Our Strange Love/Hate Affair with Technology

Post date: Nov 7, 2015 2:32:53 AM

Blog post for the week of November 6

This week, one of my students wrote on his test that he didn’t like taking the tests online when it was a face to face class, and that he thought we should take the tests in class. I groaned, imagining the chaos that would result with this change. First, it is stressful for students to take a major test during 50 minutes, due to time pressure: I stopped giving tests in class a few years back because I sometimes had to walk students over to the testing Center at the end of class, and arrange for them to finish taking the test. Second, it seems wasteful of time in class: I almost always had a couple of people who would plow through the test in record time and then get up and leave while others were struggling to finish. Finally, it takes a lot of time to grade all of those handwritten tests, and after seeing his daily work done in class, I’m not sure that I could decode this student’s answers on the short essay questions.

However, it got me thinking about the way that all of us complain about the way technology has invaded our lives at work and school: teachers now print out their own class lists from our online record system, report grades online, and report whether or not students are attending and deserve their next financial aid checks. We can look at our pay stubs online, fill out a request for a personal day online, and get frequent requests to do online surveys, attend a webinar, or update our faculty pages on the online directory.

Most of us do the majority of our grading on our Course Management System, Canvas, using tools like “Speed Grader,” which makes it possible to open/view shorter documents like worksheets and assign them points without having to download them, open them up in word, resave/rename them (susies essay 1 w Cherie), mark them up with errors and comments, and load back up on the drop box. I still use that method, however, for the major essays.

All of this takes time. At week 7, I calculated that I had spent over 400 hours on our Course management System, Canvas—with five classes, it adds up fast! This includes time spent organizing material into Modules and building each class website with discussion boards, announcements, drop boxes, and handouts. Responding to students’ email (either through the Canvas system or through our My Hawkeye Portal page) or taking their phone calls has replaced the old Office Hours routine. A handful of students still stop by the office, but increasingly our contact is done electronically. I’m sure that if I gave my students my personal cell phone number that I would be deluged with text messages, but I have resisted the urge!

Of course, I realize that it isn’t limited to Higher Education. All of us are dealing with this phenomenon in one way another at work, as well as in our personal lives. If I want to contact my doctor to check on medication refills or ask a question, I have several medical accounts (and logins and passwords to remember) as well as my Walgreens app on my iPhone to order refills. I now have an account for Social Security, with retirement on the horizon. I can go to one of numerous accounts to check on balances, orders, titles of books downloaded to Kindle, Apps downloaded, Activity points earned, and many other things.

In many ways, it is wonderful. It’s convenient, and it's something we can access 24/7 from anywhere on the planet that has an internet connection. Then, again, if we have our handy smartphones, with their built-in WI-FI connections, we’re good to go from anywhere. The downside is that sometimes we are simply overwhelmed with remembering all of those logins and passwords, and keeping on top of our things to do list generated by all of these accounts. (By the way, there are some wonderful products out there for helping us manage passwords by the way: something worthy of its own blog post).

However, getting back to my student and his complaint about the use of so much technology in the classroom: is he justified or a little bit of a hypocrite? Over the past couple of years, as more students got smartphones, I noticed that as soon as I announced that an assignment or test had been graded, they were using their iPhones to check out the scores. I’ve noticed this young man checking his college email, the class webpage, and the grade book on his smartphone. The line between face to face and online learning has been blurred by our ability to use mobile devices to access the web. I have no plans whatsoever to go back in time and try to read people’s scribbly handwriting on their tests!

(Speaking of going back in time, I thought of what my mother did when she taught in a tiny country school house in Tama County in 1941. Who could have believed that her daughter would grow up to teach at a Community College in such high tech classrooms, with iPads, Touch screen monitors, and Four Big Screens on the walls?)

Last updated Nov. 6, 2015