Serendipity35

So, I read this article during my lunch soup yesterday about a dean at Southern Methodist University who is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. He is a dean for their school of the arts and challenges his colleagues to "teach naked."  What he means by that is to teach without "machines" such as computers.

Reading into the story, you find that it's also another "PowerPoint is Evil" type of movement. I agree that slides (We might as well blame Keynote along with PowerPoint - it's not like fancier transitions make a slideshow more educational either) can be used badly, but a slideshow does not guarantee a bad class session.

Dean Bowen believes that when students reflect on their college years later in life, they won't remember media presentations but will recall the interactions they had with their professors.

The Chronicle article points to other anti-ppt studies like one in the British Educational Research Journal that found that 59% of students said that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. I'll bet that if you had surveyed my fellow undergrads 40 years ago, we would have said that at least half of the lectures were boring, and there were no computers to blame. Could it be that lectures, with or without slides, are boring? Is it possible that the professor is boring?

And it's not just PowerPoint that gets low marks. Other technology-assisted activities, like interactive exercises in computer labs, also get the boring stamp. That report listed seminars, practice sessions, demonstrations and group discussions as less boring. [insert Bloom's taxonomy, engagement theory and learning pyramid slides here]

So, are tech-free classrooms the most engaging classrooms? Would it be that simple - to strip the "smart classrooms" of their technology right down to the dusty overhead projector in the corner?

How would most teachers react to teaching naked in this revised learning space?
A) They would become highly innovative and creative in their approaches to presenting material.
B) They would call their union rep.
C) They would bring in their own laptop and CD player and ask media services where they are storing the DVD players and 16mm projectors these days.
D) They would lecture for the full time.

It simplistic to say that teaching without tech equals just lecturing. In fact, the effect has been in some cases that students don't like having to be "more engaged." After all, the lecture model is very comfortable and doesn't ask for much from them. It can be like watching [bad] TV - not exciting, but relaxing.

Back to Dean Bowen. I'll give him credit for giving a presentation about the no-tech teaching naked approach at the techie conference on "Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning" offered by the Sloan Consortium. Talking to a crowd that encourages technology in education, he suggested that the "lecture" can be recorded and delivered to students as podcasts/online videos before class, and use the valuable class time to introduce issues of debate and have discussions.

That particular approach has been proposed and used before. At Miami University, Glenn Platt, along with his colleague Maureen Lage, coined the phrase “inverted classroom” back in 2000. They proposed using technology to move
active learning into the classroom and lectures outside of class.

I guess naked teachers are not really naked of technology. They use it, but in a limited way. Read the comments on that Chronicle article and I suspect you will agree with most of them - technology is not the problem OR the solution.

Some other thoughts on
- Naked Teaching http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/?p=194
- Inverted Classroom  http://www.eric.ed.gov