Resident Theologian
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I’m in Comment on ed tech
This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.”
This morning Comment published my review essay of Audrey Watters’ latest book Teaching Machines. The title of the essay is “Unlearning Machines.” Here’s how it opens:
Audrey Watters is a prophet. Prophets aren’t fortune tellers, however. The main business of prophets, even in the Bible, isn’t the future. It’s the present. Better to say: it’s the set of possible futures that are liable to follow from crucial choices made in the present. Israel’s prophets brought a word from God to the people of God, and that word was—as it always is for prophets, including Jesus—repent. To repent means to turn, to veer right rather than left, to take this branch on the decision tree, not that one, to see the fork in the road for what it is: an opportunity, probably the last, to avoid disaster. Because disaster is what awaits if you continue on the current path.
True, Watters is a secular prophet. She doesn’t speak on God’s behalf or for the sake of a chosen people. But like Amos, she brings a word of judgment to the powers that be. Those powers she calls Ed Tech. And like the nations against which Amos railed, Ed Tech is a bastion of avarice and injustice. It grinds the faces of the poor into the dust.
Ed Tech is short for education technology. Think Zoom, “learning management systems,” online anti-cheating software. At first glance those might seem harmless enough. Allow Watters to dissuade you. She has a decade’s worth of work with which to do so. Sometimes it seems she has the beat all to herself, a one-woman journalistic gadfly buzzing around the behemoths and motherships of Silicon Valley. Unswattable, she maintains a blog, Hack Education, and has self-published several collections of talks and essays. In August MIT Press published her latest book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, which she wrote as part of a fellowship at Columbia University.
Click here to read the rest. Let me add for the record that editor Brian Dijkema is a mensch. He’s edited me three times now for Comment and every time both the substance of the piece and its style is vastly improved. (“Plain English, Brad, plain English!”) Also, if you read the whole thing you’ll have the pleasure of stumbling upon a sentence that contains “some kind of Burkean phlegm,” which I trust is a phrase I’m the first to have used. I certainly enjoyed writing it.
Experiments in Luddite pedagogy: dropping the LMS
This semester I wanted to experiment with teaching my courses without the use of an LMS. For those unfamiliar with the term, LMS stands for "learning management system," i.e., an online program for turning in assignments, communicating with students, updating the syllabus, inputting grades, etc. Some of us used Blackboard back in the day. My campus uses Canvas.
Now, Canvas is without question the best LMS I have ever encountered: intuitive, adaptable, not prone to random glitches and failures, useful for any number of pedagogical and technological ideas and goals. So far as I can see, after 15 years or so, the technology has finally caught on to the vision of using the internet well for teaching purposes, a vision ahead of its time one to two decades ago, and which probably, as a result, led to a lot of wasted time and self-defeating habits.
But, you might be wondering, if Canvas is a good LMS, why did I want to experiment with not using one? Here's why.
1. I want to be intentional in my use of technology, in my life and in the classroom. My campus is an LMS-supporting and Canvas-deploying atmosphere. I've never heard of anyone even broaching the topic of not using it, or even of using it as minimally as possible. The presumption is not that one ought to decide whether to use an LMS but how. I wanted to test that presumption.
2. I have many colleagues who are not only tech-savvy but pedagogically creative, even brilliant, in the ways they put Canvas to use in their courses and in their classrooms. I am not among them. Partly for philosophical reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons, I simply do not put Canvas to maximal use. Indeed, in most of my courses I put it to minimal use: sometimes exclusively as an online home for the syllabus and for students' grades. Which raises the practical question: If that's all I'm using it for, why use it at all?
3. My diagnosis of students—a diagnosis I share with them, since the diagnosis applies to our culture more broadly, and since some of my classes try to tackle the problem head-on—is that they are overly reliant upon, even addicted to, screens: above all their smartphones. Part of my move toward (so-called) Luddite pedagogy is that I don't want to contribute to that addiction if (a) there are alternatives and/or (b) that contribution would not justify the additional screen time it would require. In other words, if I'm going to ask, encourage, or (Lord help me) mandate that my students be on their devices more than they already are, then I had better have a very good reason for it. Do I? Do we?
