Gearing Up for Learning Beyond K--12. Bryan Johnson Alexander

      Chapter 1

       After the Technological Tsunami

      What is technology doing to higher education?

      To understand its impact, it is best to imagine a predigital university classroom in its full, nearly nostalgic glory. Let us choose the preweb date of 1985. Consider a seminar, where a professor leads a small class of a dozen or twenty students in the exploration of archaeology or Russian history. That professor is older, probably male, most likely white, and either tenured or fighting hard to get on the tenure track. He uses a chalkboard to scrawl notes, working from papers and print books. The students (tending to be around twenty years old, male, mostly white) take notes on paper using pen or pencil. Discussion happens out loud. (Andrew Delbanco [2012] offers another good example of such a historical, even nostalgic vision in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.)

      Or imagine the classic lecture hall, where the same sort of faculty member holds forth in a cavernous space containing hundreds of students. The professor might use an overhead projector and acetate-based transparencies. The flow of information is mostly one way as the professor describes principles of biology or British literature. Once more, those students take notes (or should have been doing so) with the technologies of paper and pen.

      We can also envision practice-oriented learning spaces, like laboratories and music studios. Again, the main players are faculty and students. Here they would have the appropriate technologies for the curriculum: a musical instrument, microscopes, chemicals.

      All of these spaces have gone through changes as of this writing. Yes, academia in the United States still has labs, lecture halls, and seminar rooms. But digital technology is invading those precincts, altering the flow of information and the social dynamics, and opening classrooms to the world.

      First, digital hardware appears in these rooms. Computers aren’t new on campuses—indeed, many were invented and developed there—but their appearance throughout learning spaces is a recent development. Laptops appear, used by students and faculty alike. A desktop or laptop computer now connects to an elevated projector, or directly into a massive screen, replacing the classic overhead projector. The podium may sprout its own computer, like a touch screen for controlling multiple digital outputs.

      Meanwhile, smaller devices have snuck in. Students and faculty may be carrying tablets: good for passing around, fine for quickly accessing information, and not so good for typing at length. They may also have either smartphones or other mobile phones. In the lecture hall and other spaces, students may also sport personal response systems, or clickers, tiny units resembling remote controls that allow quick and simple feedback to questions.

      These devices connect with each other and the rest of the world through means visible and otherwise, by cables, cell phone networks, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. The classroom is laced with these interconnections.

      This brings us to the second technological invader: software. The physical classroom replicates itself in a virtual class, the learning management system (LMS) (also course management system or virtual learning environment in Europe). These programs furnish a space for instructors to share documents with students, curate links to curricular content hosted elsewhere on the web, publish class news, host discussions, and even create a class glossary. The LMS in turn connects to a campus library’s collection of digital materials, including e-reserves, ebooks, and digital finding aids. Within or outside the physical classroom, students can access the LMS to ask questions, share reflections, and work in teams.

      A raft of other software now occupies the class space, often specific to a particular academic discipline. Image processing applications for arts and design classes, statistics programs for fields relying on quantitative data, composition tools for music: learning software packages are now part of the college curriculum. Other apps are more broadly used across the curriculum, like web browsers, office productivity tools (word processing, spreadsheets), and the ubiquitous PowerPoint. Some of these are networked, while others work primarily offline.