Greetings, Digital Immigrants, Natives!

Dispatches from the
Digital Campus Institute's
“Reaching and Teaching
the Digital Native” Conference…





04.03.07 8:01 a.m.

I’m transmitting this from a ballroom in the Reynolds Alumni Center, in attendance at the Digital Campus Institute’s “Reaching and Teaching the Digital Native” conference. For clips of pretty much everything that happened, click here--I've labeled each section of my post with the same labels--in bold--used to designate each clip so you can scroll down the page and find the clips that you want to actually watch. The clips are ordered chronologically but start at the bottom of the page, so that you'll have to scroll all the way down to see what I talk about first (though actually the very first clips are from a panel discussion that occurred prior to the actual conference featuring students--"digital natives"--that I'll let speak for themselves).

First, I should note this is a swank affair. Some of the biggest wigs on the campus are here: Brady Deaton, Chancellor for MU, is here, as is Ted Tarkow, the Dean of Arts and Science. George Justice is also here (though he'll be leaving shortly). I mention this because I think it speaks to the fact that incorporating technological innovations into pedagogy is no longer something that's happening solely at the ground-level by a few and scattered motley of upstarts, but rather that the call for change and adaptation at MU is definitely coming from on-high. The theme of this year’s conference, as indicated above, is “Reaching and Teaching the Digital Native.” The phrase is taken from work done by Marc Prensky on the generational gap that’s been created between those who have grown up immersed in digital culture and who “speak” technology as a native language and those who are "immigrants,” who must learn it as a second language, so-to-speak.


Gary Allen, Vice President of Information Technology for the University of Missouri, introduces the conference by putting a fine point on this sense of urgency:

To me, there is no more important set of topics for discussion and decisive action in institutions of higher education than the ones that you will be tackling in the next few days. There’s a well-documented and ever-increasing recognition of the demand for knowledge-workers in the global economy. The critical role of technology-enabled learning in meeting that demand can not be over-emphasized. It’s absolutely crucial to our success as individual faculty members, as institutions, and in the success of our students… the digital natives are expecting great things from us and we must develop approaches to optimize their learning experiences. Part of that includes taking into account the fundamental differences in how they learn compared to most of us digital immigrants. This effort, great in and of itself, is taking place in a context of enormous challenge: higher education costs are rising, budgets are shrinking, student enrollments are predicted to drop, characteristics of our students are growing ever more diverse, both in terms of their facility with technology and also in terms of their age, their background, their geographical location, their career aspirations. There are renewed demands for assessment of learning-outcomes, for example in the recommendations of the recently-released Spellings Commission Report. Assessment requirements that really represent ways and degrees of assessment that we’ve never before experienced. For us to be truly successful, we must develop information delivery systems that satisfy the sometime competing demands of access, accountability, affordability, sustainability, and security, and as we do this we must be careful to provide the learning framework and the environment that enables our students to engaging meaningful reflection, so that the information that they acquire can mature into knowledge that they can use. I was reading an article recently and it included a quote from Peter Drucker. He said, ”A change is something you do and a fad is something people talk about.” This conference is not about a fad. It is and you are a tangible representative of change that has already occurred and will continue to occur because of the vision of individuals like yourselves who’ve committed to enhancing teaching and learning in ways that are perhaps not yet widely or fully understood or appreciated…

Dr. Allen introduces Dean Mills of the Missouri School of Journalism, who makes some brief remarks before in turn introducing Chancellor Floyd. Dean Mills tells an anecdote of how he "had always been jealous" at the thought of how many technological changes his father, who was born before the turn of the twentieth century and who lived to be 93, had witnessed in his lifetime. Dean Mills quips that he never thought that any one could live in an age with so many changes, but now he thinks he might have spoke too soon. He says that "meetings like this are particularly important because they force us as educators to question whether we sometimes have more of the thirteenth century than the twenty-first century in our classrooms."

