José Antonio Bowen - Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

Contents

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowen, Jos Antonio.

Teaching naked: how moving technology out of your college classroom will improve student learning / Jos Bowen. First edition.

pages cm. (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-11035-5; ISBN 978-1-118-22428-1 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-23808-0 (epub); ISBN 978-1-118-26240-5 (mobipocket)

1. Educational technology. 2. EducationEffect of technological innovations on. 3. School improvement programs. 4. Blended learning. I. Title.

LB1028.3+

371.33dc23

2012016814

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

Preface

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country .

Abraham Lincoln

The future of higher education is deeply intertwined with new technologies. Technology has changed students and professors, how we access knowledge, the nature of community, the habits of learning, our understanding of patience, and virtually everything about education. It has also created an expanding global market for online learning that will continue to increase in quality, efficiency, and flexibility. Considering these changes, the value of a bricks-and-mortar university will remain in its face-to-face (i.e., naked) interaction between faculty and students. As the traditional model of college is challenged by changes in demographics and college preparation, for-profit institutions, hybrid class schedules with night and weekend meetings, free online learning, and even free certificates from the best traditional brands, it is widely predicted that there will be fewer students enrolled in expensive, inflexible, full-time, four-year degrees (Van Der Werf & Sabatier, 2009). If we want campus education to survive, then we need to focus on the experience of direct physical interaction in higher education and make it worth the extra money it will always cost to deliver.

We know from Alexander Astins What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited (1993) that student engagement and facultystudent interaction matter most in student learning. At the heart of Teaching Naked is the seeming paradox that technology can be harnessed to enhance the widely desired goals of increased student engagement and facultystudent interaction but that it is most powerfully used outside of class as a way to increase naked, nontechnological interaction with students inside the classroom. This book addresses the why and how of this paradox and provides specific guidance for faculty and administrators on how to leverage both technology and face-to-face classes to improve student learning and ensure the survival of the bricks-and-mortar university. Thus, the aim of this book is to connect the practical questions of immediate interest to professors with the larger managerial and policy challenges facing administrators.

Abraham Lincoln argued against the tyranny of common sense, the invisible belief system that limits our imagination by mandating obvious and singular ways to do things. It is their commonness that makes these assumptions and attitudes transparent and therefore so dangerous.

Common sense tells academics that our students are learning because of what we do in the classroom. But it is a common misconception that everything that successful people do contributes to their success. A teacher might be successful because he is excellent at explaining complex problems in a simple manner, but after a few teaching awards it is easy to start believing that the soft voice and the no-late-work policy also contribute to his success, when in fact changing both of those tactics might make him even better. Since common sense tells him that he deserves his success, it is hard to convince him to change. Similarly, American education has been incredibly successful, but not everything we do has contributed to that success.

We were all taught with lectures, and we all give them despite a mountain of evidence showing that they are poor transmitters of content and even worse tools for learning. When our students learn, we attribute their learning to our current methods. We persist because common sense tells us that lecturing is working. But any analysis of how we might improve student learning has to start with the dissection of everything we currently do.

In America, for example, there is a deeply held assumption about modularity in the liberal arts. We believe that the order in which students take courses is only slightly important. We encourage students to take a majority of their general education courses in the first two years, but in reality we routinely mix seniors and freshmen in the same course and then do not expect more from the seniors in our grading. For the British, and most other academics around the world, this common-sense approach is nonsense that can only be justified by some economic necessity. A sequential curriculum is routine in most other countries: first-year students must master rudimentary skills before they move on to higher levels of thinking and analysis. Americans can see the logic of Blooms taxonomy (Bloom, 1956, rev. Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) that progresses from remembering and understanding to applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating; even so, most American general education curricula are structured around content and continue to allow students to acquire that content in almost any order. Most college major curricula contain a modicum of progression, with gateway and capstone courses. However, few American institutions expect or assess integration of learning outcomes between general education and the major, so we have no idea if our modular curriculum structure is working or is just an old form of common sense.