Adventures in Education
The technophobe enters the Boundary Zone
I am a late and reluctant user of personal tech. Until March 2020, I did not have the internet at home. When I was forced to go online, I got a dongle (a USB that gives me internet access) which is not optimal but it seemed the easiest thing to arrange at short notice - you just plug it in, and it's live.
In the UK, where the average person has 1.2 mobile phone subscriptions, I still don't have one. I have never, ever, made a call on a cellphone. I am not a user of social media; I don't do Facebook or Twitter.
I do not have a TV at home and I don't watch TV on the computer. I have an analogue radio, and I listen to it all the time.
With this profile, you might ask how (and why) I have become an advocate for online learning in my university.
Reaching through the screen
The answer is simple. I have been a student online, and a teacher online, and I did not enjoy the experience. I want to save my colleagues from producing the same courses that I endured. I want them to understand the challenge of 'reaching through the screen' to their students.
It is not easy to transmit this message. In the first place, my colleagues expected the lockdown to end in a few weeks, and were not prepared to change their teaching style for a temporary problem.
Second, colleagues were nervous about the public exposure of teaching online; you just don't know who is watching your performance, how they are sharing it with others, or who is making a permanent record of your mistakes and 'humorous' remarks. It makes you more cautious.
Third, colleagues felt overwhelmed by vendors and e-learning specialists with their vast array of apps, platforms, technologies. it seemed that you had to know everything before you could do anything. Paradoxically, my university offered very few solutions (MS Teams for web conferencing, Panopto for lecture capture, and Blackboard) which seemed insufficient for subjects like medicine, engineering, chemistry, geology. At the very least, we would need simulations, branching scenarios, remote control of experimental equipment, data visualisation, light boards, virtual reality and other tools which were unavailable and inaccessible.
None of us signed up for this
The education and ed-tech media focused on priorities that seemed beside the point to my colleagues. There was a lot of talk about being kind, and learning styles, and mental health, and access to technology....yes, yes, but my students have to pass a degree in medicine, geophysics, aeronautics....
In a flash of insight, I realised that we are ALL beginners...universities like Arizona State have been teaching online for 10 years, but their students have signed up for online courses that took years to develop.
Our situation in March 2020 was different. We were being driven online in circumstances we did not choose. For our campus students, the 'value proposition' is a human, embodied experience. Our campus students might be bored, frustrated, discouraged, but they are not staring at flat people.
On education forums online, and in education seminars, I was surprised to find so little expertise on rapid course re-design, so little emphasis on asynchronous learning and how to coordinate it, and no attention to the social cues, serendipitous meetings, and informal learning networks that are features of campus learning. How are we going to preserve the Academy when students tell us 'I can get the same thing on YouTube' ?
That's my preoccupation these days. Just how is my university, in its blended and online provision, going to distinguish itself from spectating on your phone? Our bodies, in space, are our normal mode of being, and most online experiences are not designed to accommodate them.
REFERENCE
For a different point of view, which insists that we are always embodied, even online, see David Ward's article here
WARD, D. (2018), What's Lacking in Online Learning? Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty and Bodily Affective Understanding. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52: 428-450. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12305