"Social" in the Classroom

I was sent an invitation from Peterson's Interactive Marketing for a "webinar" on "Social Media in the Higher Education.  While the purpose of this webinar was to help colleges and universities work with social media to contact prospective students, it got me thinking about the use of such media in the classroom, or at least related to the classroom.  My friend, Christopher Long has been working on this issue for some time and has a lot more knowledge than I do in this area.  However, whenever we talk about this question, we usually end up in an argument.  He is usually up on the latest tech that could be used in education and his blog posts often link up the use of technology with opening up pedagogy.  The argument we have been having for about five years brings together the classic topic of community vs. society and the question of student engagement in their own learning.

Let me say at the outset that Chris and I have been good friends for a long time, and we have disagreed on a wide variety of issues.  Our disagreements have been, at least for me, extremely fruitful and productive.  This is only the case because of a deep and abiding friendship that allows disagreements to take place without ever calling the friendship into question.  This friendship has been extremely important in my development as a thinker, and I thank him for that.  So I am not just dumping on him, rather, I take his position very seriously and as a challenge to my own thinking on this matter.

To my mind, there are two related issues that need to be addressed in relation to technology and pedagogy. The first is that, as my friend H. Peter Steeves always insists, technologies are never neutral in the sense that they come with their own norms and values.  That is, each technology has the structure of "in-order-to" that may be explicit or implicit.  A calculator is "in-order-to" calculate numbers.  It is extremely unhelpful in writing an essay, posting a blog, or watching TV.  It is not always clear at the outset what norms and values are implicit in a technology, and sometimes the recognition of those values comes too late.  Let me give a small example: I have become addicted to my smartphone (I recently got duped into buying a Motorola I1 running on Boost Mobile's IDEN network...DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE...I love the Android operating system, but IDEN is not a workable data network and neither Boost nor Motorola are interested in upgrading this network or this phone to a more recent version).  I thought that I loved being able to receive and send email wherever I am and whenever I want.  But I have noticed one thing: I have stopped responding to email almost entirely.  The reason?  Somehow when I read an email on my phone, I assume that I have "dealt with it."  Writing long emails on a phone is a huge pain in the rear end, and so, having read the email, I realize that I do not take the next step and respond when I am at a computer.  This is a norm that is built into this technology and one that is not immediately recognizable when you buy the smartphone.

I worry, then, about what norms and values are implicit in the various forms of technology that we might introduce into the classroom.  For example, technologies that allow all students to participate equally in discussion seem to open up the pedagogical space in a more democratic fashion.  Yet is this the case?  Is democracy simply the ability to say whatever comes to my mind at any time?  Perhaps more significant is the question of whether opening pedagogy in general is more "empowering" to students.

When I was in graduate school at the New School for Social Research, I had a professor, Reiner Schurmann, who had a tremendous impact on my learning and my thinking.  Any of his students can attest to the fact that Schurmann's classroom was not "open" in the sense that participation in almost any form was not encouraged. In fact, whether it was a lecture course or a seminar, Schurmann always lectured. In addition, he presented interpretations of texts that were extremely "strong" and did not seem to invite question or dialog. The result of this is that students were presented with a model of how one goes about reading and interpreting a text and, perhaps more importantly, they were presented with a clearly stated position against which they could argue.

One worry I have is that many attempts to democratize the classroom cover over the authority of the instructor and, therefore, work to coerce students rather than liberate them.  Instructors do have authority: we set the syllabus, determine the appropriate forms of communication, write assignments, assign texts, schedule the topics to be discussed, and above all assess our students in some way (usually in the form of grades).  Therefore, not all the participants in the classroom are equal and this fact should never be covered over.  Modern capitalist societies have long thrived on a coercion that is "freely" accepted by a democratic populace.  In fact, capitalism thrives on the dual notions that choice equals freedom and a plurality of voices equals democracy.  What obviously gets lost in all of this is the question of whether facts and knowledge are important.  In an age when creationism passes for science, when the human impact on global climate change is an opinion, and when presenting all opinions on an issue passes for objectivity, we should be extremely cautious of our pedagogical strategies.

I raised one point in the initial post of this blog that is worth raising again, many of us who are interested in helping our students have a mind capable of critical reflection on self, society, and the world came to this position on the basis of some very old pedagogical styles.  We should be extremely careful not to deny to our students the very tools we received and used to arrive at our own critical positions.  Openness is not necessarily letting every voice speak with equal authority or the lack of authority.

What does this have to do with technologies in and in relation to the classroom?  We are now back to the implicit norms and values of technologies.  If information becomes opinion, if critical reflection becomes "my feelings" on an issue, then students are robbed of the tools of critical reflection.  Will the on-line community sort this out?  Won't the "cream rise to the top?"  Perhaps, but then why do nearly 20% of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim?  And that number is up from a year ago!  How can critical reflection on information and disinformation be encouraged?  These are questions for which, I argue, there is not technological solution, but an old fashioned one.