[Paleopsych] Liberal Education: Beyond Computer Literacy
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Beyond Computer Literacy
http://www.aacu-edu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa04/le-fa04feature1.cfm
Liberal Education, Fall 2004
[First, the summary from the News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher
Education, 5.2.7:]
Computers and the Internet already play important roles in
liberal education, but greater attention is needed to the
educational outcomes of the technologies, argues Stephen
Ehrmann, vice president of the Teaching, Learning, and
Technology Group, a consulting organization that focuses on
teaching with technology.
More and more of the goals of liberal education, such as
analytical thinking and communication skills, require
technological proficiency, Mr. Ehrmann writes. For example,
students need to acquire skills in finding, retrieving, and
analyzing information in a library, on the Internet, or
elsewhere.
One way to gauge students' computer literacy is to require them
to turn in electronic portfolios of their work, Mr. Ehrmann
says. Portfolios could include Web projects, video recordings of
oral presentations, and students' thoughts on how those tasks
advanced their skills and learning, and the portfolios could
even be made available to prospective employers, he says.
Electronic portfolios could also help faculties see how well
students are meeting instructional goals, and that could guide
curricular change, he suggests. "When portfolios are used in
that way, the doorway to rapid, intentional evolution of liberal
education opens," he writes.
Institutions that are already taking account of such changes and
possibilities are the ones that will "redefine what it means to
be an educated person in the 21st century," he argues.
_________________________________________________________________
Beyond Computer Literacy:
Implications of Technology for the Content of a College Education
By Stephen Ehrmann
Computers and the Internet already play several important roles in
liberal education.
1. Computer literacy and fluency: the ability of students to use
computers and the Internet as tools for general purposes
2. Effectiveness: the use of technology to foster faculty-student
connections, student-student collaboration, active learning, and
other practices that can improve outcomes
3. Access: the use of technology to support programs and practices
that are fully available to nontraditional learners who would
otherwise be unable to enroll and excel
All three of these applications are well established and growing. Now
there's another application of technology to liberal education to
consider:
4. Content: Computers and the Internet, as they're used in the larger
world, have implications for what all college students, by the
time they graduate, should have learned from their majors as well
as from general education requirements. These implications go far
beyond computer literacy.
What students should learn
These changes in content, too, are already in motion, although they're
at an earlier stage than the first three. A recent AAC&U report, Our
Students' Best Work, specifies five key educational outcomes for
liberal education (2004, 5-6).
1. strong analytical, communication, quantitative, and information
skills
2. deep understanding of and hands-on experience with the inquiry
practices of disciplines that explore the natural, social, and
cultural realms
3. ntercultural knowledge and collaborative problem-solving skills
4. a proactive sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and
social choices
5. habits of mind that foster integrative thinking and the ability to
transfer skills and knowledge from one setting to another
For each of these five, computers and the Web are already beginning to
affect faculty thinking about what all students should learn, and how.
First outcome
"Strong analytical, communication, quantitative, and information
skills--achieved and demonstrated through learning in a range of
fields, settings, and media, and through advanced studies in one or
more areas of concentration"(AAC&U 2004, 5).
Today there are important types of analytical thinking, communication,
quantitative reasoning, and information skills that cannot be used, or
learned, without technology. Let's look at just two: information
literacy and the ability to create Web sites as a medium of academic
expression.
Information literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve,
analyze, and use information in a library, on the Web, or anywhere
else. Virtually all majors require some form of information literacy,
which almost always requires knowing how to use a maze of information
on the Internet, as well as print resources. Information literacy,
like writing across the curriculum, is learned via a series of
assignments and feedback on those assignments that should occur
frequently and throughout the student's course of study.
Earlham College's Diana Punzo, associate professor of psychology,
talks about how computers have changed the process of research in her
discipline. "When I was a student, we didn't use computers. You had to
spend hours thumbing through indices of the literature. Now the
process is far more efficient and students can focus on the literature
itself and the process of research." In course after course,
psychology students at Earlham get briefings from librarians and do
research on the literature. They learn, for example, the difference
between using "racism" and "prejudice" as search terms. Faculty
members coordinate their efforts informally, talking about these
skills and other facets of the curriculum in biweekly departmental
meetings.
