This is a great thread. This statement from cstein (Chris as George has stated) is what drove me to pursue a PhD in Ed Psych at the GC. I was asked to develop courses for a library instruction and I started wondering, how do people learn? And if I don’t know how people learn, how do I know how to teach them? Of course Bransford et al. answered that question in a landmark book, but it still didn’t answer my question and certainly said nothing about technology. So almost 4 years later and much research I find myself investigating cognitive load, multimedia learning theories, and self-regulated learning (SRL) in hope for the magic answer.
If one investigates cognition deeply enough, one might think that the next powerful technological teaching tool will enable direct uploading of information into the brain (a concept I have been accused of supporting). In fact, at a recent book presentation Allan Collins (Northwestern) talked about learning in isolation becoming more of the norm. I don’t agree with Collins, in fact, based on social networking statistics, this generation values community and interaction with others very highly.
So, if the above statement is correct (cstein), and I agree it is, how have faculty been able to teach anything for the last 100 years? And how many faculty actively seek help in pedagogy outside the framework of technology? I can say then; before we can move into the position of integrating technological tools into pedagogy, we have to investigate our own pedagogy. So the point, I believe, still remains, what is it that I want to do in the classroom. And then after, how can I do it better with technology?
Well to faculty who are not versed in technology, there is no real answer to the latter part without knowing what the options are; but, there is also the increase in work that it takes to use technology. So it is not only what, but why should I do it? With some results favorable to online learning, the emphasis should be learner-centered, cognitively as well as formative assessment wise, and simply to teach better. But what I think is overlooked is teaching the students to self-regulate their learning in online environments. We can’t assume that because this generation knows how to click on Facebook that they know how to learn, or that they want to do all of their learning online. I favor the blended learning for this reason. In my opinion, placing certain content online allows for more critical discourse in the classroom. Conversely, one can lecture directly in the class and place all conversation online. Regardless of preference, the field is at a point of where do we go from here and there is no simple answer. Engaging faculty in conversation is the first step. This probably why some faculty call me the tech-therapist.

A lot of people think the answer is to ask more work of teachers. (The corollary is that’s why more aren’t doing it.) To use a variant on a phrase you use, this is so much mierda del toro. Nothing written on online learning has held up as well as Bill Pelz’s piece, and his argument there is that the online environment is one in which students should teach themselves and each other more, not require more work from the teacher.

I think he’s right. I know he is, at least in my experience. The five sections I taught for the Online Baccalaureate were the best teaching experiences of my long teaching life for a simple reason: I was able to set things up so that, if they did what I asked, they learned, and that was demonstrable. Simple as that.

I should give an example. One assignment (this was in the Digital Info class, basically a computer literacy class) was to do a one-pager on some aspect of Internet use they found interesting. They were to do it as an article (I gave them the journalistic questions to answer), and they were to follow a simple scheme of source attribution. No more than one page, thought layout, at least one image.

I got the best papers I’d ever gotten at that kind or level of instruction (and I’m a retooled English prof — writing teacher, basically — who’s taught at three universities). But that wasn’t anything I could attribute to the online environment. It was what else happened with those papers.

Three things, basically:

*First, they were supposed to be first stabs at a final research project, but that had to be a group project, so they were all reading and commenting on one another’s work, looking to choose up a team. (This was of course one reason why the papers were so good in the first place.)

*Second, they were teaching the content of the course in the process of doing the assignment. All sorts of things that I didn’t have that much time for (identity and privacy issues, the “digital divide,” virtual worlds, multiplayer gaming, etc.) got great write-ups and advanced everyone’s knowledge, including mine.

*Third, and this was the trick part of the assignment, I locked down the discussion board on which they published these things (so they couldn’t change what they had posted), and then, three weeks later (after a thorough treatment of plagiarism and how the Internet presumably aids and abets it), I had them go back to their one-pagers and do a self-assessment of how well they did on source attribution.

You can guess a lot of what happened. (For one thing, NO ONE attributed the images they used — or designed their own.) Some self-assessments were egregiously self-flagellating; others were too lacking in self-scrutiny. Every single one allowed me to distill an important point (almost never the same point) about the use of sources in just a few lines of response.

I never, in a quarter of a century of teaching writing, accomplished so much with so little effort. I still felt I was teaching. I had a role to play. But it didn’t require any high-tech bells and whistles. And it certainly didn’t require that I work hard. The online environment meant that there could be lots of cross-teaching, peer work, mutual support, competition to shine, and a very light touch from yours truly.

This is just one example, of course, and I don’t know how generalizable it might be. I do know faculty can’t be told how to teach. But I also know the online environment allows models to be more visible, more fully exposed, more easily shared. That’s important: online pedagogy will typically move forward by models, not mandates.

Also agreed that online/blended learning invites a new pedagogical approach, not just a “course conversion”.

So why the lack of technology enhanced and online courses? To put it crudely I think the idea that faculty are waiting for a tech innovation is B.S. There’s the tried and true response of lazy faculty with yellowed notes, tenure and full professorship but I don’t think that covers it as well. Although I do concede that inertia and lack of incentives plays a part.

I think many faculty do, like you, realize that online and blended learning requires a new pedagogical approach. However they don’t really know what that approach is. They also don’t really know where to start figuring it out. So they sit on the sidelines and wait to see if someone else has figured it out.

I might even go a step further and say that most of us (faculty) don’t really understand how people learn on a fundamental level. We know how we were taught our subject and we have ideas about how to fiddle with that model and make it better but when you present an entirely new medium that requires a new approach we don’t have a good foundational model of what learning requires that we can use to build a new approach.

I’m glad we are not that far apart. Maybe even less so than we seem to say. One of modern rhetoric’s terms is “enabling constraints” — the fact that apparent constraints of context and circumstance may actually have a generative effect. But then this comes from the same ilk who prefer “productive disequilibrium” (argument, also generative) to consensus.

Having been trained as a philosopher (and hence a Socratophile), I suppose I’m part of the team that produces all the bad press about Sophists. I apologize on behalf of the group

I see what you mean about not arguing from principle – and I gather that this is more a strategic decision than a philosophical one – but my point is that there would be nothing inconsistent about your doing so. Embracing certain kinds of constraints doesn’t imply rejecting principles of openness, and in fact one’s principled desire for openness might be the motivating factor for embrace certain constraints (at least if the last few sentences of my previous comment are true).

That said, when it comes to the CUNY Academic Commons, the questions surrounding openness are not as simple as open-v-closed, or even as simple as the spectrum between open and closed. There are different kinds of openness that operate largely independently of one another. Thus the Commons might be less than totally open with respect to its membership or to its intended purpose. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t embrace a great deal of openness in other respects: the software on which the site runs, the scholarship that its members produce, and so on. A space that is totally open in every respect, attempting to be everything to everybody, is likely to serve no individual member very well. In a sense, the kind of openness you consider here is given up, and in exchange we are better able to foster other kinds of openness. Pragmatism at work.