4. The three greatest "needs" addressed by an LMS are communication, syllabus, and grades. All other uses, so far as I can see, are optional: each professor is (or should be) free to employ it—or not—to whatever further pedagogical ends she has for her course. But those differ per the nature of the class, the character of the instructor, the style of assignments, and so on. What then of those necessities?
5. Communication is most simply dealt with: I communicate with my students face to face, in class, or via email. Communication via LMS has only ever seemed to me like one more thing to add to all the other modes of digital communication in one's life (text messages, Google Chat, Slack, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, on and on). I only know if someone has messaged me on Canvas if Canvas alerts me by email. Why not just cut out the middle man?
6. I understand the desire for an online syllabus. I prefer not to have one, but for those who do, I would go one of two ways. Either Google Doc—which is simple, accessible, and revisable—or a one-page blog post, preferably on one's own domain (examples: Alan Jacobs; Jeffrey Bilbro). Moreover, I discovered that my students were (a) ignoring my verbal instructions about assignments and scheduling in favor of what Canvas told them and (b) ignoring the syllabus PDF on Canvas in favor of what Canvas's schedule of upcoming assignments told them. It turns out that form isn't content-neutral and the medium is the message (ever and ever, amen): students have been trained by LMS programs since middle and high school not to read or even to listen and instead to consult their online home page for course guidance. If the home page says jump, they jump. If it says nothing, they know there's nothing to do—even if the professor or the written syllabus says otherwise. So this semester one of my experiments was the lack of a Canvas home page "consultation" device: they had to read the paper syllabus I handed out to them as well as pay attention to what I said in class. A novel concept, no?
7. Immediate and ever-ready access to grades is both the greatest expressed desire on the part of students and that which has caused me the most worry about presumptive usage of LMS in higher education. Students and professors talk as if the absence of such access is a cause for anxiety in an already anxiety-ridden generation. My observation has been the opposite. From what I can tell, immediate and ever-ready access to grades does not alleviate but rather generates and increases student anxiety. Students' default settings on Canvas—which they have not only on their tablets and laptops but, naturally, on their smartphones—sign them up for email alerts and push notifications for any and all changes to the grade sheet, including changes to other students' grades. For though they can't see others' grades, they can see the average grade for an assignment, which changes as others' grades are entered or modified. Now, students, like the rest of us, are already addicted to their phones. Add to that the ever-present possibility that grades might be entered, or start being entered. Add to that receiving push notification after push notification updating the average grade for a course assignment, prior to receiving one's own grade. It's a recipe for stress. And even if, on the instructor side, you do your part to minimize all those alerts, students can still go online and check their grades at any moment, calculating their (incomplete and rarely predictive) average and comparing their individual grades to how their peers did (on average). I am flat unpersuaded that this is a good thing.
So I opted for my little experiment (with support from my chair). What have I done, and how has it gone so far?
1. Each student receives a printed copy of the syllabus the first week of class along with detailed verbal commentary by me. I also email a PDF to everyone in the class. I'm not a "revise as we go" teacher, so any changes are minor (e.g., no class on X day because my kid is sick, etc.).
2. I communicate in class or via email (or one-on-one in office hours)—full stop.
3. All assignments are completed or submitted by hand or in person: quizzes are taken in class without the use of laptops or phones; papers are printed out and turned in during class; there are no online class discussions; etc. Reasonable exceptions are permitted due to ability, availability, emergencies, and so on, but these are the norms.
4. One of my courses uses a bunch of scanned PDFs of chapters and essays. I simply uploaded all of them into a university Google Drive and shared it with the students in the course.