Over the years, students learn skills that are manifested and assessed
in a senior year capstone experience. For psychology majors at
Earlham, the capstone experience is a multipart project. In one piece
of it, students are each given an article written for the general
public (e.g., from a newspaper). They have to search and interpret the
academic literature on the topic and then write an analysis of the
article, also geared to the general public. In another part of this
capstone, seniors do an experimental project and must search and
analyze the relevant research literature. These capstone projects are
each graded by a pair of faculty who examine, among many other things,
the students' use of the literature.
Student-created Web sites as a medium of academic expression: Imagine
a course on nineteenth-century English literature or a course on the
politics of urban neighborhoods. Multimedia projects offer several
distinctive advantages for learning and assessment. Here are just a
few:
* Student authors of Web sites can include evidence such as
pictures, audio recordings, video clips, databases, and live links
to references. Providing the reader with direct access to the
supporting evidence also puts more pressure on the student to
explain why the evidence is being cited instead of just inserting
a terse "Smith 1996" and moving on.
* When creating a Web-based project, students can create an argument
that operates on several levels: a summary form of the argument
that links at several points to more detailed explanations, data,
and responses to anticipated objections.
* One of the most educationally important features of creating
Web-based projects is the option of expanding the audience. The
implications of this shift surprised the faculty and students who
initially tried it. For example, in 1995 Bosnian peace talks began
in Dayton, Ohio. Not far away, students in a journalism course at
Miami University were asked to create a Web site with background
on the conflict and the peace talks. Professor Linda Crider wrote
later that students quickly received e-mail criticisms to their
site from as far away as Bosnia. The students were shocked, but
soon, Crider wrote, she was shocked more than they were because
she had never seen students work that hard. Suddenly this
assignment was real and they didn't want to be embarrassed in
front of the world. Students today can create projects for use by
other students (students who take the course in future semesters
or students in the public schools, for example) or as parts of
internships. Later in this article, we'll see some examples of
such projects.
As with their skills of writing or information literacy, students
usually cannot learn how to use the Web as a medium for thought and
communication in just a single course. The more courses that encourage
or require students to create multimedia projects in addition to
writing papers, the easier it becomes for each new faculty member to
take advantage of, and further develop, this new and important skill.
The University of Southern California's Institute of Multimedia
Literacy is a leader in this area, providing faculty development and
support across the institution. Starting in fall 2004, USC is offering
a new honors program in multimedia scholarship to help lead the way in
further development of undergraduate skills. Sixty students from
twenty-five different departments have been admitted to this four-year
program. Stanford is also taking steps to foster multimedia literacy
across the curriculum: the university's new required second-year
course in communications includes development of multimedia by
students, along with writing and oral presentation.
Second outcome
"Deep understanding and hands-on experience with the inquiry practices
of disciplines that explore the natural, social, and cultural
realms--achieved and demonstrated through studies that build
conceptual knowledge by engaging learners in concepts and modes of
inquiry that are basic to the natural sciences, social sciences,
humanities, and arts" (AAC&U 2004, 5).
Professionals in almost every discipline now use technology-based
tools to think in new ways. For example, statisticians explore data
differently now, using new statistical procedures and displaying
results graphically. Technology-based tools enable relative novices to
ask meaningful questions of their own--literature students learning a
bit about inquiry in biology, and vice versa. In addition to these
"power tools for novices," technology is playing other roles in
helping people from all fields learn skills of inquiry.
In order to attract and educate students, science literacy programs
often use active forms of learning. At West Point, for example, all
students must learn math and science. In calculus courses, students
are told that they have captured a number of perfectly serviceable
cannons with plenty of ammunition. Unfortunately, however, the
operations manuals are missing, so the students must experiment. They
are allowed to measure the distance the ball travels when the cannon
is fired at one particular angle.
Working in teams with their laptop computers and using theory learned
in physics and calculus, students must then deduce muzzle velocity.
With that information and some more physics, they should be able to
figure out the appropriate angle of elevation to hit any target so
long as they know the target's distance and elevation. Each team gets
a different target and only one shot. Visiting a calculus class at the
right moment, one can see cheering students who've just hit a distant
target with the first shot of their toy cannon. West Point uses a
number of such games, often based on simulations, to help all students
learn to think the way that scientists and engineers do.
