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March 30, 2012
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The Wired Campus An explosion of information technology brought on by the digital
revolution has colleges rethinking how they teach—and how students
learn.
by Andrew Zaleski
@ajzaleski
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New digital tools are changing the way professors convey information in college
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Digital Media in the Classroom
What colleges in the Baltimore area are doing to
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by Andrew Zaleski
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A year and a half ago I was still a student at Loyola University Maryland,
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occupying space in a senior seminar class, my penultimate hurdle en
route to a bachelor's degree in English literature. The course centered
on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the eleven of us had purchased
about a dozen books—from the text of the poem itself to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway—in preparation for
many late nights and plenty of last-minute, before-class skimming. But about one month into the semester,
something unusual happened: Professor Nick Miller tossed out the syllabus.
Instead, he placed the text of The Waste Land into a Google Document, which was then shared with all the
students in the class. Every Monday and Wednesday we set our laptops on the round seminar table, fired
up this Google Doc, and inserted electronic annotations while simultaneously discussing the meaning of
"Shantih" (the Sanskrit term Eliot employs in the poem) and debating whether the typist was the apathetic
girlfriend of the young man carbuncular, or just a dispassionate prostitute. We typed comments in preassigned colors (I think mine was orange), linked from the document to YouTube videos and outside
sources, and read and reread Eliot's poem, trying to extract the tiniest nuggets of meaning from his cryptic
lyricism—all from behind laptop screens. In turn, understanding the poem became less of an individual
pursuit along the road to a grade and more of a shared endeavor among fellow thinkers.
"It's not like I was tech-savvy," says Miller. "It was more like technology saved the class—it gave us the tools
that allowed people who were completely unfamiliar with The Waste Land to find a way into it."
Laptops in an English literature class might sound ridiculous (some of us thought so, while others warmed
up to it). But the digital revolution of the last decade has brought about significant change in higher
education. According to Heather Weiss, director of the Harvard Family Research Project and an evaluator of
the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative, simply "imparting knowledge" is now
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/the-wired-campus/Content?oid=1470628
obsolete. "Educators are now preparing kids for a future they simply cannot predict, and so your whole
approach to learning must change accordingly." Today's education, Weiss says, is "about creating
knowledge and very active learning," aided by digital technologies.
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3/30/2012
many late nights and plenty of last-minute, before-class skimming. But about one month into the semester,
something unusual happened: Professor Nick Miller tossed out the syllabus.
modern facelift with an organic touch.
by Andrew Zaleski
More »
Instead, he placed the text of The Waste Land into a Google Document, which was then shared with all the
students in the class. Every Monday and Wednesday we set our laptops on the round seminar table, fired
up this Google Doc, and inserted electronic annotations while simultaneously discussing the meaning of
The Wired Campus | Education Guide | Urbanite Baltimore Magazine Page 2 of 5 "Shantih" (the Sanskrit term Eliot employs in the poem) and debating whether the typist was the apathetic
girlfriend of the young man carbuncular, or just a dispassionate prostitute. We typed comments in preassigned colors (I think mine was orange), linked from the document to YouTube videos and outside
sources, and read and reread Eliot's poem, trying to extract the tiniest nuggets of meaning from his cryptic
Digital Version
lyricism—all from behind laptop screens. In turn, understanding the poem became less of an individual
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pursuit along the road to a grade and more of a shared endeavor among fellow thinkers.
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"It's not like I was tech-savvy," says Miller. "It was more like technology saved the class—it gave us the tools
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that allowed people who were completely unfamiliar with The Waste Land to find a way into it."
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Laptops in an English literature class might sound ridiculous (some of us thought so, while others warmed
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up to it). But the digital revolution of the last decade has brought about significant change in higher
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education. According to Heather Weiss, director of the Harvard Family Research Project and an evaluator of
the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative, simply "imparting knowledge" is now
obsolete. "Educators are now preparing kids for a future they simply cannot predict, and so your whole
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approach to learning must change accordingly." Today's education, Weiss says, is "about creating
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knowledge and very active learning," aided by digital technologies.
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"The whole lecture-based learning thing doesn't work for everyone," adds Samantha Adams, director of
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communications at the nonprofit New Media Consortium (NMC), an international community of experts in
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instructors. Adams's point isn't exactly new, but what is different is that in a world where class discussion
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can happen in a Twitter feed accessed through a smartphone and online textbooks can link to YouTube
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videos, lectures need not be the only—or even the main—way students learn.
