Reclaiming Conversation (27 page)

C
arol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School, is committed to a particular form of unitasking: the unitasking that follows naturally when students take class notes
by hand
. Harvard, like so many other law schools, took great pride in having all classrooms “wired” over the past decade or so, and for many years, Steiker allowed her students to take notes on laptops.

I speak with Steiker and a group of other law professors. At one time they had all allowed their students to take class notes on laptops. It seemed natural. Coming out of college, students were accustomed to doing things this way. And the professors didn't want to be in the position of “thought police,” checking if students were on Facebook during class time. The consensus: If a student couldn't pay attention in a law school class, that would soon become the student's problem. That student would fall behind.

Steiker explains why her position has changed, radically. She saw that students taking notes with computers suffered from more than inattention. They were losing the ability to take notes at all. She puts it this way: “Students taking notes on computers seemed compelled to type out the full record of what was said in class. They were
trying to establish transcripts
of the class.” To put it too simply: Students were putting themselves in the role of court stenographers. For Steiker, this was a problem in itself. She wants note taking to help students integrate the themes of her class. For her, note taking trains students to organize a subject in a personal way. It cultivates an art of listening and thinking that will be important to the future lawyer.

And Steiker says that the urge to “transcribe” had a curious side
effect:
Her law students didn't want to be interrupted in class.
Steiker says, “They sometimes seemed annoyed if you called on them because it broke up their work on their transcriptions. If your notes are meant to capture the themes of the class, you remember your own participation and you make it part of the story. If you are trying to write a transcript of a class, class participation takes you away from your job.”

Here is how Steiker describes a turning point in her understanding of how note taking on computers stands in the way of what she wants to accomplish in her classroom:

One of the students in the first year had a serious illness that kept her out of class for several weeks. The students banded together into teams that would take notes for her in every course. After one class, the young woman who had been responsible for note taking in my class on that day came up to me, upset. Could she please have my class notes to send to her absent classmate? Her computer had run out of power and she had no power cord. She hadn't been able to take notes in class. I asked the obvious: Why hadn't she taken notes with pen and paper? The student looked at me blankly. This simply had not occurred as a possibility. This simply was something she no longer could do.

There are at least two ironies here. First, behind our note taking on computers was a fantasy: When the machines made it possible for us to take notes faster, we would take notes better. Instead, we don't take notes at all but behave like transcribing machines. Second, when the day comes that machines are able to take notes for us, it will not serve our purposes, because note taking is part of how we learn to think.

So now, Steiker allows no technology in any of her classes. She says, laughingly, that she came to this position in steps. She first told her students that they couldn't use computers in class. So they put their laptops away but kept checking their phones in class. “I found this amazing,” she says. In fact, her students were thinking like lawyers, following the letter but not the spirit of her instructions. “So, then, I had to be explicit that
I really meant no devices at all. This seemed surprising to them. They are so used to looking down at their phones—having a phone in class didn't seem to them like holding on to a technology.” There is much talk about the advantage of our devices becoming so habitual and easy to use that they become invisible. It is usually assumed this is a good thing. But if we don't “see” our devices, we are less likely to register the effect they are having on us. We begin to think that the way we think when we have our devices in hand is the “natural” way to think.

Now, in a device-free class, Steiker says, “The students aren't annoyed when you call on them.” She's optimistic, convinced that taking notes by hand is forcing her students to be better listeners. “They can't write fast enough to do a transcript, so they have to figure out what is most important.” When she tells this story, I think back to a comment that an eleventh grader made to me a decade ago about why she likes to bring her laptop to class. “When I have my computer, I like it that I can write everything down.” At the time, I didn't pursue the comment. Some costs take a while to become apparent.

I
f you tried to design an educational technology perfectly suited to the sensibilities of hyper attention, you might come up with MOOCs, or
massive open online courses
. Typically, when you take a MOOC as they were initially imagined, you—and potentially hundreds of thousands of classmates—watch short online videos and take tests on their content. This completed, you move on to the next course unit. There are usually readings, a discussion board to share ideas, and supplementary exercises. If you turn away from the screen to check your messages or send a quick text, no one is insulted. You just watch the video again. If you have several windows open at once, no professor or fellow students feel slighted—the issue that came up in my memoir class. One teacher in a large Harvard MOOC says appreciatively of them, “You can walk away at any
time. You can take a ten-minute break, a fifteen-minute break every minute, every ten minutes, every thirty minutes. I think that is a huge advantage to online learning right now.”

And indeed, 2012, the year that my students confessed they couldn't sit through a class without texting, was called
the year of the MOOC
by the
New York Times
. MOOCs fit the times beyond how they dovetail with our new attentional style. College and university administrators under financial pressure see online education as a way to cut costs. If you take success in MOOCs as a yardstick, you have a new way to measure faculty productivity. And MOOCs inspire faculty because they are a way to experiment with new ideas. And, of course, to reach a much larger audience. Since you can record every action a student takes on a MOOC—every keystroke, how long any exercise takes to complete—
you can easily test the result
of any change in pedagogy. And there is the thrilling prospect of using online education to reach underserved populations, whether in remote villages, disadvantaged neighborhoods, or retirement homes.

