Blackboard as a Teaching and Learning Tool

In college teachers would often post notes and assignments on Blackboard in an attempt to make classroom and administrative materials more accessible. It also listed fellow students’ email addresses and allowed for online interactions through discussion boards. When I left college I thought I had seen the last of Blackboard. I finished up a M.A. program at a school that didn’t use the system at all and am now in a program that has used it fairly frequently.

Blackboard makes some assumptions and shapes education and interaction between users in a lot of ways that likely go unnoticed. On the surface it is a nice tool for document dissemination and it provides a space where important information is just a login away. But I think there are some real problems with Blackboard by design – that is to say that it doesn’t even have to be abused to be detrimental.

In college I had some teachers abuse Blackboard through over-reliance on it as an information-transmitter. All of the teacher’s PowerPoint slides (with their notes) were available to be printed off, and since that is all that was covered in class – there was really no need to show up; I can read all by myself. In this case the teacher wasn’t a teacher as much as they were an information-gatherer and examination-proctor. Even without an over-reliance on the technology it seems to suggest that students, to varying degrees, don’t need teachers as much as they need to be fed information (because it would be too hard for the student to go out and look for the information themselves).

Blackboard also seems to establish some interesting dynamics between users. Unlike a Wiki page, Blackboard is primarily manipulated (with respect to design and content) by the teacher. If there is a discussion board available the students can comment on it or email one another, but the nature of the content and how it is presented/accessed is determined by the teacher/facilitator. We’ve talked in other classes about the danger of teachers being stuck in unassailable, ivory towers and I wonder if Blackboard’s lack of direct student-teacher interaction helps construct the base of those towers. Furthermore, discussion boards hardly mimic real-life conversation and turn-taking patterns which means that regardless how thoughtful a discussion between students may be on Blackboard, it isn’t really training them to articulate themselves in the civil arena, face-to-face. It also disembodies the speakers in ways that make it hard to be a sympathetic interlocutor and ascertain meaning. People are forced to rely on emoticons to transmit actual feelings or motivations behind text and it is received through a computer screen and not a real person. Face-to-face interaction allows for contextualized meanings and quick clarifications that Blackboard discussions don’t lend themselves to. However, those discussion boards are particularly good at getting responses from people who are either shy or otherwise conversationally overpowered in a traditional classroom so there is a beneficial power shift when discussions are held online (though there should be some consideration made for students who may not be able to access or use Blackboard as easily as others which creates an entirely different power struggle). 

My real concern with Blackboard has been articulated in part here, and especially here. The latter article relies heavily on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but both argue in part that mediums build up expectations in users – and in this case a digital medium used for education can often, though unintentionally, establish a cognitive expectation of entertainment. Their specific concern is over distance-education (which seems very similar to an abusive, over-reliance on Blackboard), but a lot of what they borrow and accommodate from Postman is still applicable.

Postman was worried that the entertainment model was dominating the American discourse-landscape through the popularization of the television medium. Everything from game shows to political debates to church services was being broadcast on television which resulted in their being reduced to passively-received bits of entertainment. For Postman, the digital medium was so powerful, and so bypassed critical analysis, that the only tools viewers had for watching a political debate, for example, were those that they had cultivated watching game shows. The digital medium relied on style over substance since it was primarily visual and people went to the television medium expecting to be entertained. So how are we to understand a learning system that is computer-mediated?

I think, in a lot of ways, the same thing should concern Blackboard users. On a theoretical level we should consider what kinds of expectations a user brings to the computer medium. How are computers most commonly used? How long does a user spend on any one screen when using a computer? If we use computers primarily for email and Facebook, then are we able to flip a cognitive switch that allows us to engage with a discussion or lecture notes for longer than we would spend on a friend’s profile? Practically speaking, a teacher who puts anything on a computer-mediated system has to know that that information is competing with countless other distractions calling to the student from the 20 other tabs open in the browser. I think it is likely that students will be more passive when dealing with information on Blackboard, not just because it is visual – as Postman would argue – but because the internet is a distracting place and we’re conditioned to give into those distractions and move quickly from one thing to another.

I like to be able to reprint my syllabus, look up notes that I’ve misplaced, and find email addresses quickly – but I do have some serious reservations about Blackboard as a learning tool and the model of education and interaction that it constructs.

From Without or Within?

