The following news item was originally published The Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i18/18b02701.htm
I Upload Audio, Therefore I Teach
By LUKE FERNANDEZ
This past spring, I worked with my dad — James W. Fernandez, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago — to incorporate MP3 audio into his traditional lecture-style course.
“Traditional lecture-style” is a bit of a misnomer because he doesn’t allow students to take notes during class. Because the course is on oral narratives, he asks, much to some students’ discomfort, that they keep their pens and notepads in their backpacks so that the class can take on some of the habits of an oral culture. The students aren’t exactly happy about that, but he teaches the course in that manner as a way of undoing “what writing has done” — in the words of Valerie Babb, in a 1986 article in the journal Phylon — and as a way of capturing more convincingly the ways in which our literate society differs from cultures that use face-to-face storytelling as their primary means of communication.
Although recording lectures and making them available as MP3’s might seem counterintuitive for a course that denies students the use of even paper and pencil, we speculated that the online technology might help students get away from writing and allow them to think and learn in new (or perhaps older) ways.
As it happened, not very many students availed themselves of the MP3’s, according to the end-of-semester feedback we got. A few told us that they listened to the audio if they had missed a lecture, and a few reviewed the audio to go over points that they hadn’t comprehended as well as they would have liked in class. But at least for that course at that university, the hype of multimedia technology was just that: It seemed promising but actually delivered little.
There were probably two reasons for that outcome. First, my dad’s 120-minute lecture-discussions were posted on the course Web site with little editing. While the microphone picked up the instructor’s voice, it didn’t always clearly pick up the voices of the students. Second, most University of Chicago students live on the campus and go to school full time. Although they are busy, attending class is a relatively high priority in their lives, and therefore they didn’t need to listen to MP3’s.
Meanwhile, well over 1,000 miles west of Chicago, I teach an online course called “The Wired Society” as an adjunct instructor at Weber State University. (I have a Ph.D. in political science, but my full-time job at the university is as an educational-software developer.)
In contrast to the University of Chicago, Weber State has a majority of students who do not live on the campus. A lot of my students have full-time jobs or family commitments that make it difficult for them to get to the university as often as they would like. And in any course I teach, I’ll have at least a few students in their 40s who are going back to college to change careers, as well as one or two divorced moms in their 30s who have children. Those responsibilities of job and family are obvious distractions, and they seriously limit the amount of work that students can do for the course in a given week.
At Weber State, digital audio and podcasting — posting multimedia files online so they can be downloaded — are very much in vogue. Susan Matt, my wife and an associate professor of history, and I have been using Impatica (a technology for mixing audio into PowerPoint presentations and making them available through the Web) since 2003; Tony Spanos, a Spanish professor, has used podcasting and Wimba Voice Tools (which allow him to host online discussions in an audio rather than text format); and university administrators have recently been exploring with Apple Computer the idea of partnerships using iTunes.
In my online course, I use audio technology for three main reasons. First, many of my students are commuters who spend a lot of time driving between home and work. By giving them lectures that they can easily download, I hope I am helping them use their commuting time more productively.
Second, my course explores the relationships between society and technology. Exposing my students to new learning technologies, and new ways of using old technologies, allows me to encourage them to reflect not only on how technology and society interact in an abstract way, but also on how that interaction shapes their daily lives.
Third, I use MP3’s because, although I have spent a lot of time leading successful seminar-style discussions, I have yet to become an eloquent lecturer. I suppose that, like Demosthenes and other people who’ve confronted and overcome their trepidation about public speaking, I could improve by doing more of it. But I can rely instead on the crutches of modern technology. Demosthenes put stones in his mouth and forced himself to enunciate above the roar of ocean waves to improve his speaking skills; I can use the mixing, parsing, and editing capacities of Audacity (open-source software for recording and editing sounds, which is available online at http://audacity.sourceforge.net) to smooth out my diction, remove awkward pauses, annihilate my frequent “um"s, and save me from my propensity to butcher the simplest pronunciation.