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For the last decade, the NMC has published an annual "Horizon Report" outlining emerging technologies
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and their likely effects on college education. Of 2012's crop, mobile apps and tablet computing (the report
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mentions the iPad, as well as the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy tabs) hold prominent positions: The
NMC expects each to be adopted into the mainstream of higher learning within the next twelve months.
Adams stresses that these reports are meant mainly as predictive tools—guides filled with information and
examples of what other colleges do in the digital realm—and not deadline-driven lists of demands. But the
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"The evolution of what we do is dramatically moving away from being the content providers to being the
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organizer and the person who really helps students process information," says Roger Casey, president of
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In Maryland, a number of schools have begun to ride this wave of digital innovation, using new media and
devices, like the iPad, to change the way course material is communicated. The hurdle, college educators
say, is parlaying advances in information technology and technological devices into meaningful pedagogical
improvements.
click to enlarge
Tony Varga, a freshman who was in
Peter Bradley's fall 2011 Critical
Thinking course at McDaniel College,
browses a website on his iPad2. Photo
courtesy of McDaniel College
McDaniel College philosophy professor Peter Bradley, whose fall
semester course "Critical Thinking" had fifteen first-year students on
their own iPad2s as part of a new pilot program, observed subtle but
significant changes among students. Small group discussions in class
were steadily replaced with conversations via Twitter, on Facebook,
and in blog comments. "Back-channel" conversations occurred where
some students participated in a traditional discussion while others
raised questions on social media. Students also watched videos
embedded within the text of their e-textbook, and when writing
papers, "tweeted" questions at Bradley. "I've had full conversations
with students from my couch," he says. Of course, he adds, it was the
messenger, and not the essence of the course material, that changed.
"For the most part there's nothing really radical here ... it's just
another medium," says Bradley.
Given the medium, however, learning can become a joint enterprise
where even students who normally shy away from direct interaction in the classroom find ways to connect
and contribute.
Hood College, in Frederick, made a big leap in embracing digital technology when it issued iPad2s to all
318 first-year students in August. "We're seeing a move towards a collaborative learning environment,"
says David Gurzick, an assistant professor of management at Hood College. "Having the iPad in front of
them allows them to Google information, pull up examples—it really makes a bit more of an engaged
classroom and gets them to be more active participants in the learning process."
Elsewhere, students have ended up defining the learning process outright. Last spring, when Loyola
professor Paul Tallon taught a class of finance students about using technology in financial services, the
brokerage firm TradeKing invited Tallon's students to develop mobile apps using the firm's programming
code. "I was initially very anxious," Tallon says. He encouraged his students to find programming buddies—
including friends at other universities—and after a month, students came back with apps that made sense
of options pricing and posted on Twitter the stock trades people make. "Now my students are learning
from other students in other universities," says Tallon. The big motivator? A cool $10,000 in prize money
offered by TradeKing to the students in Tallon's class.
Tallon's experience illustrates Weiss's point about digital, active learning: It makes higher education reflect
a workplace world that's increasingly more collaborative. Why not encourage classes to jointly contribute to
a single document of notes using an app, like Evernote, that allows students to share documents and store
them on tablets, laptops, and phones? And then bring those devices into classrooms where, despite inclass discussion, traditional learning has been a siloed operation? (My notes. My highlights. My test.)
National examples abound of schools embracing the latest digital technology. Since 2009, Abilene Christian
University in Texas has equipped its students with iPhones. At Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, all fulltime students receive an iPad2.
The costs incurred in equipping all students with the latest gadget is nothing to sneeze at—at $399 apiece,
it costs more than $120,000 to purchase iPad2s for Hood's class of 2015. By comparison, a stationary
computer lab of twenty computers costs nearly $180,000.
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/the-wired-campus/Content?oid=1470628
For larger schools, gradual implementation, along the lines of University of Maryland's effort in College
Park, might make more sense. In 2008, it launched the Mobility Initiative to investigate whether mobile
3/30/2012
Tallon's experience illustrates Weiss's point about digital, active learning: It makes higher education reflect
a workplace world that's increasingly more collaborative. Why not encourage classes to jointly contribute to
a single document of notes using an app, like Evernote, that allows students to share documents and store
them on tablets, laptops, and phones? And then bring those devices into classrooms where, despite inclass discussion, traditional learning has been a siloed operation? (My notes. My highlights. My test.)
