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.