I was at a faculty board meeting on Friday last week and the first item on agenda was a presentation by the university's marketing department filling us on the new marketing campaign. They have "cleverly" align the words "technology" and "creativity" and the suggestion that at my university, prospective students can find both. It is interesting to observe the comments and responses of those present, consisting of academics, practitioners and students.
One response, rather predictable, is to downplay technology and subsume it within that generic benign saccharine but rather meaningless phrase, academic freedom and prerogative as to teaching style. Basically, let us continue the way we were, preserve the status quo.
The same person who proffered such pearls of wisdom as above also, again predictably, raise the spectre of over expectations on the part of students subject to such marketing campaign (which incidentally involved running a 60 sec animated short in cinemas). The rationale suggested was that my discipline, law, is rather low tech and therefore not really in need of such technological enhancements.
Another member of the professoriate suggested that we are already technological in our teaching of law since we have fellow academics involved in issues where technology and its advances are an integral part of the issue(s), eg, technological assisted reproduction, intellectual property. I wonder if there is a deliberate misunderstanding what technology holds for teaching and learning or rather an inadvertent slippage in thinking. Is teaching the law as it grapples with cutting-edge technology, or as it tries to deal with the moral, political and social issues thrown up by technology, an engagement with technology itself? Does it count as technology in teaching and learning resulting in contributions to a culture of innovation, collaboration and scholarship in teaching and learning? I am not so sure. You can still teach about cutting edge stem-cell research (which has once again become news since the Obama Administration in the USA has overturned the previous Bush (jnr) Administration's ban) in a very "old"-technology manner, ie, printed paper, whiteboard, OHPs.
It seems that any discussion of technology and teaching and learning gets bogged down in the existing paradigm of linearity and linear thinking, teacher-centred education process. The oft-repeated refrain, that technology is the servant and not master, is made. Not that I disagree but it is often made with possibly wrong albeit the best of intentions (in the phenomenological sense). Technology is seen as a supplement/enhancement to traditional teaching methods such as the lecture and tutorial (ubiquitous in law schools) and the final exam involving problem-solving exercises. For example, pod casting is seen as another enhancement of choices available for students and therefore aimed at their satisfaction. It is seen as a substitute for the traditional lecture and discussion is framed along these lines. But nothing is made of pod casting and its potential as a true supplement to the lecture, ie and eg, it enhances the lecture experience, by providing additional, extra, supplementary, information, knowledge, examples, illustrations, case studies.
Similarly, nothing is made of the multi-linearity (or non-linearity) of the WWW/Internet or of electronic computerised processing itself, or of the potential of hyper-text linkages. (It seems this should have been named 'hypermedia" rather then multi-media: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia.)
One serious research question: Does a student learn better from pages of text formatted in size 12 font which is to be read from the start to the end? Will the student learn better if the text is broken into chunks and hypertext-linked together with supplements from other media such as illustrations, photographs, video clips, animations.
On googling "hypermedia" I came across this website, http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/research.html, home of
It is interesting to note that its research contributions are mostly, if not all, of the traditional linear text expression. Where is the hypermedia?
As noted on the wikipedia entry on hypertext, the idea is actually not new, just the technological implementation. In the Jewish tradition of interpretation of their sacred writings, there is the central text, around which (on the printed page) is placed interpretations by noted rabbis, around these interpretations, further discourses by other and later rabbis on the earlier interpretations. There are often references, sometimes in a very oblique manner, to interpretations on other texts, anecdotes, illustrations found on other pages. Texts within texts within texts criss-crossing with other texts; there is no end and no beginning — a moebius strip. One can begin anywhere and everywhere and one is still learning. One learns by performing the act of reading/interpreting/understanding/translating. The student is no longer a passive reader absorbing the text and the information it contains. She or he must actively engage, must search and re-search, and ultimately knows that there is no end to the knowledge, thus fulfilling the dream of modern educational theory's main proposition of life-long learning.
The post-modern exemplar of the Jewish Midrash is Jacques Derrida's Glas. Some links: http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/Derrida/glas.html;
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DF1038F930A2575AC0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3;
A very recent attempt at similar project is JM Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year.
The post-structuralist movement (and certain previous generations) has been instrumental in uncovering this aspect of performativity. They created texts which were/are mise en abyme. In one sense, this was what Derrida meant by deconstruction, that deconstruction is performativity, especially, when in his influential article on law, justice and violence, he said, "Deconstruction is justice, justice is deconstruction".
