I admit that I have significant hesitations about hybrid and fully online learning that range from an almost religious belief in the value of face-to-face learning environments to a perhaps (but perhaps not) paranoid fear of the corporatization of the university and its interests in taking advantage of hybrid or fully online learning possibilities. But I am also really excited by the idea of taking control of the situation and thinking about hybrid learning from the perspective of teaching and learning, rather than letting LMS vendors and corporate-styled boards make those decisions.
With that said, I’d like to use this space to meditate a little on the statement Groom and Lamb made that “it is facile to think that the technology makes no difference.”
The two articles we read yesterday were in different formats — one a PDF and one a webpage. I read them in chronological order, so Bass’s 1997 article came first. Since it was a PDF, I was able to bring to it some of my normal scholarly practices: I saved it in a file I have for scholarly articles I read as PDFs (which is further separated by topic), and as I read I highlighted and annotated it with comments and questions. I turned to Groom and Lamb next and found that this reading was a piece that made really dynamic use of its web space. It was hyperlinked, it included video, it had a funky table of contents that signaled one’s reading progress, it embedded tweets, and it contained readers’ comments at the bottom. While the process of reading that piece was in a way much more dynamic than my experience reading the PDF, I was struck by one major drawback: I couldn’t highlight and annotate the text itself unless I altered it significantly from its intended spacial, technological setting. So, the old-school, rather static PDF allowed me to interact with it by inputting my own thoughts (via highlights and annotations) whereas the nuanced and dynamic article published in an online review promoted certain kinds of interaction (clicking links, watching videos, submitting comments) but didn’t allow a certain other, for my teaching and learning purposes, extremely important kind of interaction.
This is not to say that one reading experience was better than another, it’s just to agree with Groom and Lamb that the technology we use matters. What did it do to my reading practice of Groom and Lamb that I decided to take some notes in a TextEdit file while reading since I couldn’t take notes in the margins of the text itself? Where can I store that file and how will I connect it with the webpage in my archive of research and writing? At what point do marginal notes turn into comments we make on the webpage itself that become part of the public record?
These questions, essentially just a little meditation on this particular reading experience, cover a very small amount of ground but I hope they represent the kind of questioning we should be doing anyway whenever we plan any kind of teaching or learning effort: what are the goals and what are the best methods of achieving those goals? In other words, as Bass and Groom and Lamb suggest, we should be thinking about backward design.
Well, Meechal, I see your “old-school” process and raise it with the PDF of the Bass article that I PRINTED out and then scrawled with marginal notes. I guess this comes down to comfort: I am always most comfortable with writing and thinking in its most haptic forms: pen in hand, talking out loud, scribble and scratch. Your query of form is so pressing as we can think of different technologies doing just that—producing different forms. From blog posts, to videos, to selfies, we all have our own metier and relate to it with differing forms of intuition, intellection, and comfort. Is emphasizing technology in such a specific way (this class will use blackboard, this class maintains a blog) a limitation in that some students experience, respond, and process these forms (as both producers and creators) better than others? Is being completely open to any available tool going to stall the class with so much instruction and possibly multiply the experience of alienation for students ?
As I mentioned in my comment to Debra’s post, I am really thinking now of the practicalities of hybridizing my course in a way that doesn’t over emphasize the technology, but merely uses it as a tool to bring a critical understanding of literature and its use in being engaged humans into the immediate lives of my students, which is the ultimate goal.
Apologies, I hit publish too soon!
The crux of how I respond to the issues Meechal brings up is how to incorporate variety—of forms, of technologies, of student experience—that serves the goals of my course without bogging it down. Perhaps, it is democratizing the expert-novice paradigm which is a concept I love, but sometimes fear as many new teachers must. I am all for a heterogeneuous mix of tools, teaching styles, learning experiences, and assignments, but how do I strike the balance before the variety becomes a stumbling block?
Your post gets right to a heart of the matter in Great Works of Lit courses: how people read. Faculty commonly bemoan that students don’t read, or they read on devices including (GASP!) their phones. I am in the midst of totally redefining my 2850 suyllabus (as is Jeanne, also in the seminar) to see how it could look w/o using an anthology. Jeanne mentioned in an email to me (we’re exchanging ideas on possible reading lists for an anthology-free 2850) that she is shying away from using PDFs of long-ish readings–but, she said, she isn’t even sure why. So, why might it be? I found some great public domain PDFs of Candide, and I ‘m going to use one of them, I think–though I feel a little “hmmm” about it, too. But why? Why is it that I also feel a little nervous about assigning PDFs of readings. Am I afraid students won’t print them out? (They won’t.) So, what do students lose if they don’t print out? Annotating? A lot of PDF readers allow annotation. Maybe we can use this capability to teach textual annotation and recursive reading practices. W/o an anthology, PDFs of readings are very hard to avoid, unless you have students buy A LOT of separate texts, which can get pricey, or you don’t provide much breadth in your reading list, which I don’t like.
We English-y types are wedded to our texts in a lot of deep ways, I think. It’s interesting to think through the questions of how we read, how our students read, and how we *want* them to read (or wish they would read)–and how justified we are in wishing things into certain ways of being.
Meechal, I really relate to your inquiry here, as I struggle to read posts, comment, do other work, etc. on a new i-Pad. Everything is a little different from my old laptop, and forces me to think about where I’m clicking, tapping, going next… and also to try to figure out the most efficient way of doing so. It takes extra time, but also slows down my thought processes in a nice way. Your observation that we need to consider these experiences and how they shape our students’ perceptions, understandings, and access to texts (whatever form those “texts” take) seems crucial.
It also makes me think about issues of familiarity and access, as Miciah brings up. How would less technologically-experienced student readers approach Groom and Lamb’s essay? What kinds of new thinking about structure and collage could it inspire, or what types of roadblocks might it create to comprehension? How would we as teachers need to prepare students to approach a new form while also letting them find their own way? I’m also most comfortable with haptic modes of processing information, but have, slowly, built up a few electronic ways of doing so. But it’s a long, uneven, constantly changing process, at least for me. I’m now thinking, reading your post and Miciah’s comments, that questioning the scale of the technological intervention we can achieve within one course is key.
Also: “backwards design!” It keeps coming up on my radar, and although I don’t know a lot about it, it seems it could be important to our discussions here.
Meechal, I love your meditation on the process of reading these texts. These observations are indeed incredibly important as we digitize our materials, as Cheryl and Jeanne are experimenting with, or stay with the text (Miciah’s radical method of printing and handwritten annotation), or change its format to suit our needs. Students will be doing this, too. It’s worth examining how technology changes content and also how form changes it.