Physics and calculus are not the only realms of science literacy where
technology can play a transformative role. BioQUEST creates, collects,
and distributes realistic research simulations in biology. BioQUEST
values the "Three P's":
1. Problem posing: creating a research problem to do in the simulated
world, such as a genetics experiment or a biochemical analysis
2. Problem solving: carrying out the research and developing a
conclusion based on the evidence
3. Persuasion: persuading first a peer and then the instructor that
the experimental evidence is sufficient to support the student's
conclusion
One nice feature of the BioQUEST software is that not even the
instructor can "open" the simulation to find the right answer. The
instructor, like the peers and the student investigator, must examine
the chain of experiments and the resulting evidence in order to grade
the student's work.
Third outcome
"Intercultural knowledge and collaborative problem-solving
skills--achieved and demonstrated in a variety of collaborative
contexts (classroom, community-based, international, and online) that
prepare students both for democratic citizenship and for work" (AAC&U
2004, 5).
Imagine an undergraduate from suburbia reading a translation of
Beowulf or studying a novel of Appalachia. How can the student develop
a deeper understanding of another culture where familiar words may not
have familiar meanings? How can the student express that understanding
in a form that allows feedback? In two different courses Professor
Patricia O'Connor of Georgetown University has asked her students to
create Web sites that annotate text from their readings. Students link
each selected word and phrase to illustrate commentary about their
meaning in context; terms used in the commentary are themselves linked
to other such commentaries, creating a web of description of that
culture. Andrew Owen, one of O'Connor's students, analyzed a brief
passage from River of Earth, a novel by James Still set in Appalachia.
Dozens of phrases and terms such as "patriarchy," "God's green earth,"
and "homeplace" were analyzed and illustrated with archival images.
Owen's analysis, like the culture it depicts, has no beginning or
end--each narrative annotation stands partly on its own, but it is
interlinked with, and given further meaning by, several other such
annotations.
Technology is making more direct learning about other cultures
possible, too. For example, "Raison d'Etre" is a project conducted
jointly by the University of South Carolina, Lycée Paul Héroult, and
Dickinson College. Students learning French in the United States
interact regularly with students in France who are majoring in
English. They correspond weekly, engage in regular chat sessions, and
use Web cams as they talk about one another's cultures. The project
won a 2003 National Award from the American Council of Education's
AT&T Program on Technology as a Tool for Internationalization.
Another ACE/AT&T national award-winner was Ball State University's
Global Media Network. Thirteen institutions on five continents are
members. The technology they share makes it possible to have highly
interactive class meetings with faculty and students from pairs of
institutions. Imagine a conference table with faculty and students
from an American institution and a university in Korea seated around
it and talking with one another. A major goal of the program is to
provide initial international exposure to lower-division students in
the university's core curriculum.
These are just two examples of how technology can open gateways into
other cultures from a distance. Technology can also make it easier,
and more productive, to study abroad, as the next section describes.
Fourth outcome
"A proactive sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and social
choices--achieved and demonstrated through forms of learning that
connect knowledge, skills, values, and public action, and through
reflection on students' own roles and responsibilities in social and
civic contexts" (AAC&U 2004, 6).
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has had for thirty years one of
the most exciting programs in engineering education. For example, the
Interactive Qualifying Project, typically done in the junior year,
requires students to apply what they've learned in their majors to
problems of social significance. Surprisingly, half of WPI's students
go abroad to do this project these days. Technology seems to have a
subtle but spectacular impact on the feasibility of study abroad. The
Web allows students to define and prepare for their projects long
before they and their faculty advisors travel to London, Thailand, or
any of WPI's more than twenty other off-campus sites. And digital
communications (including cell phones that WPI provides the students
and faculty) make it easier for them to be so far from campus for
seven or eight weeks while working on their projects.
Last year, for example, seven student teams and two faculty advisors
traveled to WPI's London site. One of those student teams, composed of
students from several engineering programs, was assigned to respond to
a request for help from the municipal government of the borough of
Merton, a London suburb. A new census of the UK had just been done,
and the planning unit wanted the students to prepare a display of the
data relevant to the borough, perhaps a sixty-page book of the sort
that had been created for the previous census, a decade earlier.
