Learning space

Over the past few months my boss (Duke University) has been sending around a veritable frenzy of messages urging me to put my courses online. The messages are kind, helpful, nurturing; they recognize my eagerness to get up to date on technology and to learn the many exciting ways I can bring my classes into the 21st century. The premise is that I’m still hauling my old handwritten (or typewritten) notes into class, standing regally at a big podium and reading lists of facts out loud to an auditorium packed with reverent, note-taking students. There is good news, says my boss: No longer need I be confined in the prison of the Languages Building, with its chalky blackboards and snoozing students—the world is my classroom! The only obstacles are my insecurity, my fear of the unknown and my discomfort with technology.

Dostoevsky and I have spent many hours pondering the nuances of these communications. We have decided that before the conversation gets too far down the road, we need to clear up some misunderstandings. The first misunderstanding my boss seems to have is the delusion that the reason I’m not “MOOCing” is that I’m worried about whether or not the technology is going to work. In spite of some venting on these pages about mishaps with the knobs, screens and wires, I’m pleased to report that, with tactful visits by Kim from OIT, they have generally been overcome. I have learned, for example, that you have to make sure things are plugged in, and some higher-order things like which buttons you should never, ever press. Miraculously, as even my students can attest, we have wrestled the technology into submission.

That misconception was pretty easy to clear up. Others, also fairly primitive, have to do with terminology. In some of my boss’s messages, certain terms seem to be getting mixed up: “MOOCs,” “online resources” and “multimedia.” OK, yes, I admit it: I do fantasize that 100,000 human beings out there are eager to hang on my (and Dostoevsky’s) every word. Hey, live with a teenager for awhile and you wish just ONE person would listen to you. Seductive as this whole dream is, I have not yet taught one of these things, which is known as a “massive open online course.”

This deficiency aside, I hope that my boss is able to distinguish between the above entity (online courses) and other uses of technology in the classroom. Multimedia teems in my classroom and in the classrooms of my colleagues. A typical class period up in 320 Languages will feature, at a minimum, a short musical piece or a Youtube clip. We might watch a scene from a film or I might give a PowerPoint—one with cool photographs or images, by the way, not the stupid kind with bullet points. We have even Skyped with an author during class time. A student might share a link, or someone who has foolishly brought in a laptop or one of those tiny devices might be asked to Google something (a quote from Genesis, say, an elusive date, a news item or photo). What are seraphim? Why would Pushkin mention them? Let’s take a look. What IS the seventh deadly sin? What exactly is “ekphrasis”? As a smart colleague from down the hall puts it, “In this day and age, information is readily available a Google search away. What could have taken years of research for a person to find out 25 years ago takes two seconds to figure out. Conveying information is no longer the goal of education in humanities.”

Knowledge is a living thing, and always has been. It has never been an object that you memorize in order to prove later that you’ve memorized it (“Why would you want to do that anyway?” interjects Dostoevsky). Knowledge feeds on conversation. The wonderful thing about literature is that the conversation is three-way: teacher, student, author—and believe it or not, one of them can be dead and still dominate the conversation. The wonderful thing about the classroom is that this conversation takes in real time, with actual human beings looking one another in the eye. Another colleague says: “No forum requires more effort and ensures more intense, effective engagement and understanding than the so-called ‘face time’ of a live course in which a professor not only lectures about a topic but also asks questions, answers questions, guides analytical discussion of a topic or a text and facilitates interactions between students as well as between students and professors.”

People—real people, not their avatars—flock to Duke from all over the world. Why don’t they just stay home and log on? My guess is that they are drawn not by the prospect of serving as fact-delivery receptacles in a process that one of my teachers calls “the data dump,” but by the promise of participating in an ongoing, real-time, living conversation in a unique physical space that was created precisely for that purpose.

Carol Apollonio is a professor of the practice in Slavic and Eurasian studies. Her column runs every other Tuesday. Send Professor Apollonio a message on Twitter @flath3.