New Age
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Teaching Technology Yvonne Ng's observations and conclusions Logistics of designing an interdisciplinary course A main objective of my part of this project was to integrate liberal arts components into a traditionally technical course, CSCI 106: Introduction to Computers. Background By "traditionally technical," I mean that certain facts and skills are of primary importance. As a result, exams for this course in the past were traditionally fact-based: Matching terms with definitions, multiple choice questions about historical events or technical processes, and identifying items on a diagram. This approach to testing students' understanding was particularly limiting if we expect students to be technically savvy or fluent. In languages, knowing a wide range of vocabulary or parts of history is seldom considered fluency, so expecting that just these will constitute technological fluency seemed unfounded. However, as with languages, there is a certain body of knowledge a student needs to master, much of which is fact-based, before any real depth of understanding can be generalized or extended. That is, a master of the French language does start off learning the basics of grammar and reams of vocabulary before she can start analyzing pieces of French literature or even the nuances of French philosophy and culture. Unlike the language requirement, technological literacy is formally satisfied in the college (and many other colleges) with a single course. The challenge for me was to cover the breadth required for an introduction, but to also hint at the depth that could be learned with further study. The student population profile Two factors had to be dealt with when teaching this introduction to technology course. The first is the fact that many students are either outright afraid of technology (computer-anxiety) or have a healthy skepticism for it. The second factor is a bit more elusive. Students who want to enter computer technology areas are encouraged to enroll in the class. This means that students who have had many years of computer experience through at least secondary school also come into the class. Some have even gone through certification classes, and with the former economic market, could have gone into the job market and be employed as computer technicians. This certification (the infamous technical school process that promises "a degree in two years") gives students the impression that they already know all there is to know about the field of computers. The first group of students are acutely aware that technology is rapidly changing. Often, the latter are highly confident in their technical skills and are often unaware at how quickly the field has and will continue to change. Together these students form very extreme poles in the student profile that comes into CSCI 106 Liberal Arts Techniques I was educated as an engineer. My education included a host of lab courses, problem sets and problem exams. There was always an answer that was to be boxed, a process that should be followed, and a sense of a rightness and wrongness to any answer. My colleagues and I were shared similar philosophies, however, in that we chose to be educated in a school renowned for its liberal arts. Since my coursework each semester was so polarized, I came to associate the following elements as part of the liberal arts portion of my education-these parts I felt were critical to my intellectual development as a whole, but also with respect to my technical education. These were elements that I sought to incorporate into the CSCI 106 course.
Readings from multiple sources Considering I already had a syllabus full of technical information that students needed to know for the class, the readings were the single easiest way to hint to students that they could 1) apply their knowledge and 2) realize there were different perspectives to the same ideas of technology. Media Analysis Papers Each week, students were required to find articles about computers or technology in a particular media source. Some example sources were newspapers or magazines for a general audience (e.g. Time, People, The Star Tribune), magazines focused on just men or just women (e.g. GQ, Cosmopolitan), and movies (e.g. Desk Set, Swordfish, Apollo 13). Students were to summarize what the article presented and what the information meant to themselves, their major or society as a whole. They were also asked to comment on how the source represented technology, based on the types of articles they found in the source. With respect to the movies, students were expected to comment on how technology was used and represented. The objective of this activity was to make them more aware of technological development and how technology's representation in the media may contribute to their attitudes towards technology. It was also meant to prepare them for their exams which were essay questions about technology. Required Texts Instead of using a textbook written by either technology experts or educators, I chose texts that were written with a more general public audience in mind. The books, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, The Victorian Internet, and Computer Hardware in a Nutshell. The intentions of this reading list were to establish a historical framework, showing how various business practices, personalities, and technological developments contributed to the computer technology we know today. The last book was intended to show students how much they had learned, and serve as a source for term definitions. Discussion and Activities The term started with an activity asking students whether certain artifacts (e.g. a quilt, a hook latch rug, a jar, a pen) were technology. Students then gathered in groups to determine what 5 characteristics of technology would be. Throughout the term, students learned basic technological concepts through activities in which were designed to show them that computer technology was designed to solve problems using simple logic. Occasionally, the students would work in small groups to complete an activity. Their final project involved creating an educational web page. They were to "teach" through their web page, a concept that that they learned in the class. As a result, they learned HTML and JavaScript in order to create an interactive web page using only a text editor. Judy Nollett, a professional web writer, visited the class, discussing writing techniques that were used in commercial web pages. Essay exams Finally, students were given essay exams for their midterm and final exams. They were either asked to describe the meanings of terms or processes in their own words, or given a quotation from a recent article on computers and asked to relate the information in the context of what they learned in class as well as extending this knowledge. For example, students were sometimes asked to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of a particular new product or discuss the new product's social and moral ramifications. Qualitative observations Students It would be a lie to say that the students loved the new components to this class. Some did, but others, who were hoping to avoid writing by taking a technical class, complained quite a bit about the new requirements. When I compared the performance of students on questions that were more "factual" in nature to the those that were more "probing", students, for the most part, showed identical performance in both areas. That is, students who did B work on the factual parts, also did B work in the probing parts. The only exception to this observation were students for whom English was a second language. By working with the O'Neill Writing Center and the ESL professor on campus, students who wanted to improve did by the end of the term. Students tended to ask questions that were less fact-based (what do those letter stand for? when was that invented?) and more process- and connection-based: They asked for more information on topics to understand why. No one ever asked the superficial question "will this be on the test?" Myself This shift was hard for me. Many times I thought, why am I making my life so hard? I am not used to grading essay questions or offering comments on how to improve written work. I am used to helping students come to understand an accepted process but not to handle the various, sometimes conflicting, perspectives that arise when students learn about the non-linear, sometimes illogical, path of technological developments. When one student declared that computers were only products of war and greed, I was not equipped to handle that in any other way than to say that nothing in this world is simple, and the reasons that bring together technological development do not always indicate its sole function. But, by putting these feelings of inadequacy aside, by seeking out and relying on the many experts we have on campus (ESL, writing center, Gabrielle), I greeted my own inadequacies with a chance to learn more and expand my knowledge and capabilities. And it appeared that my students benefited-they learned the facts that they needed to, they achieved greater comfort with the computer (unexpected difficulties did not throw them anymore). One student, who had systematically avoided computers since the 8th grade, showed an amazing increase in confidence. By the end of the semester, she was relaying stories of how she was dealing with technical problems at her workplace. To some extent, they learned how to look at the computer not as something that was thrust upon them, but as something that evolved from great vision and effort. Future effects I have taught this class again since the conclusion of this study. In it, I incorporated even more consciously the objectives that I had in this study.
The last item is the most significant, since through this one exercise, students realized that the class did help them learn more about technology-irregardless of the grade that they finally earned. I know that I will continue my efforts to integrate liberal arts ideas and evaluation methods into my technical classes, and the surveying techniques have helped me better evaluate, aside from exams, how well students prepare for their technologically based future. Project Description Students created a web page that "taught" something that they learned in this class. Each student started at a different level of comfort with computers. These projects here were created by students who had no expertise with programming before the start of the course to those who had created a web page before. Each student challenged herself to go beyond what she already knew. Projects
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Observations:
Yvonne
Ng
Gabrielle Civil
Maria Marchand