The Wired Campus | Education Guide | Urbanite Baltimore Magazine Page 3 of 5 National examples abound of schools embracing the latest digital technology. Since 2009, Abilene Christian
University in Texas has equipped its students with iPhones. At Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, all fulltime students receive an iPad2.
The costs incurred in equipping all students with the latest gadget is nothing to sneeze at—at $399 apiece,
it costs more than $120,000 to purchase iPad2s for Hood's class of 2015. By comparison, a stationary
computer lab of twenty computers costs nearly $180,000.
For larger schools, gradual implementation, along the lines of University of Maryland's effort in College
Park, might make more sense. In 2008, it launched the Mobility Initiative to investigate whether mobile
technology improves students' educational experience. By 2010, 545 students were iPod- or iPhone 4toting digital learners. That same year, the school introduced its Digital Cultures and Creativity living and
learning program, and all seventy-five participating students were handed an iPad. Adams says that while
a school's evaluation process of new digital tools is critical, the NMC also believes colleges "have to be
willing to experiment, take risks, and even fail."
But for smaller colleges on tight budgets, particularly state schools, what might amount to nothing more
than a failed experiment can be costly. And it seems foolhardy to assume that students can just buy the
newest devices on their own. A recent study of Maryland's university system by the Institute of Higher
Education at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that between 1999 and 2009, as family incomes
have remained flat, tuition at the state's public four-year schools rose by 25 percent; at public two-year
colleges, tuition has risen by 6 percent.
"The problem is inequality," Adams says. "Not everyone has access to pay for their own equipment." At the
University of Maryland, for instance, students who opt for the iPhone 4 have to pay the monthly account
charges. Also, professors still have concerns about handing students the ability to surf Facebook or shop
online during class from the convenience of their school-sanctioned mobile device. (I'd be lying if I said
there weren't times in that Waste Land course I was more interested in Gchatting over Gmail than figuring
out why the month of April is so cruel.)
Bradley notes that even though students are certainly entertained by new devices outside and inside the
classroom, "it doesn't necessarily mean they're learning." His observation underscores an important point:
College students, while they know their way around an Android phone, a Kindle tablet, or the Apple app
store, don't necessarily associate new technologies with learning, although that can change. Phillip Perry,
one of Bradley's students in the fall, said most of his classmates viewed the iPad as just a toy at first. Then,
after using it to look up information in class and highlight passages in their e-textbooks, "we realized it's a
tool for so much more than just the games," he says. In fact, the more problematic issue might be
assuming that students today are as well versed in using digital tools as their age implies.
"There is a tendency to think that students are digital natives," says Bill Shewbridge, the director of the new
media studio at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). "But uploading a picture to Facebook
doesn't make you a producer, much less an informed consumer."
A television producer-turned-professor, Shewbridge discovered this
after embarking on UMBC's digital storytelling project eight years ago.
To tell digital stories—short videos, usually for a particular class, that
combine scriptwriting, interviewing, and research—students first
needed to be taught video editing, audio recording, and image
processing. Now, UMBC offers a multimedia literacy lab, a one-credit
course taken concurrently with another class, where students learn
those skills.
click to enlarge
"There is a recognition that part of what it is to be literate in today's
J.M. Giordano
society is being able to use these technologies and communicate
Bill Shewbridge, who oversees the digital
effectively with them," Shewbridge says. But too much focus on digital
storytelling project at UMBC, warns
media could undervalue crucial aspects of undergraduate education,
against assuming students are digital
like constructing arguments in academic papers and learning to
natives.
speak extemporaneously in front of others (see: laptops in an English
class). Shewbridge, whose experience helping students produce
digital stories has been primarily in the humanities fields, sees it slightly differently. "The humanities
typically are looking at being critical consumers of media. Nothing teaches you more about how things are
put together after you produce something on your own—you become a much more critical consumer."
