Classroom Blogging and Bush (V, not GW)

Patience comments in his or her blog entry that we have not formally addressed the use of blogs to extend classroom discussion and remarks on the potential that blogging offers for extending academic interchange beyond walls and desks. As we are already seeing, the potential blogging offers is, indeed, highly useful. V. Bush, Zappen, and Gurak have remarked on the potential, and we are seeing it on our own blog.

Technology has revolutionized education, and we all experience the benefits of the revolution. From a student's standpoint, we've all experienced the huge amount of help technology has offered us in research. Long days in the library are virtually a thing of the past, even for graduate students. Many of the articles we want are available online. Those that aren't can be ordered through interlibrary loan at home, and are sent to us digitally. Instead of having to save thousands of pieces of paper that might or might not come in handy for future research (I'm still lugging from apartment to apartment boxes of articles from my MA study of 10 years ago), we can load the articles onto the computer and save them forever. With the addition of jump drives into the scenario, we can move these huge texts onto external storage at the end of the semester and free up space for new work without losing the availability to access the old. Amazing! (Someone needs to come up with a way of labeling and storing jump drives, though. I can envision a time when I have a shelf full of jump drives the way I once had stacks and stacks of Zip disks and before that, floppy disks.)

Even locating and obtaining books in the library requires less time outside the home. We can access not only the NIU card catalog, but the card catalogues of other libraries. We can compile lists of books we need and know they are available and just pop into the library to pick them up. Of course, as grad students, once we get to sections of books concerning our topic, we expand our exploration in the old-fashioned way. But because we don't have to spend umpteen hours sifting through journal articles to find what we want before we pay both time and money to copy them, we can spend more time browsing the shelves once we do get to the library. We can gather more information in less time at lower cost.

Technology has also revolutionized education from an instructor's viewpoints. Through email, my students have limitless, constant access to me, and my "office hours" have gone from 2 a week to 12 a day. I can post course materials, assignment updates, revised calendars and handouts to WebBoard continually, expanding my ability to teach beyond the limited 50 minutes I have in the classroom. My class meets physically three times a week. Virtually, it meets constantly. Since my students are THE top priority in my life (over my own courses, the family and friends I used to have, and my ability to sleep, eat, or even use the restroom), yeh, they are with me always, even unto the ends of the earth.

But ever the one who feels it necessary to explore the negative alongside the obvious positive, I am reminded of what V. Bush says about the inability to keep up with available research even in the 1940s days of print. There has always been more to read than there has been time to read it and always more time to read it than to integrate it, reflect on it, and use it. As Warnick points out, computers have made this difference even greater.

As students, we can and probably do find that exciting. We have chosen to devote our lives full time to learning at this point. But what about beyond school? The possibility of working all the time creates the potential of an expectation to work all the time. The situation is staggering enough in the academic world, but at least we are allowed to pace ourselves to some degree. We can decide how much new information to incorporate into the courses we teach, and we can work on research at a reasonable pace.

I haven't held a corporate managment position in 14 years. When I did, only a few people had cell phones. The Internet didn't really exist beyond academics. The World Wide Web had not been born, although it was being incubated in computer research facilities. We were able to go home, to leave work for the day or the weekend. Even at that, there was something of an attitude that salaried employees were owned by their employers. What must it be like now, when employers can reach employees via email and cell phone 24/7? Are people EVER allowed to "go home?" Is there ever an end to the work day? Is there any respect at all for the rights people have to a personal life?

In addition, there are the dangers of "multitasking." (Isn't it great when terms coined to refer to machines are extended to human beings?) I heard a recent news report that people who multitask are more prone to make errors because of scattered focus and experience higher stress. One morning last week, I had four windows open on my computer. On one, I was watching for an email from my presentation partner for 532. In another, I was uploading information for the 104 class I was teaching. In a third, I was composing an email for my part-time employer. In the fourth, I was conducting a chat with a friend. All before 9 a.m. This occurrence was, of course, neither unique in my life or unique to my life. This is how we live.

Baddlee's (forgive me if that's spelled wrong) concept of the ability to hold 7 +/- 2 concepts in short-term memory is well known. However, people are less familiar with what he actually stated; it's not a matter of holding 7 +/- 2 in short-term memory (ST); it's the ability to hold that information in WORKING memory (WM). It is not a matter of trying to remember a phone number. WM is the cognitive space which must hold any concepts in conscious awareness to be consciously manipulated. Items held in long-term semantic (used differently in cog psych than in linguistics) and episodic memory must be brought into WM to be used on a conscious level. The availability of technology does not expand the capacity of WM, but it does raise the expectation that outside parties can place on WM. There are still only 24 hours in a day, WM is still limited to 7 +/- 2, and there is still only so much we can do at once. But we can be reached by any number of people at a time now, and each of those parties can expect us to do more and more because the technology is available that allows us to do it. I was once chided by an employer for not replacing my dead answering machine quickly enough to allow him to contact me at 7 pm on a Sunday when I was having dinner with my family. Now of course, he would expect me to have my cell phone on so he could call me whenever he wanted.

People bemoan the fact that interpersonal contact has decreased because of technology. Warnick mentions that we don't talk to our neighbors over the back-yard fence anymore. These points are well taken, but how CAN we have any meaningful, direct interpersonal exchanges if we are expected to be available to the whole world at all times? Is there any time or energy left to spend on spouses, children, parents, and friends? Are we allowed to work to support our lives, or are we now expected to live to work?

"Ruth"