a device isn't the only distractor;
c) the need for a PC in my own classroom as a graduate student showed that -- yes -- I may disengaged momentarily, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages;
d) the concept of knowledge as network became increasingly obvious as I used the Internet to follow multiple lines of thinking while a professor was lecturing, thus creating new texts bricolage-like to support my own learning;
e) I can actually use the student's devices to her advantage by strategies such as social networking during the class to demonstrate learning; and
f) technology devices themselves are advancing so fast that management is impossible -- smart watches alone, for example, are now part of the student's living experience. Just as we certainly would have not prevented a student looking at his watch a hundred years ago, we shouldn't expect to do so now. 

c/o The Verge <http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/18/5522694/google-smartwatch-android-wear-photos> 

Nathaniel Rivers addresses the larger question better than I do -- instead of justifying one's policies within any specific classroom, we should question our very assumptions about technology and the classroom:

As I see it, there are three problems, generally, with how we discuss "technology in the classroom":

1. We often employ a less that sophisticated understanding of technology. Here is great nutshell definition from Douglas Adams that gets at this: 1) Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2) Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3) Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. In the case of teaching, this definition allows (or compels) us to ignore, for instance, that the classroom itself is a technology. We can also ignore that the lecture is a technology. I would rather we start from the assumption (where else?) that human experience always has, is, and will be mediated by technology, starting with language. (I'd link to something Walter Ong wrote here, but you can just Google it.) 
2. We treat technology on quantitative terms (how much technology we have in the classroom) rather than on qualitative terms (what kinds of tools for which kinds of situations). A ban just tries to have less technology. And the same critique holds true for those who think more technology is some kind of solution. I'd prefer that we have the conversation in terms of "better" or "worse" technologies, which would necessarily be tied to specific goals.
3. Treating technology as we do in points #1 and #2, and here is the big problem, leads us to leave un-interrogated the "traditional" ways we teach (see clause one of Adams's definition). The one thing Shirky hardly talks about in his editorial is actual pedagogy: the reasons he thinks he ought to be lecturing on this topic rather than some other form of teaching. To be fair and to be clear, I am okay with lectures when used effectively: I give and often eagerly listen to them. The problem is lectures, in particular, get naturalized in such discussions of technology. When we (quantitatively) add "technology" to the classroom, we imagine we are adding it on top of the lecture. Lectures thus become the (unchallenged) baseline for teaching, and, as such, they are no longer seen (or interrogated) as an historical, cultural artifact (historicize, historicize, historicize, except when...).

Rivers's allusion to Ong is the "human life world," where humans exist a physical world instead of an abstract one, including the physicality of print, for example, where the body engages with the materials of book and page; tablet and screen. This facet of materiality, since we're there, is more potent in working class students' lives than those of middle class students, as I'm trying to explore via Peckham via Bourdieu (and I'm still working on that one).

Rivers is right -- the discussion should be on the whole ecology of the classroom, including examining our own attitudes, experiences, emotions about our own classroom history (as students, as instructors), and being aware of a changing physical world via technology. But to simply divorce students (or ourselves) from "technology" writ large without this conversation ironically represents precisely the opposite of critical inquiry into our world that the academy is supposed to prepare us all for.

Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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