Some MOOCs are envisaged for distance learning. When a MOOC is proposed for a residential campus, students come to class after the online work is done to discuss ideas, work on projects, and go over homework. The classroom is no longer the place for “content,” as traditionally conceived. The classroom is considered “flipped.” Some call it “blended,” referring to the combination of online and off-line elements. The hope is to make the classroom a space for project-based learning and a new kind of conversation,
more dynamic than what students had before
. Many of my university colleagues hope that blended classrooms will end the “passive” technology of the traditional lecture.

So as I was working on this project—immersed in thinking about conversation today—my professional world buzzed about a revolution (
some called it a tsunami
) that some hoped would completely change the nature of conversation in education. The educational innovator Seymour Papert once said, “You can't think about thinking without thinking about
thinking about something
.” That insight, generalized, is key to understanding the idea of evocative objects—objects to think with that
provoke thinking about other things. As I thought about conversation in education, I often had MOOCs on my mind.

So, for example, it was exciting to consider how students taking MOOCs from remote locations were creating new communities of learners and new conversations that would have been impossible to imagine before.

In Professor Gregory Nagy's “The
Ancient Greek Hero
,” a flagship project in Harvard's MOOC offerings, participants have used the online discussion board to share recordings of themselves reading Homer in their own languages. They talk about parallels between their personal lives and Homer's stories. One student from Mani in Greece, a region that still has a traditional village-based culture, posts a video of her grandmother's lament for a recently deceased family member. The student makes a connection between her grandmother's lament and the heroic form. So, just as the course faculty put up videos and readings and notes, the students respond with their own. A new kind of conversation evolves. Indeed, the teaching staff of “Hero” says that for them the
C
in MOOC stands for content, conversation, and community.

For one staff member whose main responsibility is facilitating conversation on the discussion boards, the MOOC is a way—imperfect, but a way—to return to a community you feel has been lost to you. It seems to her an improbable thing, but some of her childhood friends are taking the course and she is getting to share what she most loves about classics with people for whom she never thought this possible. She imagines that students all over the world who have no one to share Homer with are having a similar experience and finding unexpected companionship. She says, “This could be the community we all crave.” Indeed, “graduates” of the Ancient Greek Hero MOOC, now called “The Greek Hero in 24 Hours,” can go on to participate in a community known as “Hour 25.” It has regular virtual meetings and guest speakers, a blog site, and ongoing discussions.

So MOOCs are an object to think with for thinking about what is possible with new educational technologies. And they also help us take
the true measure of what we already have. Despite the power of what can take place in MOOCs, only a few years after the experiment with them began in earnest, even their most enthusiastic supporters were working hard to introduce more in-person conversation into MOOC design, certainly for MOOCs in residential settings. For it soon became clear that online learning works better if you also increase the amount of face-to-face contact between students and faculty.

An irony emerges. Research on MOOCs, the pedagogical form that was hailed because it offers so much to measure, shows that they work best when they are combined with the least measurable element of a traditional classroom: presence. Even in the most technical subjects, such as an introduction to calculus, students in online classes do better when the curriculum
includes face-to-face encounters
. The director of a Columbia University study that compared online and face-to-face learning sums up its findings: “The most important thing that helps students succeed in an online course is
interpersonal interaction and support
.”

Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, a MOOC initiative that began at Stanford, is humble about what the university classroom can offer that MOOCs cannot: “non-cognitive skills.” Online, you can't learn “teamwork, ethics, the ability to regulate anxiety.” This, says Ng, is
what classrooms teach
.
Udacity, another Stanford online initiative, found that students did better in face-to-face courses than online courses and refocused its efforts on vocational training.

These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation. When Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, was asked about the biggest challenge facing higher education, he said, “
What's striking is how similar
college experiences are to what they were a generation ago.” Summers implied that this was reason to change a slow-to-change field. Perhaps it is also a sign that in the American college experience, something is going right.

M
any who were behind the early MOOC initiatives took the traditional classroom as a problem that technology could solve. Daphne Koller, the co-founder of Stanford's Coursera, saw traditional “live” classrooms as places that silence students. Why? Because for Koller, any live environment implies an imperfect system for being heard. “
When a question is asked
in a ‘live' course,” says Koller, “some students are online, shopping for shoes on Amazon, some are not paying attention, some smarty-pants in the front row answers the question before the rest of the class even has had a chance to know a question has been asked.” In an online course, on the other hand, everyone has a chance to ask a question and get feedback. Your question will never be preempted. For Koller, the lack of “live” presence creates a new equality. With no one there, everyone can be “heard.” There is
no one in the front row who will upstage you
.

As Koller sees it, flipped classrooms should mean that students spend more time with professors in a setting of real interaction. They would have learned the basic content online before the class even meets. Now, together, they are free for a deeper interaction. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way. The “discussion sections” in blended classrooms are often, as they have always been, with teaching fellows. One student in an MIT class being taught with a large online component says that the discussion sections when her class gets together are times to go over homework. All the teaching fellows take sections and the professor moves from group to group. She gets to listen to the professor speak only in an online video. She wishes she could hear the professor lecture in person. He is an international figure and has a reputation for being charismatic. She feels she is missing out.