Reclaiming Conversation (29 page)

Recently, a member of a university panel on online tools, fresh from developing a new MOOC, owned up to the temptation to “freeze” her elegant online presentations and use them in place of lecturing “live.” The way things are now, she said, “fear” makes her go over her class readings the evening before every in-person class. “My children ask me, ‘Mommy, haven't you read that already?'” Hers was an honest admission that anxiety helps to keep her materials fresh.

Students, too, get anxious about speaking in class. Some supporters of online education see as one of its virtues that it gives “voice” to students who are shy and don't participate in discussion when it is held in physical classrooms. Shy students, they argue, gladly participate in
online forums, particularly if they can be anonymous. And even in “live” classrooms, professors can use digital tools to get feedback from shy students, using clickers, for example. Clickers attach to software that allows students to express an opinion without revealing a name. Student opinion shows up as “poll” projections on a screen. Similarly, “comment” software for classroom discussion masks identity, another boon for the shy.

The virtues of anonymous classroom polling were presented at MIT's 2013 MacVicar Day—an annual gathering
set aside for reflections on teaching
. In 2013, the focus was technology and education. From the audience came an objection. The speaker was Daniel Jackson, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. He argued that wearing a mask—what he thinks anonymous polling accomplishes—may free people up to express themselves, but face-to-face encounters encourage civility and a sense of accountability. When people know who you are, you take responsibility for what you say. For Jackson, the classroom is a place to learn how to participate in the conversations that make democracy work. Anonymous polling and comments don't teach you to stand up for your beliefs. Neither does anonymous posting on the online discussion board of a MOOC.

As Jackson spoke, I thought of old traditions: standing on Hyde Park's speaker's corner and being unafraid to say whatever you wished; the signed article in the newspaper that was protected speech. Where would students learn that they had the right to express their opinions if class opinions were registered through anonymous clicks?

Jackson acknowledged that the use of clickers in class to get anonymous feedback provides “useful information.” You learn what the group is thinking, but there is a cost:

It seems to be reinforcing exactly the habits I'm trying to undo in class. I'm trying to get my students to engage more; I'm trying to get them to overcome their need to be anonymous. So everything I do to allow them to be more anonymous, to get more immediate feedback, to reduce their length of attention . . . in the long run is not good for the culture.

In this debate, professors worry that students are too embarrassed to talk. But in a classroom, one should “walk” toward embarrassment. Students should feel safe enough to take the risk of saying something that
might not be worked through or popular
. Students will get over feeling embarrassed. It may be easier to contribute anonymously, but it is better for all of us to learn how to take responsibility for what we believe.

At the MIT panel, no one wanted to discuss Jackson's critique of online materials as pandering to rather than challenging students' short attention spans. And no one wanted to discuss the idea that anonymous polling might reinforce bad habits learned on the Internet. These are difficult issues. Talking about them doesn't rule out the idea that technology solves certain educational problems. But they frame a conversation that assumes that technology won't solve all educational problems and might cause some of its own.

D
uring a panel discussion about the ethics of pedagogy, English professor and literary theorist Lee Edelman said that
his biggest challenge as a professor
“is not teaching his students to think intelligently, but getting them to actually respond to each other thoughtfully in the classroom.” Like so many others, he finds that students are having a hard time with the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.

Human resources officers tell me that their new hires have a hard time talking in business meetings. College graduates say the same thing about themselves. One graduate student in European history talks about his struggles with conversation in “real time.” He has just returned, dejected, from his first academic conference. He is very happy with the paper he read (his department had been so happy with the paper that it paid his expenses to go to the conference), but he says, “I was rambling and scatterbrained in the question-and-answer session. While I thrive at writing, my conversation falls flat.”

Why would we want to put at the center of our educational agenda a
kind of learning in which we don't teach the skill of raising hands and entering a conversation? If doing this makes our students nervous, our job as educators should be to help them get over it.

In the best of cases, the college classroom has been a place where students stand up and defend their ideas in real time. They learn from speaking and they learn from listening to each other. “I've learned things from how people make mistakes when they ask questions in lectures,” says a college junior. “Some kids will just ramble on and you shouldn't do that. You watch people. You learn not to say, ‘I've read every book.'” None of this learning happens if you take your class alone in your room.

The value of attending a live lecture in college is a bit like the value of doing fieldwork. In fieldwork, there can be dry spells, but you learn to read people in real time. You share a bit of road with those around you and you come to understand how a group thinks. And you learn the rewards of patience: You have followed arguments as they unfold. If you are lucky, you learn that
life repays close, focused attention
.

I
n the political theorist Michael Sandel's classes, students have to pay very close attention. Sandel faces hundreds of students with a brief presentation and an interactive conversational format. Students speak up—there is no anonymity. Sandel calls only on students who raise their hands, but once they have made a comment, Sandel engages them. In one of his recent classes, “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature,” he asks the question: “If you're a vegan, would you eat a ‘hamburger' that has been bioengineered from cow muscle that did no harm to the cow and was cultured in such a way that it used no fossil fuels?”

A vegan student says, “No, it still uses animal tissues, it's still from an animal.” Sandel nods. “But what about if we now have a technology that grows the hamburger from skin tissue that has sloughed off the cow. . . . We're solving the world food shortage and helping global warming by
eating derivatives of a single cow. Are you okay with it now?” Now, the vegan is unsure, but holds firm: “No. No. It still comes from an animal.” The student is embarrassed, but she has stood her ground. And in standing her ground, she's had to reconsider her position.