Audacity spares me embarrassment. And, in a curious way, it’s allowed me to graft some of the features I like about text-based communication onto audio communication. When you are writing prose, you can rewrite, shifting the sequence of paragraphs at will. No one has to know that it took you all afternoon to write a simple paragraph. That luxury is now at any speaker’s disposal through technology like Audacity’s. I can participate in oral culture even though I have a textual disposition.
Audacity isn’t a technological panacea, of course. And some people might argue that until you master the art of the traditional lecture, your credentials as an instructor are somewhat questionable. My dad might well say just that to me, if he were a colleague instead of my father. On the other hand, it may be that technology truly is revamping the nature of teaching, and that the prospects for my kind of knowledge and skill sets are rising, while the talents of the face-to-face lecturer are becoming less in demand.
Who stands to gain and who to lose in our brave new world? As academe moves ever deeper into the information age, we shouldn’t forget that political question when we talk about pedagogical competence, or the merits and demerits of technology-enhanced learning. The point is not only whether change is progressive or regressive, or whether online learning is better or worse than traditional learning. It’s also that change can be progressive for some instructors and students, but regressive for others.
New technologies may be challenging traditional institutional hierarchies and creating a new playing field for scholars. In The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman argues that the spread of digital networks and the increasing ease with which we upload and download digital information is leveling the world in unprecedented and revolutionary ways. Friedman focuses on how new methods of communication are changing the relative prospects of people in developed and less-developed parts of the world. But those methods may also have an impact on the careers of instructors in the United States. Technology is opening up opportunities for teaching to people like me, who haven’t cultivated the memory or elocution that are used by professors like my dad.
As with any other technological invention, it is difficult, if not impossible, to divine how online learning will remake higher education, or whether new technologies will ultimately undermine the interests of some people who initially adopt them. The profusion of students chatting on their cellphones as they walk across the quad, or using their laptops in the lecture hall, suggests that the winners are members of the so-called “net generation,” who want to multitask, who learn through collaboration, and who can tolerate constant interruption.
But the technologies that instructors and students are using can sometimes encourage deep reflection. For example, current online technology is still predominantly a tool that encourages textual communication. A good online course in the humanities can provoke a lot of writing and reflecting.
So the intrusions of technology into academe are multifaceted. True, there are technologies like wikis, multiplayer online games, and interactive discussion boards that present opportunities for collaboration, debate, and the more social experiences of an oral culture. But there are also technologies that promote a quieter, written scholarly life.
Sometimes a single technology embodies the characteristics of both oral and textual cultures. For example, Audacity produces the sounds of an oral culture but lets speakers edit and revise them through a visual representation that is more reminiscent of writing and print. Speaking is represented on the screen as a sine wave, and it can be parsed and edited just like a sentence in a word processor. And, as S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder point out in a recent article in the journal Innovate, wikis feature both the “communal cohesion of oral-based cultures” and the usual ways that a print culture records, disseminates, and preserves knowledge.
A quarter-century ago, Walter J. Ong observed in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word that even though we live in a world where writing and print are ubiquitous, electronic devices like the telephone, radio, and television sustain the mind-set and habits of oral cultures. Ong was writing before the advent of the Web, podcasting, and wikis, but his observations remain valid today. It is still too early to tell whether on the whole we’ve progressed or regressed, or whether we’re becoming more oral and less textual, or more of both.
One thing, however, is certain: Educational technology is rearranging the way that knowledge is thought to be distributed among teachers and students. Even if you aren’t witty and you can’t banter, and even if you don’t thrive in the give-and-take of the forum, you can still appear wise and reflective in the online classroom. The new mix of oral and textual cultures that technology is giving us will play an important role in determining the reputation of the traditional lecturer and the cyberprofessor, and even the student.
I admire the detachment and reflection that are hallmarks of a print culture, and I’m uneasy with the quick emotional response and the focus on the present that are typical of oral cultures. My dad might disagree. But we both hope that, no matter what technological developments the future brings, academe will always keep a privileged place for writing.
Luke Fernandez is assistant manager of program and technology development and an adjunct instructor in information systems and technologies at Weber State University.