The Heart of the Matter: Ned Ludd Returns

Lou Spaventa

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to
HLT. E-mail: spaventa@cox.net

"Well, they're back! Smart classrooms with toned down bunkers and still way too many knobs and buttons, configured by someone who confuses tech speak with English." So writes David Megill in "Smart Classrooms, Dumb Teachers," his self-labeled rave against tools that dumb down teachers.

Megill is on to something, I think. For the last few years, I keep having a recurring impulse to start the new school term with paper and pencil only, in fact, to organize a movement of paper and pencil people, people who would just go into a classroom with paper and pencil to see what would happen. Maybe someone would create an original work of art on the blank paper or perhaps the instructor would think through the basics of his subject matter and begin making a simple list of what he feels his charges should know. Perhaps instructor and students would draw up a learning contract, something short so as not to dull the point of the pencil. There might not be a student in the classroom with a penknife and, because this is a paper and pencil classroom, there'd be no sharpener on the wall, certainly no sideways appended stapler, hanging like the tongue of an ox in a butcher shop.
I don't dislike computer technology or multimedia instruction as is the current appellation here in California. I use computers in a writing lab. Students write and I read what they put on their screens while I sit next to them and discuss their writing with them. I move from place to place in the writing lab. I don't control the students' computers. I use DVDs in my classes when I find a scene in a film that works with what the class is studying. I used to use recorded music, though not so much anymore - the gap between my musical taste and my students' has grown into a chasm. I am not opposed to technological innovation although I do see that schools pressed for space turn to distance learning to increase student enrollment. The technology serves an economic end, not a pedagogical one, for the most part.

What bothers me and makes me brother to Ned Ludd, the apocryphal Nottingham weaver who destroyed two stocking frames, is the bandwagon of technology, marching right through budget and past critical review, into classrooms; yet later hiding in some cobwebbed closet to rust in its old age, either of no further use - cassette recorder - or superceded by another form - my old nest of floppy disks, some of which hold my dissertation. Recently, at a department meeting, my colleagues were wowed by reports of a new piece of software/hardware. The presenter, a department member, fairly glowed in presenting the new technology, much as one would at presenting a newborn to family, even though the item in question was not in the room. Other faculty members me-tooed this: "I've seen it." "I've used it." "I want it." Our budget for such equipment is a little over one third of the cost for this single item that would go into one classroom, and for which, no one has been trained. The majority of us had not seen the item, but the majority was clearly for spending most of our budget to acquire it. As chair of the meeting, I kept my opinion largely to myself, though I couldn't help visualizing the computer cart that our instructors sometimes use, humping it through hallway and into elevator, dutifully plugging it in and playing it in class. Our classrooms aren't big enough to hold all of our students. Most of us bark our shins on the supernumerary chair and table in our rooms as they crowd us from white board and blackboard. On my first day of class this semester, I had one student spread on the floor two feet away from me writing an essay. It was the only space available in that classroom at the time. Now we were itching for one more thing to bring into our crowded classrooms, and we hadn't even seen it, but we wanted it.

My philosophical upset with this infatuation with new technology - emphasis on new, ever new - is that it puts off the essential question as to what we do with our time in class. How do we best teach? Is technology the answer? I doubt it. What I think is that a good class consists of instructor and student mediating meaning through the word, through dialogue. When a machine is brought in to mediate between instructor and student, the focus becomes visual, on the object as mediator of the word or image. It removes both instructor and student from the direct responsibility to make meaning from their time together. It moves the locus of power to the machine, the computer. If the lesson fails, it will be because the computer failed. There was a glitch. How many times have I seen this? In practically every presentation using a computer. "Sorry, this Power Point presentation worked when I tried it last night." "Yeah, well, it's not working now, and now is all we have. We don't have last night, no matter how much we wish we did, darling." Something always goes wrong, at least for a while. Then we get back to normal, to watching the image on the screen. We are in television land. Oh, but it's interactive you say? Like changing the telly channel.

What do we take away from a computer-led presentation? Images? Perhaps, perhaps fleetingly. What about from a dusty, dry old presentation by an instructor. Perhaps a little more. As David Megill writes, "But I do remember things from those classes (In this case, he is referring to a traditional lecture format - Rats!) where the teacher jumped tracks in response to a student question and led us all on a rich journey that was never codified in the lecture notes." In other words, there was some extemporaneous and tangential interchange that occasioned something textured and vivid for the student. Can we say that computer assisted instruction does the same? So far, I think not.

Knowledge about technology these days is trumping knowledge about subject matter. Perhaps this is a temporary aberration. Perhaps we will indeed liberate ourselves by computer. Long ago, in a conversation in a bar in Frankfurt, I told two German Adult School colleagues that I believed technology would create a more democratic learning environment for everyone. I think it does to a great extent on the Internet via websites and email exchange. This is largely self-selected learning, the principal way that adults are given to learn anyway, by choosing what they want to learn for themselves. That is why the Web works. In the classroom, I have my doubts, especially because technology seems to arrogate to itself the better part of budgets and brain power outside the classroom. If things continue, I will assume General Ludd's banner, and blindly charge into classrooms in California and in Nottingham, should I ever get back to Mother England, with my pencil and paper, disrupting the new technology and supplanting it with the old. All hail King Graphite!

References

Megill, David "Smart Classrooms, Dumb Teachers," in FACCCTS, Volume 13, Number 1, Fall 2006, Journal of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges.

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