James Clifford, an ethnographer, confronted with the postmodern/post structuralist turn, wrote in The predicament of culture : twentieth-century ethnography, literature and art of his experience and concluded that ethnography must embrace postmodernity/post structuralism. Similarly, teaching and learning in law must embrace non-linearity and technology.
One response, rather predictable, is to downplay technology and subsume it within that generic benign saccharine but rather meaningless phrase, academic freedom and prerogative as to teaching style. Basically, let us continue the way we were, preserve the status quo.
The same person who proffered such pearls of wisdom as above also, again predictably, raise the spectre of over expectations on the part of students subject to such marketing campaign (which incidentally involved running a 60 sec animated short in cinemas). The rationale suggested was that my discipline, law, is rather low tech and therefore not really in need of such technological enhancements.
Another member of the professoriate suggested that we are already technological in our teaching of law since we have fellow academics involved in issues where technology and its advances are an integral part of the issue(s), eg, technological assisted reproduction, intellectual property. I wonder if there is a deliberate misunderstanding what technology holds for teaching and learning or rather an inadvertent slippage in thinking. Is teaching the law as it grapples with cutting-edge technology, or as it tries to deal with the moral, political and social issues thrown up by technology, an engagement with technology itself? Does it count as technology in teaching and learning resulting in contributions to a culture of innovation, collaboration and scholarship in teaching and learning? I am not so sure. You can still teach about cutting edge stem-cell research (which has once again become news since the Obama Administration in the USA has overturned the previous Bush (jnr) Administration's ban) in a very "old"-technology manner, ie, printed paper, whiteboard, OHPs.
It seems that any discussion of technology and teaching and learning gets bogged down in the existing paradigm of linearity and linear thinking, teacher-centred education process. The oft-repeated refrain, that technology is the servant and not master, is made. Not that I disagree but it is often made with possibly wrong albeit the best of intentions (in the phenomenological sense). Technology is seen as a supplement/enhancement to traditional teaching methods such as the lecture and tutorial (ubiquitous in law schools) and the final exam involving problem-solving exercises. For example, pod casting is seen as another enhancement of choices available for students and therefore aimed at their satisfaction. It is seen as a substitute for the traditional lecture and discussion is framed along these lines. But nothing is made of pod casting and its potential as a true supplement to the lecture, ie and eg, it enhances the lecture experience, by providing additional, extra, supplementary, information, knowledge, examples, illustrations, case studies.
Similarly, nothing is made of the multi-linearity (or non-linearity) of the WWW/Internet or of electronic computerised processing itself, or of the potential of hyper-text linkages. (It seems this should have been named 'hypermedia" rather then multi-media: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermedia.)
One serious research question: Does a student learn better from pages of text formatted in size 12 font which is to be read from the start to the end? Will the student learn better if the text is broken into chunks and hypertext-linked together with supplements from other media such as illustrations, photographs, video clips, animations.
On googling "hypermedia" I came across this website, http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/research.html, home of
It is interesting to note that its research contributions are mostly, if not all, of the traditional linear text expression. Where is the hypermedia?
As noted on the wikipedia entry on hypertext, the idea is actually not new, just the technological implementation. In the Jewish tradition of interpretation of their sacred writings, there is the central text, around which (on the printed page) is placed interpretations by noted rabbis, around these interpretations, further discourses by other and later rabbis on the earlier interpretations. There are often references, sometimes in a very oblique manner, to interpretations on other texts, anecdotes, illustrations found on other pages. Texts within texts within texts criss-crossing with other texts; there is no end and no beginning — a moebius strip. One can begin anywhere and everywhere and one is still learning. One learns by performing the act of reading/interpreting/understanding/translating. The student is no longer a passive reader absorbing the text and the information it contains. She or he must actively engage, must search and re-search, and ultimately knows that there is no end to the knowledge, thus fulfilling the dream of modern educational theory's main proposition of life-long learning.
The post-modern exemplar of the Jewish Midrash is Jacques Derrida's Glas. Some links: http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/Derrida/glas.html;
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DF1038F930A2575AC0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3;
A very recent attempt at similar project is JM Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year.
The post-structuralist movement (and certain previous generations) has been instrumental in uncovering this aspect of performativity. They created texts which were/are mise en abyme. In one sense, this was what Derrida meant by deconstruction, that deconstruction is performativity, especially, when in his influential article on law, justice and violence, he said, "Deconstruction is justice, justice is deconstruction".
James Clifford, an ethnographer, confronted with the postmodern/post structuralist turn, wrote in The predicament of culture : twentieth-century ethnography, literature and art of his experience and concluded that ethnography must embrace postmodernity/post structuralism. Similarly, teaching and learning in law must embrace non-linearity and technology.
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