The Vision for a Digital Campus
Chancellor Deaton kicks things off by discussing how oriented he personally is towards adapting technological innovations in education. He tells an anecdote about a book called Christ Stopped at Eboli , by Carlo Levi, which is about a region of Italy that stopped development from ancient times up until about the 1950s, at which point it underwent rapid technological change. Chancellor Deaton asserts that it really is amazing how dramatic the technological change can be from one generation of grandparents who still live with mouth-to-mouth communication only to another generation of grandchildren who communicate with each other and indeed with people all over the world over the internet. This conference, then, is about the strategic uses of pedagogical tools for technology-assisted learning to facilitate and often to anticipate such dramatic technological change. A key part of that formulation is “strategy.” Chancellor Deaton recounts how, two years ago, Elson Floyd, the President of MU then and now (until May), spoke at that year’s Digital Campus Institute conference on technology in higher education and that he quoted an adage--one that will be repeated here this year by almost every speaker. Floyd said, “Culture will eat strategy every week." In other words, culture is all-important in determining how far we go as an institution. Educators can plan strategies for reaching students, for introducing innovations (through technology or other means) but if the culture of the classroom or the culture of the university at-large (reactionary culture) is resistant, then the strategies will be difficult if not impossible to implement. Culture eats strategy--the trick, then, is change the culture, or get the culture to change itself (I think of it as the tyranny of tradition). Chancellor Deaton speaks about "a half-life of change," how innovations keep occurring rapidly in a dynamic relationship with education. We need to embrace these changes and keep up with them in order to succeed.


Chancellor Deaton identifies four main areas of concern for digital immigrants to become immersed in so that they can communicate fluently with digital natives:

1. The integrity of resources used—making sure that students understand what counts as reliable resources and what is questionable (e.g. Wikipedia)

2. Pedagogical concerns—what digital resources can actually facilitate and even advance learning (what works) vs. what is just adding technology for adding technology’s sake (a reoccurring theme).

3. Keeping up with the pace of innovation—knowing what’s out there,
what’s coming down the pipe, and anticipating what changes need to
be made to adapt (knowing what you don’t know is a big part of this, in my opinion, and it’s been a big help for me to attend because it’s helped realize just how much I can learn and how many resources are out there that can be adopted).

4. Maintaining services—a big part of this is the physical and human resources needed to maintain the technology (an administrative concern) but it’s also about teachers seeing where there are lapses in the services being provided to students and calling for change. Another big theme of the conference is that it’s largely up to instructors to call for resources they want to use—that instructors need to adopt technology and demonstrate that it works. The more that happens, the more resources will be allocated and it becomes an enabling cycle that will effect change.

Elements of Success: A Roadmap
Chancellor Deaton gives way to Dean Brian Brookes of the J School, who points out that one central effect of the generational divide regarding technology has been an increase in integrated learning—students coming into university with as much if not more knowledge of technology in the classroom, leading to a leveling of students and teachers in many instances (a kind of variation on critical pedagogy)—students and teachers are working together on the learning process itself. This phenomenon also brings to mind Margaret Mead’s work in Culture and Commitment on postfigurative versus cofigurative and prefigurative cultures, where a prefigurative culture follows the traditional model of younger generations learning from older ones, cofigurative culture is where generations learn from each other, and postfigurative culture is made up of older generations learning from younger generations. A point touched on by Brookes and others is that, at best, we have a cofigurative situation that has developed in higher education and that, if we’re not careful, a postfigurative culture very well could emerge. In other words, we’re digital immigrants, interacting with digital natives, and we have to keep abreast of changes in order to remain competent teachers (I’ve added Mead’s work to contextualize Brookes’ remarks, but I think my “take” is a good approximation of Dean Brookes’ sentiments).

Dean Brookes mentions a study done by the Graduate School, authored by Pam Benoit et al, regarding the use of technology in the classroom. It’s an eye-opening assessment. Here’s a link for the report:

Dean Brookes goes on to speak about the digitalization of knowledge, the evaluation of various tools, and continuing exploration—pedagoically and philosophically--of the application of technology in the classroom. He observes that a graduate 20 years ago is not the same as a graduate today, that there are so many more skills-sets that a graduate today has. But our assessment of graduates is still limited to traditional skills, skills that do not encompass all of what is needed to succeed in the marketplace today. The J-School has responded by trying to immerse students in digital culture and provide them with incentives to learn these skill-sets, inside and outside of the classroom. A big part of this move has been the iLife Freshman Challenge, an initiative undertaken in joint partnership with Apple (yet another reoccurring theme at this conference is that Steve Jobs and company are gods… a large part of this is that Apple does, in fact, have many products that facilitate learning, but often speakers end up sounding like paid spokespersons). Dean Brookes comments that iLife and other technologies are allowing for things that were never thought possible, and that in terms of the culture of the university, anything is possible. He mentions how iLife has allowed J-School students to tape their interviews using their labtops and so now he can critique their interviewing skills using real-life situations, something he could never do before. Similarly, foreign language classes are using podcasting to reinforce second language acquisition

Again, using technology for technology’s sake is not the goal, but the iLife challenge and other success stories that will be told during the conference speak to how revolutionary technological innovations can and will be for education. Dean Brookes concedes that not all faculty will get aboard. His solution? Forget ‘em. They’re “not worth the effort”—they’ll either conform or retire. The best thing to do is to find the ones that are enthusiastic about adopting new technologies and help them make it happen—give them the resources and the support to modernize the curriculum. You want to try to make it so no one feels left out, but you the main focus should be to help those who want to change find the resources they need to succeed. Key partners on the MU campus that Dean Brookes identifies are Apple (of course), Adobe, and Macromedia (these two have merged), Google, and Yahoo. Public podcasting sites are facilitating the free exchange of ideas like never before. New programs such as Imprint, and Adobe PDF technology, are allowing course webpages that have better copies of readings, and macromedia programs are allowing for increased implementation of video files on course webpages. Educators are increasingly using what’s been proven to work to reach their students, as well, finding ways to use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, for example. In addition to leveling the roles of students and teachers, technology has increasingly led to a leveling of disciplines; Dean Brookes finds that there is much more interdisciplinary activity at MU than ever before. It’s just exploded in recent years.

Transformation at the University of Missouri

Dean Ted Tarkow of the School of Arts and Science takes the podium, and begins by offering a few benefits that technological innovations can provide. Among them, he observes, is that it allows for a questioning of “the validity of knowledge” and having students employ critical thinking in assessing sources which can provide a teaching moment. He then observes that technology is allowing for the possibility of 3-year programs to become standard. He nods to the Writing Across the Curriculum program and asserts that we need to start thinking about Technology Across the Curriculum—enabling all students to be proficient in new technologies.

Dean Tarkow mentions that he is a professor in Classics, and that he’ll have to leave us soon to go teach his class. In the lecture he’ll be giving in class today, he’ll talk about Pliney the Elder and an allegory about a dilemma he had over what technologies to use in teaching. Pliney had three styluses to choose from—one from a friend, one he had used before, and one he just found—so two were old, one was brand new. The dilemma was in choosing which to use—the old or the new. Mirroring Dean Brookes’ remarks, Dean Tarkow asserts that technology is changing the very definition of what it means to be a professor, and that while the J School is blessed by vision and singularity, A & S is blessed by heterogeneity. The dilemma is how to reconfigure these resources and new technologies.

Dean Tarkow points out how we can capitalize on this heterogeneity and incorporate technology by considering three figures for classical mythology—Narcissus, Odysseus, and Prometheus. He notes that The Chronicle of Higher Education recently described this generation of students as the most narcissistic ever. He says that they might very well be a little like Narcissus, but that if so, they are also a little like Odysseus—“the ultimate multi-tasker”—and that they have also been touched by Prometheus, who gave man fire—that is, technology. A modern-day Prometheus, Dean Tarkow quips, gave these students iPods and other innovations, and these technologies challenge authority (the gods), challenge the professor, to engage these students.

Dean Tarkow is followed by Dr. Paul E. Resta, who has a few interesting observations, among them that technology by necessity changes the make-up of both courses and faculty, that technology changes how faculty design and teach courses. It can facilitate the decentering teacher and a move to student-centered paradigm. A move from a didactic to a constructivist model. He asserts that sites like YouTube are providing a new means of discourse—that there are no longer just text-based concepts available, but the use of video and music can be used to present arguments. While some may scoff at this notion, there will be a presentation later (see “Writiing with Video” below) that will demonstrate this assertion with great force.