I conveniently ran into a different cultural manifestation of Facebook and given my last post thought it might be appropriate to link to it:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20107794-93/facebooks-kosher-twin-separates-users-by-gender/

Postman, Thamus, and Facebook (again)

I like Neil Postman; I’m sympathetic to many of his concerns insofar as they can be applied to new media today – and perhaps that’s why I find him so frustrating at times. I’ve been going through his Amusing Ourselves to Death for another class and while he can sound a bit extreme at times in that book, I thought that in the opening chapter to Technology, Literacy, and Progress he took some arguments to a hyperbolic level without letting his readers in on the fun.

Using an excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus Postman accommodates Thamus’s concerns about writing (as a new technology) to Postman’s own time and the flourishing of new technologies (particularly the computer and television). His argument is not so much that these new technologies will damage our memory and knowledge (these conclusions, according to Postman and Thamus are moot points) – rather Postman suggests that these technologies are paradigm-changers that significantly alter the way in which we understand concepts like memory and knowledge (as well as everything from politics to love).

At times Postman sounds like he is favoring archaic definitions of words and lamenting their malleability while blaming changes in language entirely on technology – as if language was not prone to fluctuation within oral cultures. But at the same time there is something deeper than definitions that technologies can change. I have written elsewhere about how Facebook has great potential to detrimentally change the way we understand larger concepts. What is our Facebook generation going to consider “news-worthy” when their primary interface for Facebook interactions is a “News Feed” that is filled with everything from Farmville scores to friend updates and inside jokes (with links to “actual news” occasionally interspersed). The infamous “Like” button (interestingly synonymous with the thumbs-up symbol) is another interesting test case. Obviously “liking” something can have a number of different meanings and motivations on Facebook. My “likes” are often political: I use them to maintain relationships and fulfill obligations. They can also mean “I’m too lazy to actually interact with this post” or “I know exactly how she said that!” or “That’s funny” or “What an idiot”. More could be said about the fact that your only options on Facebook are silence, comments, or like; there is no room for a convenient dislike and it hardly affords itself to the hard work of love. Much has been said about these things and more (consider friends, communities, relationships, etc.), but the point is that it is hard to disagree with Postman’s conclusions even if arguments seem a bit silly.

Lastly, I just want to juxtapose two quotes: one from this piece and one from last week’s Bolter reading. Postman follows the Ong and Havelock line of thinking that gives technology a certain sense of agency where writing, for example, is responsible for impoverished memories. At one point Postman speaks of the “early stages of a technology’s intrusion into culture” as if it were a rodent that steadily destroys a garden of its own volition (35). Culture remains helpless as technology forcefully subdues her from without. Bolter takes a radically different approach when he writes: “It is not a question of seeing writing as an external technological force that influences or changes cultural practice; instead, writing is always a part of culture… they are not separate agents that can act on culture from the outside” (19).

Facebook didn’t happen to us. We demonstrated a need and once it was filled we continued to shape it as it shaped us. Technology and culture share a cyclical relationship but it is not as if they are two equal parties. The fact that technologies can’t be understood apart from the cultures from which they sprouted should be obvious when we see how the same technologies are used or manifested in different cultures. Google is used (and designed) differently in China than it is elsewhere in the world. In global technologies (e.g., YouTube) it is easy to see marked differences in how different cultures use the same space (e.g., content, frequency, participation, duration, etc.).

I think Postman has a lot of valid concerns, but I wish he’d get to them in a more palatable fashion. As a final case-in-point, despite his missteps along the way, he finishes with this seemingly incontrovertible conclusion: “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop” (39, italics original). 

Ong Applied

The text that we were asked to interact with this week is a story preserved within an oral culture about a boy who became king and his fantastical victory over his own handicap. Sundiata was a 7 year-old boy who couldn’t use his legs and our text gives two versions of his story. The first version was recast in a typical western structure while the second is a more faithful rendition of the story (as told by a different griot in the village). Unsurprisingly, locating the characteristics that Ong noted about narratives in oral cultures was much easier in the second narrative than the first.

The first version has aggregate descriptions (e.g., “stiff-legged king; wicked queen mother”) and an obvious, agonistic turning point (in Sassouma’s insulting Sogolon Kedjou), but other markers are lacking.[1]

The second version keeps the participatory structure intact and therefore fits one of Ong’s characteristics in form alone; hardly a line gets told without the audience’s refrain of “indeed” (or some variation). The second most obvious characteristic that is present in the second narrative is the use of repetition. The majority of the second stanza is a word-for-word repeat of what immediately preceded it and several times there are lines that are repeated right after another (e.g., “And upwards drew himself” in stanza 7).