Yet fostering educational aims through digital media doesn't always mean innovation limited to
incorporating the slew of new devices that get released every year or transforming students into amateur
producers. As the NMC's Horizon Report notes, "People expect to be able to work, learn, and study
whenever and wherever they want to." They can in the digital age. Podcasting, routinely done by
universities nationwide, allows Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) students to listen at their
convenience to recorded lectures, thus freeing up the professor in class to spend time on specific
questions. Many local higher learning institutions, like Towson, Morgan State, and BCCC, utilize Blackboard
or a similar online interface through which students interact with one another and professors using
discussion boards, blog posts, music, and videos, and access them from a mobile device. At Coppin State,
students and faculty share documents, instant message, and video chat using Microsoft's LYNC software,
which they'll have fully implemented campus-wide by the fall.
These options also tend to be more cost-effective. File-sharing services like Dropbox "cost pennies," says
Adams. Thanks to its membership in the Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium—and a $180,000
donation from Microsoft—Coppin State is paying a much smaller sum to integrate its campus with LYNC this
semester, according to Vice President for Information Technology Dr. Ahmed El-Haggan. Moreover, many
of these technologies, while perhaps not as flashy as an iPad or as well known as Facebook, serve the
same purpose of removing barriers between students and professors, and among fellow students.
"The idea of social media is really the exciting part," says Mike Reese, associate director of Johns Hopkins's
Center for Educational Resources (CER), which provides guidance for Hopkins faculty looking to augment
their classes with digital technologies. "Learning is a social process. It's not so much that we have shiny
objects or interesting demonstrations that we can watch, but that we can connect people in new ways."
Still, an all-important central question remains: Does introducing any of this stuff into a classroom produce
measurable academic improvement? Or are universities just unthinkingly shifting pedagogies in the name
of progress?
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/the-wired-campus/Content?oid=1470628
"If you're going to spend money on these kinds of technologies, it has to be in pursuit of some objectives
that are educationally defensible," says Candice Dalrymple, director of the CER. Dalrymple emphasizes
3/30/2012
Adams. Thanks to its membership in the Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium—and a $180,000
donation from Microsoft—Coppin State is paying a much smaller sum to integrate its campus with LYNC this
semester, according to Vice President for Information Technology Dr. Ahmed El-Haggan. Moreover, many
of these technologies, while perhaps not as flashy as an iPad or as well known as Facebook, serve the
same purpose of removing barriers between students and professors, and among fellow students.
The Wired Campus | Education Guide | Urbanite Baltimore Magazine Page 4 of 5 "The idea of social media is really the exciting part," says Mike Reese, associate director of Johns Hopkins's
Center for Educational Resources (CER), which provides guidance for Hopkins faculty looking to augment
their classes with digital technologies. "Learning is a social process. It's not so much that we have shiny
objects or interesting demonstrations that we can watch, but that we can connect people in new ways."
Still, an all-important central question remains: Does introducing any of this stuff into a classroom produce
measurable academic improvement? Or are universities just unthinkingly shifting pedagogies in the name
of progress?
"If you're going to spend money on these kinds of technologies, it has to be in pursuit of some objectives
that are educationally defensible," says Candice Dalrymple, director of the CER. Dalrymple emphasizes
that digital tools "should supplement and enrich," not interfere with, the teaching process. In some cases,
she says, professors who approach the CER looking for ideas may conclude that no technology is needed
for their particular courses.
Other times, technology pairs seamlessly with course objectives, as was the case with a Hopkins history
course, "Remembering Vietnam," offered in spring 2009. A collaboration between Professor Ron Walters
and Joan Freedman, the director of Hopkins's student digital media center, the class required students to
work with primary source material—songs from the Vietnam War period, clips from field reporting, videos,
seminal photographs—and interact with that material by manipulating photographs in Photoshop, recording
songs and oral histories, and producing short, five-minute radio pieces.
"Students became very facile with the technology but not for the technology's sake—for demonstrating what
they now knew in this era that was so steeped in media," Freedman says.
The ulterior benefit, higher education leaders like Harvard's Weiss say, is student engagement, not only
with the course material, but also with digital media in a way that is more learning-oriented, as opposed to
entertainment-oriented.
It's a benefit that some professors, like Paul Tallon, believe outweighs concerns about in-class Facebooksurfing. "Technology is disruptive, and it's forcing us to confront the inevitable," he says. "Ten years down
the line, if I'm doing the sort of teaching I'm doing today, I won't have any students in the classroom."
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© 2012 Urbanite Magazine | 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211
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3/30/2012