5. As for grades: This proved the biggest experiment of all, though it's merely a throwback to the way professors did things for decades before the advent of LMS. I keep a spreadsheet for each class where I input grades, absences, etc. The students' names are in a random order, and each student has a (privately assigned) number. At the end of each week, I print out the spreadsheet, minus their names, and post it outside my office. (This is the FERPA-approved method.) Students know their grades are updated weekly, and can come by anytime. They received their confidential identifying number by individual email early in the semester, and their grades remain anonymous that way. For my smaller courses (seminar-like in numbers), I bring the spreadsheet to class when I return major assignments like papers.
6. Why this route for grades? First, to undercut the anxiety of alerts and notifications. Second, to remove one more digital temptation for perpetual checking and refreshing: "I wonder if he'll update them online now? I wonder if he already has? I'll go ahead and check." Third, to motivate me to grade in a timely fashion. Fourth, to encourage students to come by my office and, if they have questions about grades, to ask me questions then and there rather than via email the moment grades are posted online. Fifth, to routinize the giving and posting of grading so that it's not a pall hovering over my head at all times, but has a structure and rhythm within the work week.
7. So: How have students responded? Without a single complaint. Not one problem. Now, we're in week 10 of 15. Perhaps there will be some students who organize mass protests at the end of the semester for one reason or another. I solicit anonymous feedback mid-semester, and that is where I got the idea to bring the grade sheet to my smaller classes when papers are handed back. But otherwise it's been smooth sailing on the student side: no missed assignments, no botched communication, no "but Canvas said!" I'm honestly still a bit shocked that there haven't been a few more complaints or requests for online grades: I told them up front that it was an experiment, and that I was open to revision or reversion if it didn't go well. But I've seen no resistance on their side whatsoever.
8. And on my side, it's been one long victory march. I've deleted my Facebook account, I've reduced Twitter to ~30 minutes on Saturdays, I severely limit my time on email, and now I'm not spending hours on Canvas when I could be doing something more productive with my time. Again, the point isn't that any and all LMS usage is evil or time poorly spent; it's that such usage ought to be intentional and purposeful. For me, it had become one more digital box to check, not a positive contributor to my pedagogical goals or my students' well-being. I have colleagues who use it well and I have other classes in which I too use it (hopefully well enough). But as for this semester, the net benefits have been manifold. Less time on the laptop, less time online, more time for other work tasks, and more timely and efficient grading. Win, win, win, win.
9. The question now is next semester. This semester I have all upperclassmen in elective courses. Next semester I'm teaching a one-week intensive in January, another elective for upperclassmen, but also a freshman survey class that is lecture-based. The intensive course relies on Canvas both before and after we meet, so I will probably keep it (though I suppose I could drop it if I solved the problem of how to give them their grades apart from the LMS grade sheet). But I'm disinclined to nix the LMS for the freshmen, for two reasons. First, they're coming from high schools where they relied on an LMS, especially for grades, and at this stage the lack of one might freak them out. Second, I have productively used online discussion posts for an assignment in this particular course, and unless I think of an alternative, I'm loath to drop it. But since I'm new to this experiment, and since it has gone so well (even better than I imagined, if I'm honest), I might keep trying to think creatively about what it would mean to go LMS-free across all my classes.
We shall see. More reports to come from my haphazard attempts Luddite pedagogy. Until then.
Now, Canvas is without question the best LMS I have ever encountered: intuitive, adaptable, not prone to random glitches and failures, useful for any number of pedagogical and technological ideas and goals. So far as I can see, after 15 years or so, the technology has finally caught on to the vision of using the internet well for teaching purposes, a vision ahead of its time one to two decades ago, and which probably, as a result, led to a lot of wasted time and self-defeating habits.
But, you might be wondering, if Canvas is a good LMS, why did I want to experiment with not using one? Here's why.
1. I want to be intentional in my use of technology, in my life and in the classroom. My campus is an LMS-supporting and Canvas-deploying atmosphere. I've never heard of anyone even broaching the topic of not using it, or even of using it as minimally as possible. The presumption is not that one ought to decide whether to use an LMS but how. I wanted to test that presumption.
