“A Toolbox for the Electronic Classroom”
Peter
L.
Havholm
The College of Wooster, USA
Larry
L.
Stewart
The College of Wooster, USA
Writing about the new economy, Jeff Madrick remarks that the kinds of good jobs
increasing most rapidly "require communication skills, social ease, and basic
reasoning abilities ..." Acquiring such skills, he believes, "may only be
possible through higher education, where students are exposed to a sophisticated
culture, a variety of experiences, and varying disciplines that require analysis
of facts and concepts" (33). In our view, the conventional classroom on a
college or university campus remains the best facility for such an education,
and we think the new technologies can be used to make it even more powerful.
By contrast, much excitement about technology in governing bodies is lavished on
various money-saving adaptations of distance education using the web. Perhaps as
a result, some advocates of increased use of technology in higher education seem
to believe the traditional classroom anachronistic (see Daniel, 1996 and 1997).
In our opinion, such thinking bodes ill for the kind of learning we see as
vital. Rather than using technology to replace teachers and conversation, we
think it should take its place with more conventional tools as another way to
enhance teaching and learning conceived in traditional ways.
In what follows, we describe (and illustrate in presentation) a technologically
enhanced classroom and accompanying tools that operationalize a philosophy of
pedagogy that puts technology at the service of active learning. While we have
previously presented some of the tools we use in this classroom (Havholm and
Stewart 1996, 1998), this presentation aims at showing a style of teaching we
believe to be particularly promising. While it is too soon to claim more than
anecdotal success, we know it promotes active learning because it demonstrably
extends students' powers of inquiry.
We and colleagues increasingly favor this kind of use of technology - in a range
of disciplines - at The College of Wooster. It saves no money in the short term,
however. Rather than doing away with buildings or teachers, it adds technology
to a conventional classroom housing a small number of people, one of whom is
salaried. But over the long term, if we are right, our graduates have the
intellectual and cultural capital that allows them to think and learn
independently. They will not need expensive re-training every time their
environment changes a little.
Our electronic classroom looks like a seminar room, with a table in the middle,
surrounded by comfortable chairs. It differs in that along its walls twenty to
thirty networked computers stand ready, each linked to one another, to a
screen/video projector overhead, and to the internet. Such a classroom clearly
values physically proximate talk, but it also brings the huge resources of the
internet to any conversation that wishes them. Moreover, it makes possible the
easy use of a range of new tools that encourage active learning.
For example, Peter Havholm and our colleague Jenna Hayward use a freeware beta
version of PennMUSH in a course on dramatic structure to allow the class (of 29)
to improvise a seven-episode serial drama. Students play characters and invent
actions on-line, edit the logs of their online sessions into scripts, and then
publish a final version on the web for friends (on- and off- campus) to
read.
Because of the technology, they can write and publish a play that belongs to all
of them. Most important, however, is that this exercise is not done in a
playwriting class but in a study of drama. Rather than honing writing skills,
writing and publishing a play in this class tests the principles of structure
students are learning from their reading of a dozen plays and Aristotle's Poetics. And because the technology makes publication so
easy, the whole project takes only about 15% of class time.
Having students write and publish a drama to test theoretical ideas was a natural
development from another kind of project several of us in the English department
use in our writing courses. In the Journalism course, in Introduction to
Non-fictional Writing, and in English 101 as well as in the course Writing for
Magazines, students spend two to five weeks writing, editing, designing, and
producing a magazine, using page layout software, which they then either give
away or sell on campus.
The publishing projects have pleased several of us because students so much enjoy
writing to intrigue and amuse their peers - and because the projects make
self-evidently necessary the tasks of re-writing, careful consideration of
audience and voice, and editing. No need for exhortation about these activities;
one cannot make a magazine to impress one's friends without them. We also
believe that preparing writing for publication - with headlines, pullquotes,
illustrations, captions, and the rest - provides valuable experience in
imagining oneself as one's reader and in visual thinking.
Among the tools that have been particularly useful in courses in narrative or
narrative theory is the Linear Modeling Kit (or LMK), a program the two of us
designed and have worked with for several years (see Havholm and Stewart, 1996).
The LMK is essentially an authoring system, and it allows users to create
applications that generate any kind of text according to principles proposed by
the user. For example, a student can use the LMK to create a "folktale
generator" by entering what the student perceives to be the parts or elements of
a folktale, any principles of order among those parts, and characteristic text
for each part. Depending on the complexity of the input, the generator will
produce hundreds, thousands, or millions of different texts. In our classes,
students have created not only folktale generators but bildungsroman generators,
romance generators, tragedy generators, and argument generators.