Only the vegetarians had reason to rethink things when Sandel brought up the example of the cow. Now Sandel expands the challenge. Would you eat biologically engineered
human
meat—meat made from taking a sample of human skin? Is it worth it? One student is impressed. It is as though we could solve world hunger by taking fingernail shavings. The class, animated, picks up the discussion.

Imagine how different the conversation would be if Sandel presented the case (food products made from cow tissue; food products made from fingernail shavings) and asked his class to hold clickers and register anonymous preferences. You would learn what the class thought, which is certainly interesting. But members of the class would not learn how to summon the bravery to voice and defend their opinions. One Harvard senior in Sandel's class says, “You do get embarrassed, but you get over it and get used to hearing yourself say things aloud. You say to yourself, ‘Did I say that? I can't believe I think that, but I do think that. I've thought about this; I just never thought I could get myself to say it.'”

This is teaching by conversation: It is a delicate thing, a walk toward boredom and embarrassment. (Sandel allows awkward moments. Some of the students cannot follow through on their thoughts even as he asks them to find their courage.) These days, teaching by conversation is talked about as crucial (after all, the stated goal of putting content online in the flipped classroom is to have more dynamic in-class conversations). But at the same time, there is pressure to use technology in classrooms in ways that make conversation nearly impossible. Interestingly, this technology is often presented as supporting student “engagement.”

An MIT colleague has just returned from a demonstration of high-technology classroom tools. Lecture slides were streamed to a front screen. Twitter comments from students were streamed to a back screen, fielded by a moderator. The professor asked questions and the class responded by electronic polling. In contrast to the extended examples and
responses in the Sandel lecture, my colleague reports that here, terseness was all. Twitter limits comments to 140 characters, so, she says, “We were asked to keep our responses short, no more than two sentences.”

But the students objected to the professor's original plan to have both his content and their commentary displayed at the same time, each on a different screen. The students said that the two screens made it hard to focus.

In this environment, my colleague found student comments disappointing. It was not just, she said, that remarks were short. It was also that for her, anonymity flattened out the discussion. It was her response to being asked to separate the dancer from the dance. “Real people,” she said, “have real concerns and interests. . . . But once the questions are turned into a flat stream of questions and comments without faces . . . you end up not caring about them. You care about a question when you know whose question it is. A question that doesn't come from a person—it's only half a question.”

For technical reasons, a final class poll was not taken, but no one suggested canvassing the class by asking for raised hands. My colleague shrugs and says she was not surprised: “After the blizzard of apps and demos, taking a poll by simply speaking with the people around you, or with a quick show of hands, frankly didn't come to mind. That kind of low-tech solution had lost its status. In this atmosphere, it seemed almost ephemeral, no longer worth it.”

The high-tech class seemed to keep students too busy for Facebook, but when students wanted a break, they did some texting to get away from the buzz.

But in Sandel's class, it is, for the most part, tools down. A senior assesses the scene: So far, in his three and a half years at Harvard, he has seen texting in every class, even in small seminars where students take advantage of the brief moments when professors turn to the blackboard. In Sandel's class he isn't sure. He thinks there must be some, but he doesn't want to assume it: “I
think
people text but less so than in other courses because this class is very conversation-based!”

We want technology put in the service of our educational purposes.
But this can happen only if we are clear about them. If not, we may be tolerant of classroom technologies that distract teachers and students from focusing on each other.

I
n a recent course, I required students to collaborate on a midterm project. I imagined my students in conversation, working together at long tables in a dining hall. I imagined late nights and cold coffee in Styrofoam cups. But there had been no late nights or long tables. All the collaboration had happened on Gchat and Google Docs, a program that allows several people to work on the same document at once. When my students handed in their projects, their work was good.

But when I gave out the assignment I was interested in more than the final product. I know that the alchemy of students sitting around a table can sometimes spark conversations that lead to a new idea. Instead, my students found an app that made presence unnecessary. They had a task; they accomplished it with efficiency. My experience in that course is a case study of why measurements of productivity in higher education are dicey. Gchat and Google Docs got the job done by classical “productivity” measures. But the value of what you produce, what you “make,” in college is not just the final paper; it's the process of making it.

My students are unapologetic about not meeting in person. Jason, a sophomore, says, “The majority of my studying in the past year has been that someone makes a Google Doc with the terms that need definitions, you fill in the ones you know, and then you work on it together. You have a chat session and you do that to collaborate.” This joyless description made me rethink my fantasy of long tables, cold coffee, and late nights. My fantasy, from his point of view, asks for the unnecessary. But his reality allows little space to talk about a new idea.

Sometimes, students who collaborate with online chat and electronically shared documents work in the same building. They simply choose not to study in the same room at the same table. They go into online
chat sessions rather than chat in person. Why? For one thing, they tell me, roles can be made clear and it is clear when someone falls behind. More important, when you collaborate online, everyone stays on point. People may drop out to text or do some online shopping, but when they are on the chat, they are on topic.

In a face-to-face meeting, you can see people's attention wander off to their phones. On Gchat, the inattention of your peers is invisible to you. Once you make the assumption that when people work, they will want to text and shop as well, it helps to collaborate on a medium that hides what Jason calls their “true absences.” Gchat lets the simulation of focused attention seem like attention enough. Whenever you see them, your colleagues are working on the problem at hand. So, Jason says, “We take the route of technology whenever possible.”