What they (can) expect. When I started teaching at the college level, email was still somewhat new, and many people had mobile phones, but texting was not an . . . → Read More: Expectations of Technology Access in Education]]> What can we expect from students and what can they expect from us?  This is a broad question that I would like to narrow down to technology.

What they (can) expect. When I started teaching at the college level, email was still somewhat new, and many people had mobile phones, but texting was not an option.  Computers were not as ubiquitous as they now seem to be.  If a student wanted to talk to me, she did so after class, or during my office hours.  Occasionally I would get a phone call during office hours, or a message to call someone back.  In the main, out-of-class inquiries were sequestered to these times and places.  Also, all assignments were turned in on paper. As email caught on and students started using it, I found that their expectations for me began to change.  They wanted sometimes unrealistically prompt responses, and expected me to available 24/7.  I began to implement  a system where I designated specific times when I promised I would check and respond to email — say, Friday morning and Tuesday afternoon.  They may get a quicker response, I would tell them, but they could expect one no later than those times.  Now, I try to respond as quickly as possible, and this semester I gave them a personal phone number — my Google Voice number — where they can call or text me with questions.  So far, it has worked out pretty well.

What we (might) expect. As email evolved and Blackboard spread across campuses, opportunities for out-of-class communication expanded.  Personally, I like using Moodle or BB, blogs, social networking tools and other asynchronous technology to enhance teaching, but lately I am plagued with question of access.  I have had the opportunity to teach at many schools, either university, art college or community college, and have found that expectations for students’ access to the web varies widely.  At some places, they live and breathe Blackboard.  At others, some do not know how to check their email.  A lot of this seems to be tied to socioeconomic status, but I contend that a lot has to do with how the college treats the students.  All of the colleges that have employed me  have provided students some sort of on-campus access to web-connected computers.  At some campuses, students are expected to check email and Blackboard on a regular basis.  At others, I have been told not to put anything online that is not also available in class, which severely limits my ability to do innovative stuff outside of class.  No blogs, no social networking, no microblogging, no Moodle even.  I feel like I have traveled backwards in time sometimes.

Back to the question.  What should we be able to expect on the part of students in terms of access to technology?  I assume mandating typed papers is ok, but should I expect that a student can email that paper?  If the institution provides access, is it reasonable to expect students to be able, say, to maintain a weekly blog?  Should they be able to expect me to post to Blackboard what they missed when they couldn’t come to class?  Should I expect them to contact me to find that out?  What are your experiences with students and technology?

The internet is off at home, due to nonpayment, but I keep instinctively trying to click on Tweetdeck or Firefox to look something up. It reminds me of how much I rely on the internet for information, for soothing escape from loneliness, to waste time. It’s lonely here in . . . → Read More: Internet Down]]>

photo credit kirk lau http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirklau/

The internet is off at home, due to nonpayment, but I keep instinctively trying to click on Tweetdeck or Firefox to look something up. It reminds me of how much I rely on the internet for information, for soothing escape from loneliness, to waste time. It’s lonely here in the morning without the internet. I am considering not turning it back on. I will miss streaming Netflix, but everything else I can do with my phone or at a local coffeeshop. Not having internet at home won’t kill me, and, who knows, it might make me a tad more productive. I’d probably get the house cleaned up, if nothing else.

I certainly have a love/hate relationship with the web. I’ll be the first to defend Twitter and Facebook, and have students email me rather than talk to them in class, and I love Youtube as a resource, and my blog and those of others have been great sources of connection, comfort and insight, but I will also waste an entire morning watching Funny or Die, or Jon Stewart videos, when I know I have other things to do and precious little time. I need to find a workable internet regime. Whether that means relegating it to certain times of day, or turning if off completely, or having to go to specific places to access it, I have to build a structure that mitigates my attention flitting tendencies. In fact, I’ve been going to the Hatcher Grad library at U of Michigan to do work precisely because I cannot access their internet.

I went on a meditation retreat a few years ago, where I did nothing but sit silently. No writing, no talking, nothing, and when I turned my phone on after a week and a half, and got back to the internet, I found that I had not really missed anything earth-shatteringly important. The world continued on, people still had breakfast, and T’d G it was F, and suffered loneliness, and shared links, and posted pics, and I was fine and they were fine without me. Point is, I don’t need to check Facebook 40 times a day, and neither do you.

We’ve all heard this before, from friends and colleagues, and several times on this blog. Moderation is the key, as it is in most everything in life, but it is so easy to lose sight of that, to get dragged back into the muck of everyone else’s everyday experience, to fear that you will miss something if you don’t keep checking. I feel like the end of The Social Network, where he is clicking and clicking, waiting for a response, except that instead of waiting for a particular response to a specific request from one desired individual, we are waiting for…what? I don’t know, but we keep getting pieces of it, tiny fragments that promise to show more, or to stand in for something we really do miss in our lives. To call it connection is to trivialize it, and risks setting up the tired old dichotomy of “real” (or f2f) connection and the “fake” connection of social networking sites like Facebook. No, online connections are very real, even if different, but, being asynchronous, they can usually wait.