As do all the activities we discuss here, working with the LMK acts as an
heuristic, forcing students to move back and forth between theory and practice.
To produce an LMK generator, students must first abstract principles from
narratives they have read and then turn them into instructions for their
generators. The generator then operationalizes the student's theory; it produces
narratives created according to the principles the student has derived.
Another of the tools we use in the electronic classroom is the Stylistic Analysis
Kit (or SAK), a combination concordance and counting program with a nearly flat
learning curve. Although the SAK is a fairly conventional program, its ease of
use separates it from many of the tools used by professional researchers and
makes it ideal for the student in the classroom.
When analyzing their own papers, students are almost always driven back to their
texts by, for example, discovering their average sentence length to be half that
of the person sitting at the next computer or by learning that "the" comprises
14.7% of their total words. Here, students move between the abstraction of
statistics and their own practice as writers. Even those who seem generally to
lack curiosity are fascinated by the statistical record of their writing and
eager to determine what practices account for those statistics.
There has recently been much publicity about the ease with which new hardware and
software can be used to create complex video projects. Our students have begun
to find that - like desktop publishing software - the new video tools can be
used to explore and test ideas. Ben Speildenner chose to make a video as his
final project in our colleague Jenna Hayward's course in Post-Colonial
Literature. In Urban Legends, he wanted to to evoke
reflection congruent with one of the principal issues of the course. The class
had talked about how easy it is to essentialize one's own culture while seeing
other cultures as "different." Ben chose several urban legends - that Disney
makes heavy use of phallic imagery in The Little
Mermaid, that there's a boy with a shotgun in the background of a
scene in Three Men and a Baby, that there's a hanged
Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz if you look closely enough
at the right moment, and that spiders can lay eggs on your face - to shake our
presuppositions. He wanted his presentations of these legends to push his
audience into problematizing their own culture. He thinks that our urban legends
show us to be more "different" than we think we are. But he wanted to stimulate
thought, not to impose his ideas on the class.
In Understanding and Cognition, Terry Winograd and
Fernando Flores make a convincing case against the use of computers as
"restricted to representing knowledge as the acquisition and manipulation of
facts, and communication as the transferring of information" (78). Rather, they
argue that we need to design computers as "equipment for language" so that they
can "create new possibilities for the speaking and listening that we do"
(79).
Our version of the electronic classroom and our use in it of the tools we have
described reflect this understanding of technology. In every case, students use
the tools to interrogate ideas in ways novel in humanistic study. In an
important sense, each tool allows students to test their understanding: the
effectiveness of a serial drama tests ideas about dramatic structure; reader
response to a published magazine tests convictions about rhetoric; the variety
of lawful stories an LMK generator produces tests the powers of the theory of
narrative it has been "taught"; the SAK's quantitative analysis leads to testing
qualitative ideas about writing style; and his classmates' response to
Spieldenner's Urban Legends tested his hypothesis that
presenting urban legends can help us think in new ways about "difference."
In every case, we believe, the technology adds power to students' ability to
question and therefore to understand - in the context of a kind of discussion as
old as learning.
References
Ernest L. Boyer. “Foreword.” Campus Life: In Search of Community. Lawrenceville, NJ: Princeton, UP, 1990.
J. S. Daniel. The Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media. Open & Distance Learning. London: Kogan, 1996.
J. S. Daniel. “Why Universities Need Technology Strategies.” Change. 1997. : 10-17.
Peter Havholm Larry Stewart. “Modeling the Operation of Critical Theory on the
Computer.” Computers and the Humanities. 1996. 30: 107-115.
Peter Havholm Larry Stewart. “Using a Narrative Generator to Teach Literary
Theory.” ALLC-ACH '96 Conference Abstracts. Bergen: , 1996. 135-37.
Peter Havholm Larry Stewart. “Computers and Active Learning: Using the Stylistic
Analysis and Linear Modeling Kits.” ALLC-ACH '98 Conference Abstracts. Debrecen: , 1998. 135-37.
J. Madrick. “Computers: Waiting for the Revolution.” The New York Review of Books. 1998. 45: 29-33.
Terry Winograd Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. New York: Addison-Welsey, 1987.