2. I have many colleagues who are not only tech-savvy but pedagogically creative, even brilliant, in the ways they put Canvas to use in their courses and in their classrooms. I am not among them. Partly for philosophical reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons, I simply do not put Canvas to maximal use. Indeed, in most of my courses I put it to minimal use: sometimes exclusively as an online home for the syllabus and for students' grades. Which raises the practical question: If that's all I'm using it for, why use it at all?
3. My diagnosis of students—a diagnosis I share with them, since the diagnosis applies to our culture more broadly, and since some of my classes try to tackle the problem head-on—is that they are overly reliant upon, even addicted to, screens: above all their smartphones. Part of my move toward (so-called) Luddite pedagogy is that I don't want to contribute to that addiction if (a) there are alternatives and/or (b) that contribution would not justify the additional screen time it would require. In other words, if I'm going to ask, encourage, or (Lord help me) mandate that my students be on their devices more than they already are, then I had better have a very good reason for it. Do I? Do we?
4. The three greatest "needs" addressed by an LMS are communication, syllabus, and grades. All other uses, so far as I can see, are optional: each professor is (or should be) free to employ it—or not—to whatever further pedagogical ends she has for her course. But those differ per the nature of the class, the character of the instructor, the style of assignments, and so on. What then of those necessities?
5. Communication is most simply dealt with: I communicate with my students face to face, in class, or via email. Communication via LMS has only ever seemed to me like one more thing to add to all the other modes of digital communication in one's life (text messages, Google Chat, Slack, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, on and on). I only know if someone has messaged me on Canvas if Canvas alerts me by email. Why not just cut out the middle man?
6. I understand the desire for an online syllabus. I prefer not to have one, but for those who do, I would go one of two ways. Either Google Doc—which is simple, accessible, and revisable—or a one-page blog post, preferably on one's own domain (examples: Alan Jacobs; Jeffrey Bilbro). Moreover, I discovered that my students were (a) ignoring my verbal instructions about assignments and scheduling in favor of what Canvas told them and (b) ignoring the syllabus PDF on Canvas in favor of what Canvas's schedule of upcoming assignments told them. It turns out that form isn't content-neutral and the medium is the message (ever and ever, amen): students have been trained by LMS programs since middle and high school not to read or even to listen and instead to consult their online home page for course guidance. If the home page says jump, they jump. If it says nothing, they know there's nothing to do—even if the professor or the written syllabus says otherwise. So this semester one of my experiments was the lack of a Canvas home page "consultation" device: they had to read the paper syllabus I handed out to them as well as pay attention to what I said in class. A novel concept, no?
7. Immediate and ever-ready access to grades is both the greatest expressed desire on the part of students and that which has caused me the most worry about presumptive usage of LMS in higher education. Students and professors talk as if the absence of such access is a cause for anxiety in an already anxiety-ridden generation. My observation has been the opposite. From what I can tell, immediate and ever-ready access to grades does not alleviate but rather generates and increases student anxiety. Students' default settings on Canvas—which they have not only on their tablets and laptops but, naturally, on their smartphones—sign them up for email alerts and push notifications for any and all changes to the grade sheet, including changes to other students' grades. For though they can't see others' grades, they can see the average grade for an assignment, which changes as others' grades are entered or modified. Now, students, like the rest of us, are already addicted to their phones. Add to that the ever-present possibility that grades might be entered, or start being entered. Add to that receiving push notification after push notification updating the average grade for a course assignment, prior to receiving one's own grade. It's a recipe for stress. And even if, on the instructor side, you do your part to minimize all those alerts, students can still go online and check their grades at any moment, calculating their (incomplete and rarely predictive) average and comparing their individual grades to how their peers did (on average). I am flat unpersuaded that this is a good thing.
So I opted for my little experiment (with support from my chair). What have I done, and how has it gone so far?