The University of Texas Story
Dr. Resta observes that the title of “professor” speaks to a 1000-year old job description—to back when “professing” was the only way to disseminate knowledge. Today, student teachers who go to high schools are the ones who are the technology leaders—they teach the teachers (Mead’s prefigurative culture once again).

Transformation at Oklahoma City University
Dr. Resta is followed by Dr. Mark Parker, who speaks about innovations in teaching music using technology. These innovations include faculty adding soundclips that students can listen to on their iPods, faculty members sending recorded music lessons to students that they can refer to it throughout the week, and how these are relayed through widgets for tuners… students no longer need to buy software individually. There’s also a a program that plays “smart” accompaniments for solo performances, speeding up and slowing down the accompaniment as needed. His school has also created a database of students using FileMaker Pro—from prospective to alumni—that includes repertoires of their music that any one anywhere in the world can listen to. They also subscribe to Streaming Naxos—a classical music library that is virtually unsurpassed in the number of classical pieces it contains. The nature of music education lends itself to this kind of technology, but one should not delimit what is possible in rhet/comp, literature studies, etc.—the ideas covered here can inspire us to imagine what might be possible.


[I'm still "translating" my notes into prose form for the rest of Day 1... in the meantime, read on for Day 2:]



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04.04.07, 10:40ish, a.m.

Bob Price, Director of Academic Services, Information Technology, Duke University


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04.04.07, 11:16 a.m.

John Foley, Curators Professor, Byler Distinguished Professor of English & Classics, and Director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition here at MU, is the last speaker to make a presentation (unannounced on the schedule as far as I can see). He speaks about the Center for e-Research (here's their homepage, as well as MizzouTube (they have sites for it at mizzoutube.com, .net and .org, but no content yet—and following last week’s assignment on search engines, if you google “MizzouTube,” you get only nine results, three of which are the variants I list above and most of the remaining six are from a blog by the guy who proposed it). There’s not much to say about it yet, other than it has the potential to allow for any student at MU to use visual media for any class. Dr. Foley makes some general remarks about the advantages and pedagogical value of adopting technology, but also to its use in publishing. Online media allow for writers to reach beyond spatial and copyright date limits of publication: in traditional publishing, if you put a book out and then six months later another book is published that adds to (or detracts from) what you’ve written, there’s a limited forum for the two to engage in dialogue (usually in journal battles), whereas with texts published online, such a situation allows for the two texts to enter into a much more dynamic dialogue. Online texts can be easily updated, amended, linked to one another. Wiki texts can be read straight through or links can be used to connect related texts in a map, links that a reader can follow in whatever direction s/he wants. Dr. Foley speaks further about how wiki texts can be especially beneficial for studies of oral tradition—next Fall Semester he’s going to have students in his seminar create a wiki in lieu of a formal paper.

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04.04.07, 11:30ish, a.m.

Final Panel Discussion

The conference concludes with a panel made up mostly of the previous speakers, and they focus on academic publishing, both in terms of journals (Dr. Foley talks about Oral Tradition's online format, how it's completely free and accessible online, promoting, in turn, the free exchange of ideas) and the future of textbooks (for a somewhat dated--but still relevant--discussion of various positions on the future of the book, I recommend The Future of the Book, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg and with an afterword by Umberto Ecco--I have a copy if any one's interested). While the content of the panel doesn’t really relate to teaching, a few bon mots were tossed out. Dr. Jim Wolfgang, Director of the Georgia Digital Innovation Group, cites what he says is an-oft quoted maxim that “Changing the course of history is easier than changing a history course.” He asserts that the digital divide that’s separating generations now will only widen if digital immigrants don’t learn the language—technology—of digital natives. He cites work that’s being done at the middle school level right now that goes beyond what’s being done at the college level. For an example, click here.

A big theme that comes back at the end here is convergence—things coming together, and the importance of collaboration at all levels: across disciplines and between campuses, intra- and inter- campus. Dr. Foley asserts that the big challenge will remain what it is already: copyrights. The technology is already largely in place—but the legal/distribution side is the challenge because of intellectual property law. How do we persuade authors and artists to free up their work and allow for exchange? Sounds like a job for rhetoric...