When today’s college students began school, there was hardly any technology in the classroom. By the time we graduated from high school, it was ubiquitous. For a lot of us, it seemed like the technology changed more than the quality of instruction.
I’ve been skeptical about the value of classroom technology. My peers and I felt like a control group. We seemed to fare just as well before the advent of SMART Boards. After, teachers often spent more time grappling with PowerPoint than with teaching.
But times are changing. That means administrators are having to parse through the deluge of new technologies to figure out a workable model for the future in both classrooms and study spaces.
Charlie Green, teaching and learning assistant vice chancellor, sums up one guiding principle this way: “Resist the temptation to build it and wait and see if they come.”
But the “Field of Dreams” hypothesis is exactly what seems to have prevailed over the last decade. Technology often felt like the end, not the means. It didn’t seem clear if technology facilitated instructors, or forced them to alter their teaching to justify its bells and whistles — no matter how spurious. Green even conceded that it has been a rocky road.
But years of data and thoughtful research might finally have provided an end goal for fusing technology and pedagogy — one that I’m excited about.
Now, there’s a focus on use of space.
In the classrooms, this means, “untethering the faculty member from the podium,” according to Green. It’s about a fusion of design and technology aimed at democratizing the classroom. The target: midsize and large classes.
The irony isn’t lost on me that after all this time, the goal is to return to the idyllic small seminar: students and teachers engaged in dialogue, not merely dictating PowerPoint slides verbatim. The challenge, though, is making a class of 50, or even 400 students able to have the same synergy as the seminar.