1. Each student receives a printed copy of the syllabus the first week of class along with detailed verbal commentary by me. I also email a PDF to everyone in the class. I'm not a "revise as we go" teacher, so any changes are minor (e.g., no class on X day because my kid is sick, etc.).
2. I communicate in class or via email (or one-on-one in office hours)—full stop.
3. All assignments are completed or submitted by hand or in person: quizzes are taken in class without the use of laptops or phones; papers are printed out and turned in during class; there are no online class discussions; etc. Reasonable exceptions are permitted due to ability, availability, emergencies, and so on, but these are the norms.
4. One of my courses uses a bunch of scanned PDFs of chapters and essays. I simply uploaded all of them into a university Google Drive and shared it with the students in the course.
5. As for grades: This proved the biggest experiment of all, though it's merely a throwback to the way professors did things for decades before the advent of LMS. I keep a spreadsheet for each class where I input grades, absences, etc. The students' names are in a random order, and each student has a (privately assigned) number. At the end of each week, I print out the spreadsheet, minus their names, and post it outside my office. (This is the FERPA-approved method.) Students know their grades are updated weekly, and can come by anytime. They received their confidential identifying number by individual email early in the semester, and their grades remain anonymous that way. For my smaller courses (seminar-like in numbers), I bring the spreadsheet to class when I return major assignments like papers.
6. Why this route for grades? First, to undercut the anxiety of alerts and notifications. Second, to remove one more digital temptation for perpetual checking and refreshing: "I wonder if he'll update them online now? I wonder if he already has? I'll go ahead and check." Third, to motivate me to grade in a timely fashion. Fourth, to encourage students to come by my office and, if they have questions about grades, to ask me questions then and there rather than via email the moment grades are posted online. Fifth, to routinize the giving and posting of grading so that it's not a pall hovering over my head at all times, but has a structure and rhythm within the work week.
7. So: How have students responded? Without a single complaint. Not one problem. Now, we're in week 10 of 15. Perhaps there will be some students who organize mass protests at the end of the semester for one reason or another. I solicit anonymous feedback mid-semester, and that is where I got the idea to bring the grade sheet to my smaller classes when papers are handed back. But otherwise it's been smooth sailing on the student side: no missed assignments, no botched communication, no "but Canvas said!" I'm honestly still a bit shocked that there haven't been a few more complaints or requests for online grades: I told them up front that it was an experiment, and that I was open to revision or reversion if it didn't go well. But I've seen no resistance on their side whatsoever.
8. And on my side, it's been one long victory march. I've deleted my Facebook account, I've reduced Twitter to ~30 minutes on Saturdays, I severely limit my time on email, and now I'm not spending hours on Canvas when I could be doing something more productive with my time. Again, the point isn't that any and all LMS usage is evil or time poorly spent; it's that such usage ought to be intentional and purposeful. For me, it had become one more digital box to check, not a positive contributor to my pedagogical goals or my students' well-being. I have colleagues who use it well and I have other classes in which I too use it (hopefully well enough). But as for this semester, the net benefits have been manifold. Less time on the laptop, less time online, more time for other work tasks, and more timely and efficient grading. Win, win, win, win.
9. The question now is next semester. This semester I have all upperclassmen in elective courses. Next semester I'm teaching a one-week intensive in January, another elective for upperclassmen, but also a freshman survey class that is lecture-based. The intensive course relies on Canvas both before and after we meet, so I will probably keep it (though I suppose I could drop it if I solved the problem of how to give them their grades apart from the LMS grade sheet). But I'm disinclined to nix the LMS for the freshmen, for two reasons. First, they're coming from high schools where they relied on an LMS, especially for grades, and at this stage the lack of one might freak them out. Second, I have productively used online discussion posts for an assignment in this particular course, and unless I think of an alternative, I'm loath to drop it. But since I'm new to this experiment, and since it has gone so well (even better than I imagined, if I'm honest), I might keep trying to think creatively about what it would mean to go LMS-free across all my classes.
We shall see. More reports to come from my haphazard attempts Luddite pedagogy. Until then.