The Timeline Beta Blog

Only half of the students have completed the surveymonkey, so I’m not going to post data yet. Today, however, I’d like to talk about a comment that came in with the surveys submitted so far that I feel really highlights some of the underlying issues at stake for this kind of tool in education.

Here’s what the student said:

“Frankly, I don’t think this is a very good tool. Who cares what a bunch of dumb kids think is relevant to the course? I take classes in order to be taught what the relevant information is…please stick to comprehensive lecturing.”

Wow. Well, my first reaction was dismay, obviously. But then I realized that this comment is fantastically useful, is in fact the gold standard comment, because it puts into words something that MORE than one student feels, something that frequently mitigates the success of technology-driven group knowledge assignments. In a school that places a very high premium on student evaluations as part of the tenure and promotion process, this is a non-trivial consideration for faculty who wish to incorporate new technology into their course structure.

The issue at hand is that blogs, wikis, forums, potentially voicethreads and now timelines all attempt to leverage the potential for social networking supposedly inherent in Web 2.0 to achieve pedagogical goals. Their use in this context is predicated on two basic assumptions. Firstly, these exercises try to extend the benefits of discussion-based teaching beyond the classroom; they are thus predicated upon the idea that discussion, as opposed to lecture, is the ideal pedagogical model. Secondly, they assume that the group effect will always be positive, that students exposed to each others’ work are not equally influenced by good and bad student work, but will collectively move towards a group norm that more closely resembles the best work.

It’s pretty clear which side of this discussion I’m on. The student comment on the timeline exercise, however, serves as an important reminder that the students themselves are not necessarily in agreement with these two hypotheses. Indeed, some of our students consider all course time spent listening to peers as filler at best, an active waste at worst. They do not trust their peers as a source of information, and they do not distinguish between what the instructor says, and what the student learns. In other words, the critical process is unproblematic; it is merely a question of receiving quality information in the first place, and not of one’s own ability to find and evaluate that information. Everything else is simply inefficient.

Finally, there is a learning styles issue at stake here as well. Lecture is a traditional format for presenting information, hallowed, suede-patch professors professing away. This has an ideological effect upon those students whose own learning styles correspond to this method of information presentation. By this I mean that since lecture is the traditional structure, and since this structure works for them, it must therefore be the one true right and natural way, the most efficient format. Bolstered by the evidence of centuries of pedagogical tradition, the lecture student can only be skeptical and impatient with claims that other methods are useful or necessary for other students.