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HyperText project
Solstrand seminar: something borrowed, something . . .
The major disadvantages with the use of various forms of technology in teaching and learning probably fall into three categories:
Utilising information technology is resource intensive. I have yet to be involved in any technology teaching project that actually reduces the actual number of hours required. This includes staff and students - think about penning notes on a slip of paper 30 minutes before a lecture versus the same material to be presented online. Or for a student the requirement that all 'modules' must be completed by a certain date to be able to continue versus skipping a couple of lectures because the kids are sick, or you're bored.
Online contact is time intensive, and if not managed well extremely time inefficient. In Melbourne at RMIT the university has pretty much worked out that there are no cost savings in delivering online, the only benefits are in terms of flexible delivery - which at the moment partly means enhanced student choice and partly enhanced sales reach. The cost benefits largely come from being able to provide education across time and distance, outside of the bricks and mortar. (Which suggests it is primarily a strategy of growth rather than educational improvement per se.)
Online teaching requires significant investment in computer expertise, hardware, design skills, instructional design, software solutions, security, retraining, content development. It still has left unresolved questions of intellectual property, copyright, professional recognition. Simple occupational health issues are only now being noticed, and as a discipline or profession we run or face the risk of the U.S. corporatised online university where part time staff are employed to manage courses purchased from other academics.
These do not, by themselves, need to be negatives, simply consider the resources needed to establish a physical university and the existing infrastructure we have for the development of staff and students to populate such institutions. However, it is apparent that many do not appreciate the work required to have an educationally viable online program, nor the ongoing costs of upkeep. Again, it is easy to rewrite your notes 30 minutes before a lecture, but quite another thing to rewrite and then rebuild the module for that lecture. What is currently invisible in this to many advocating a move to online education on the basis of efficiency or efficacy is the 'ordinary' work that academics do and the traditional manner in which this work is realised. Things such as conferences, papers, reading journals, and writing essays all gain expression in how we teach. In other words all our academic work is able to be expressed in the mode of teaching that universities have evolved. This is not the case with teaching online, and most of the existing processes we use (reading, writing, remembering) do not gain simple expression in how we teach online. This extends from the preparation of relevant and decent content through to the skills needed to contact successful learning experiences in email, MOOs, bulletin boards, or on the telephone.
In terms of learning paradigms the disadvantages are simply that the rate of change, in technology and our students literacy, outpaces our own, and rather than recognise this as a problem of a failing or potentially marginal (or irrelevant) print literacy we colonise online education utilising traditional models. The disadvantage is simply that to pause is to risk irrelevance, and to participate risks legitimating something that needs questioning.
This needs expanding. The major paradigm shift that the Internet represents, proposes, and effects is not as a distribution medium but as a writing medium. This is why the Web is full of quotidian flotsam and why students already use email before we ask them to (and bulletin boards, and reading web pages). However, most solutions provided for online education do not recognise this, and maintain students as readers. They may be able to contribute to a bulletin board, and in some cases they may even be able to run their own bulletin board, but in general students get to read, click boxes, and probably submit an essay or sit an online exam.
Staff, on the other hand, have happily translated their work into this new medium, and generally feel empowered in doing so. The question is simple. If it is good enough for staff why not students? In our existing teaching practice there is not a large difference between what we teach, how we teach, and how we assess. We write, students write. Currently this is not the case with online education, and so the rhetoric of liberation attached to online learning needs to be interrogated. While we are encouraged to add colour and movement to our online content students are expected to write 10 page linear essays. While we are encouraged to break up content into screen sized chunks, students are expected to write 10 page essays. Increasingly we are producing a disjunction between the form of expression of knowledge (hypermediated, screen based, relational) and how we assess our students expression of this knowledge. This is bad, wrong, silly, and patronising.
The two cultures I referred to are the meeting of a technical/instrumental culture with a humanist/critical practice which seems to be inevitable in using technology in teaching and learning. It is extremely hard to find a middle ground in this field and at the moment it is probably reasonable to say that those who can talk the technical with authority hold significant power in all institutions, whether this is an informal or formalised power.
In addition most humanities researchers, scholars, and teachers are unfamiliar, or uncomfortable with, with the possibilities that this technology provides or offers. This is beyond things such as email or locating an online journal but will be new forms of writing and the presentation of learning in novel genres. Media Studies and Media Science is well placed for such work as media studies has traditionally not invested a great deal in valorising the material specifities of its object of study - unlike literature, for example. We are well used to genres that mutate rapidly, are audio visual, popular and critical. We are also well placed to understand the theoretical implications of such changes. The difference now is that we are also well placed to participate in making these changes, not just observing them.
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