So I have discussed Mark Bauerlein's contributions to the Chronicle of Higher Education here before. Here's a new article entitled "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind." The argument is one that is likely familiar. Bauerlein suggests that reading online does not improve print literacy and likely even detracts from it. He cites multiple studies and projects where the use of computers in the classroom has not resulted in improved test scores in reading, math, and so on.
Here is his most interesting point:
Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.
In other words, students have a great deal of experience interacting with screens outside learning environments. For Bauerlein this is a problem because they bring their bad social habits to the classroom. I especially like this part about how if students found digital classrooms to present intellectual challenges that they would likely complain about having to be there. It's so cynical that I almost feel like I wrote it myself!
I suppose we can forgive Bauerlein this because I'm guessing he doesn't make much use of digital technology, and I'm not in a position to cite research today on these matters, but my observations are somewhat different. First, students do complain. I don't think I've ever heard a student praise the practice of powerpoint lectures, but then I've never heard them praise the practice of lecturing, period. That doesn't mean there aren't occassional good ones, but overall, lecturing encourages the kind of intellectual passivity that Bauerlein rails against here, regardless of the ancillary technologies employed. Students also certainly complain about online courses, and I know that my students complain about the challenges of figuring out how to communicate in networked environments, despite their supposed familiarity with it.
There's another interesting flipside to this as well. I wonder how Bauerlein would respond to the idea of students spending their online reading time reading print instead? I imagine he would then be railing against the trashy popular print forms they were reading, which were engendering sloppy thinking or maybe loose morals. If it's not comptuers it's TV or video games or rock n' roll or movies or even writing itself if we go back to Plato, right?
So this is just a rehearsal of one of the oldest of arguments.
BTW, I don't disagree with Bauerlein that our schools have not risen to the challenges of networked literacy. I disagree that one should conclude from this that computers should not be part of education. I also believe that it is wrong-headed to measure the success or failure of technology-intensive education in terms of how well it manages to replicate print-based education. Printcentric education results in technologically illiterate graduates. We can see this on the faculty of every English department in the US: people with high print literacy but almost no ability to communicate or access information online.
Here are things that I think Bauerlein and I can agree on.
1. We can't leave online/networked literacy simply in the hands of students and popular culture. As educators we need to teach our students to be critical readers/users of networks. We need to help them develop strong rhetorical skills to use media networks to achieve more complex and intellectual goals. Contemporary media networks can be used to explore subjects with as much complexity and depth as print, but we can't expect our students to learn to do this on their own.
2. Our students need to be asked to engage in sustained intellectual discourse in a variety of media, including print. I often tell my students that college is a place where you learn to read "difficult texts." I speak to them of the importance of constructing writing projects that require them to take risks and challenge them with their complexity. These are things we try to do. But we can also do these things through online media. I think that if you go and look at the discourse in my Writing in the Digital Age course in my Digital Age ning community (link in sidebar) that you would find a conversation that far outstrips what students contribute in a typical FTF class at Cortland, where in an average class many students say little or nothing. (And when I say this I include my own FTF classes. In many classes, it's just not logistically possible to get every student involved in a class discussion.)
One last point of disagreement though. Bauerlein ends with this point:
Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores.
If digital technology is an "imperial force," how is that measured? Are there any online classes in the English department at Emory (Bauerlien's home institution)? I didn't see any listed on their website schedule for this semester. Are there any classes that examine digital technologies as a central topic or take up the task of digital writing as a primary goal? Nope. What is there? Exactly what you'd expect: a series of courses covering print literary subjects. There may be one or two special topics courses that move into other areas (like film) but for the most part it's canonical literature.
It's not surprising, but it also demonstrates quite clearly what IS the imperial force in literacy education in our nation. And the technology informing that imperialism is not "digital" but print, literary texts. And yes, it absolutely should meet with more antagonists! Or maybe not. It's funny of course that the many, many English professors who would share Bauerlein's position might happily join the chorus of serving as an antagonist against digital literacy (even though it means carrying out antagonism against colleagues in their own department) but would in turn take deep offense at the notion that someone should return that antagonism.
Personally I am not about antagonism. I am about dissensus and intellectual pluralism. Let's have a discussion, even a heated discussion, but let's create intellectual environments that do their best to take advantage of every faculty member's intellectual interests and strengths and make those as available as possible to our students. If you don't want to use digital technology, that's fine. I wouldn't be one to insist that you should.
Nor am I an apologist or evangelist for technology. If digital technology needs me to serve in such roles, then maybe we should be skeptical. By the same token, I would not be upset if English departments disappeared or faded into obscurity (as other disciplines have) because they failed to respond to changing intellectual conditions. Disciplines, like all living things, that do not change and grow will eventually die. I'm not saying that it will happen. I'm just saying it doesn't matter to me if that is the end result of this current media/information revolution.
In any case, it is quite clear where I am putting my chips. I'm betting that media networks will continue to grow as integral parts of how our culture composes, disseminates, and stores information. I am betting that all aspects of our culture--art, politics, education, business, religion, warfare, entertainment, etc--will increasingly take place online, though obviously we will continue to have bodies as well! I am simply betting that media networks will continue to need to be studied by people like me and that our students will continue to need to develop critical literacy and strong rhetorical skills in the context of these media networks.
Everyone else can make their own bets.
Recent Comments