Working with other students and with their faculty advisors in a
preparatory course, two months before leaving for London, the students
were guided into asking questions about this task. How was the book
used in the last ten years? By whom? For what? This dialogue led the
students and the borough to redefine the task: the four-student team
would create a Web-based resource for mapping and analyzing census
data. Professor Paul Davis, a mathematician who was one of the faculty
supervisors of the London site and is dean of interdisciplinary and
global studies at WPI, commented, "In terms of liberal education, this
is a key step, where students are grappling with open-ended issues and
trying to form a project they can do in the weeks they're on site.
They identified the problem as helping policy makers visualize
deprivation on maps of the borough."
In London, the WPI students created a geographic information system
that turned indices based on census data (such as number of toilets
per resident in buildings) into maps. The maps helped planners
identify a swath of poverty that crossed the boundary from Merton into
a neighboring borough. In an "aha!" moment, the planners realized that
they could collaborate with that borough in applying for funds to work
on the problems, rather than competing with it for funds as they had
in the past.
Professor Davis commented, "The lesson we think the students carried
away was that the technology, well used, could inform important social
decisions. They also realized they hadn't solved the problem of
deprivation or even answered all the possible questions. Instead they
got a sense of technology's possibilities and limits, the complexity
of social issues, and the political and social environment in which
those problems exist. From our perspective those are all successes for
liberal education."
Fifth outcome
"Habits of mind that foster integrative thinking and the ability to
transfer skills and knowledge from one setting to another--achieved
and demonstrated through advanced research and/or creative projects in
which students take the primary responsibility for framing questions,
carrying out an analysis, and producing work of substantial complexity
and quality" (AAC&U 2004, 6).
Many of the approaches to teaching described above have dealt with
integrative thinking and the ability to apply what has been learned in
one context to an unfamiliar problem or setting. This ability to think
about your own thinking doesn't develop automatically while studying
in traditional courses, as Professor Sharon Hamilton discovered in her
teaching at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).
She and her colleagues asked students to reflect on their learning in
relation to artifacts the students had uploaded on the electronic
portfolios. Hamilton commented, "There were several top-notch writing
students in the pilot, and I was eager to read their reflections." One
student, who had uploaded a thoughtful analysis and synthesis of a
group of novels of the South as an example of her ability, wrote,
Reflection involves analysis and synthesis to come to a new
understanding. In this paper, I analyzed six novels and synthesized
their approaches to the role of women in the South. I learned a lot
about different perceptions of women in the South from this
critical thinking.
"And that was...one of the top achieving students in the group!"
Hamilton exclaimed. "It became evident to me that students require
instruction and support for their reflective writing."
Electronic portfolios
IUPUI accelerated its work with electronic portfolios. Portfolios have
been used for centuries in disciplines such as architecture and the
arts. A portfolio is a thoughtfully organized collection of student
work, usually including work other than, or in addition to,
traditional academic papers. Portfolios also often include student
reflections about how the project demonstrates their developing
skills. These reflective statements are one way in which portfolio use
is intended to deepen student learning. Alverno College in Milwaukee
pioneered the use of portfolios in liberal education starting in the
1970s, using them to chart student progress in developing competencies
required of all students by graduation.
Electronic portfolios store those projects, or recordings of them,
plus reflections and feedback, on computers so that these records can
easily be accessed online. For example, Web projects can be stored in
portfolios, as can video recordings of student performances (oral
presentations, participation in teams, dances). In contrast to paper
portfolios, the online portfolio can organize the projects in several
different ways: one "view" organized for an individual course, another
view organizing the content to show progress toward goals of liberal
education, another showing progress in the major, and yet another that
might be used for employment or graduate school applications. The work
can be used over a period of time by the student, by faculty, and, at
some institutions, by people outside the institution (e.g., potential
employers). This ability to revisit a project long after the project
is completed is one of many distinctive values of electronic
portfolios.
Electronic portfolios offer an ideal infrastructure for the
development of all the outcomes of liberal education described in this
paper--doubly so because, as we've seen, a growing proportion of
student work in all these areas is being done with computers and
Internet resources.
Bit by bit, putting it all together
Electronic portfolios have at least one other kind of significance for
changing the content of a college education: they can help faculty
members, as a group, see what's going on and guide curricular change.
In the past, college education has resembled an elephant designed by a
committee of blind men, each faculty member teaching a course while
knowing almost nothing about teaching and learning inside courses
taught by other faculty. Electronic student portfolios can be used to
change that.