A significant amount of space in the second narrative is given to the mother’s prayer which seems to be composed of rhetorical questions that characterize an aggregative approach to narratives. The “If he be/If he is” questions are not actual investigations but are designed to “assure that [he be/is], to keep the aggregate intact, not really to question or cast doubt on the attribution[s]” (Ong, pg. 33).  

If Ong’s categories are legitimate they would seem to offer hermeneutical insight to oral tales that might otherwise be subjected to exegetical tools commonly used in literate societies for written stories.

---

[1] In fact, as the story comes to a close, I expected a more “additive” structure in the final few paragraphs and instead the narrative relied on several subordinate clauses. 

The Oral Culture of Text-Dependent Facebook

Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy continues to fascinate me. His third chapter, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” was an interesting investigation of sound generally and the psychodynamics of primary oral cultures. In oral cultures, which lack any conception of writing by definition, communication relies on sound and gestures. Oral expression is, according to Ong, an impermanent occurrence. When a movie is paused there is still an image, but when a song is paused there is no more sound.[1] As Ong puts it: “sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (28).

He goes on to explore what this premise means for oral cultures in contrast to literate cultures that rely on silent texts. Recollection in literate societies simply involves looking something up or backtracking on a page, however oral cultures organized information differently – relying on rhythms, patterns, and mnemonics for easier recollection.[2] According to Ong, this type of intellectual organization precludes certain kinds of critical analyses and types of thinking which literate cultures can engage in. In fact, Ong suggests that within oral cultures cliché, proverbial-like sayings “are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them” (31).

Statements like this are what prompted me to write in my margins some variation of “what about today?” Earlier Ong had stated that “sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication” (30). I’m curious how statements like these can be assessed and applied to today’s culture which is primarily visual and where most composition occurs online. Interestingly, as Ong went on to describe certain characteristics of expressions and thoughts within oral cultures it seemed to me that there were a number of curious similarities with Facebook.

Facebook, of course, is inhabited exclusively by literate people and provides a space wherein people connect and communicate primarily through printed words. Nevertheless, it is a unique space (similar to Ong’s “human lifeworld”) where texts take on the embodied characteristics of oral communication. Ong talks about texts as decontextualized and inhuman and uses the list as a consummate example where names can be listed as mere, neutral representations for actual humans. At first glance, Facebook employs lists of the kind that only literate cultures could construct and yet they are far more contextualized. The most prominent list that a Facebook user interacts with is the Friends List, but the names are anything but neutrally-oriented. Not only are they always accompanied by their profile picture but hovering over any name on the list shows you the amount and select pictures of mutual friends as well as the option to send them a personal message. These lists are presented in the context of human relationships and activity which characterizes the genealogical or political lists in oral culture more similarly than it does a list of American presidents in a reference book.

I think Facebook communication also shares oral cultures’ pragmatic uses of language (e.g., “LOL; Friend me!”),  and is similarly empathetic and participatory (e.g., comments, likes, immediately accessible author profiles, etc.), however, the most interesting similarity between the world of Facebook and oral cultures is Ong’s description of the latter’s homeostasis.  Ong suggests that “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (39). Facebook is temporally-oriented to prefer newer information.[3] Whether it is the ever-changing News Feed or a person’s Wall, as information gets older and is replaced by newer updates, Facebook deems the newer information more relevant and eventually pushes the old information into the realm of “older posts.” Present (read: relevant) interactions with old information is recorded accordingly in the News Feed, but sooner or later the information is (practically) forgotten rather than archived.

Ong’s examples of changing genealogies is perfectly analogous to the ease with which I can de-friend someone, get married, or reject a family tree offer regardless of the information recorded in government archives. If such a change suits my present purposes, then altering Facebook-relationships is as easy as changing the words to a genealogical narrative.

I’m still working through how and if these similarities can answer my earlier questions, but it is interesting to see how Facebook – an ostensibly text-oriented space – can share characteristics which, according to Ong, belong distinctly to oral cultures.

---

[1] Communicative gestures rely on their close association with these “effervescent” sounds and therefore, presumably, suffer from the same degree of impermanence though Ong’s focus is aural.

[2] This relates back to last chapter and the work that had been done with Homer’s Illiad and the surprising number of cliché phrases and patterns that were employed (which proved to be a significant piece of evidence that convinced some that Homer was illiterate).

[3] This preference is another similar concept listed elsewhere by Ong; see pg. 35