Fenster writes:

Here are the headline and subhead from a recent article at Information Week.

Classroom Technology Faces Skeptics At Research Universities

Professors at research universities prefer teaching with old-fashioned whiteboards, one study says.

Should there be any surprise that faculty would voice skepticism about the possibly disruptive role of technology?  They are after all steel drivin’ men (and women) and in the end the machine can always be beat.  Right?

It depends on what machine.  Some of the faculty quoted in the article seemed content to take potshots at what passed for educational hi-tech maybe a decade or so ago, without giving any particular thought to what is happening  today.  Here’s a passage:

“I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that’s an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it,” said one.

What’s wrong with this picture?  For one, the faculty member discusses course management software as though that’s the cutting edge today.  But programs like Blackboard, which are now ubiquitous and commonplace, have been around for well over a decade.  They can do a lot more than house a syllabus, as the faculty member seems to suggest, but no one would mistake course management software for major disruption going forward.  It’s already been mainstreamed.  It’s like arguing in the 1990s that PCs won’t change much since the Commodore 64 isn’t that powerful.

But the next guy quoted is the one who really doesn’t get it.

“What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn’t any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don’t think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper,” said another (emphasis mine).

You can, he argues, teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard, and that there is no further need for IT.  But that mistakes some of the more revolutionary aspects of tech in education.  Salman Khan would agree that you don’t need much beyond a whiteboard to teach math, geometry, trig, calculus and a host of other subjects.  And he does, too, online, for free.

Let’s stipulate that if professors could be graded Khan would be an A.  He is certainly gifted as a teacher, perhaps singularly so.  He is a superlative explainer, clear as a bell, and funny to boot.  And that’s just the point.  For classes all about the whiteboard, wouldn’t students prefer Khan’s A performance to one by Professor X that is likely to be inferior?  And wouldn’t administrators prefer using Khan’s free content over the expensive, boots on the ground, whiteboard approach of Professor X, if only they could find a way to make that happen?

“High” technology is causing only some of the disruption in higher education. A good deal of it, though, is being caused by low tech.  Tape a class.  Show the whiteboard.  Deliver the content.