Some of the impacts of student portfolios are subtle. For example, at
Alverno faculty need to designate "Key Performances" in each
course--assignments, assessments, and projects that represent the most
important goals for the course and, usually, for meeting requirements
of the major and for graduation from the college. These Key
Performances, including descriptions, criteria, student
self-assessments, and faculty feedback, are visible to other faculty.
Linda Ehley, associate professor of computer science at Alverno,
reports that this ability to see, and be seen, provides a basis for
both collaboration and faculty development.
Other impacts of student portfolios on the ability to plan are more
obvious and strategic. Clemson Provost Doris Helms comments that
electronic portfolios have "freed us to think about general education
as something other than a smorgasbord of courses." Clemson is using
portfolios to collect student projects that are intended to
demonstrate progress toward institutional educational goals.
Portfolios used in this way require faculty to work together in
describing the intellectual achievement represented by student work:
first, to frame the goals, and then, to provide feedback to students
about whether they've provided adequate evidence of progress toward
meeting those goals for graduation. Provost Helms told me, "We'll not
only assess student work but also use student portfolios for
research--where are students learning what they're learning? For
example, what are students learning while outside the classroom, in
jobs, at home, and in extracurricular experiences? What kinds of
learning should we foster, more intentionally, outside the course?" So
the electronic portfolio can also provide data for scholarship of
teaching and learning by the faculty working as a research team. Helms
said that such a use of portfolios would not have been feasible at a
large public institution such as Clemson without the online dimension.
Three conditions are critical if student portfolios are to provide a
tool for collaborative planning by faculty:
1. Faculty need to collaborate in deciding what kinds of learning are
to be charted by the portfolio.
2. Faculty need to collaborate in assessing at least some aspects of
student progress.
3. Faculty need to use what they learn from assessment to consider
whether and how to change the goals, the curriculum, their
teaching, and assessment.
When portfolios are used that way, the doorway to rapid, intentional
evolution of liberal education opens.
Concluding thoughts
The changes in the content of a college education described above have
several common elements.
First, students use the technologies as a tool more often than as a
"teacher": these uses of technology alter and enhance the role of the
faculty member. The more powerful and widely used the technology, the
more invisible it becomes to both students and faculty. They think
with the technology rather than thinking about it. In fact, one reason
that faculty are finding some of these changes relatively easy to make
is that they themselves already use these technologies in their
research and their lives outside the college.
Second, technology widens the range of experiences and resources
available to the student, which creates an even greater need to help
students learn use such freedom, rather than floundering in it. More
than ever, college needs to help students learn how to learn.
Third, the curricular changes described in this article require a mix
of bottom-up, incremental changes coming out of individual courses and
top-down, strategic changes (e.g., portfolios) that come out of
faculty and administrative leadership.
Fourth, there is no magic level of technology that an institution
needs before such changes can begin. I've seen examples of such
changes in the content of education for almost a quarter century now,
the earliest ones relying on Apple II computers. But the pace is
accelerating, especially now that most students can use computers and
the Internet as personal tools. What seems most important for each
institution is that some level of technology be extremely reliable.
When people no longer need to think consciously about their skills or
worry overmuch about things breaking down, that particular technology
achieves a certain invisibility. How many people still think of word
processing as "technology?" Once that happens, faculty and students
can think about advancing education instead of just about advancing
technology. Institutional leadership comes from a thoughtful,
committed coalition of faculty, administrators, students, and alumni,
not from cutting edge technology.
This is an extraordinarily exciting moment in the evolution of liberal
education. This article has mentioned a number of institutions that
are currently among the leaders in redefining the curriculum. The
chances are excellent that, in five years, additional institutions
will have leapfrogged forward, drawing international attention to
their academic programs. Their fame will not come from having (for a
brief moment) the newest of the new technologies. Instead, these
institutions will attract attention and resources because they have
helped redefine what it means to be an educated person in the
twenty-first century.
_________________________________________________________________
Work Cited
Board of Directors, Association of American Colleges and Universities
(AAC&U). 2004. Our students' best work: A framework of accountability
worthy of our mission. Washington, DC: Association of American
Colleges and Universities. Also at
www.aacu.org/publications/pdfs/StudentsBestReport.pdf.
_________________________________________________________________
Stephen C. Ehrmann is director of the Flashlight Program for the Study
and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology and vice president
of The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group.
_________________________________________________________________
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled at aacu.org, with the
author's name on the subject line.
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