SUMMARIZE IN THREE SENTENCES. See University Diaries for the essence of higher education.

Significant ideas need to evolve slowly in all of their complexity and ambiguity in order to be grasped. This means questions and comments from students; it means students being able to witness the professor in real time herself evolving, through spontaneous speech and maybe through writing on the blackboard, those ideas. This is known as the life of the mind, kiddies.

The motivation for the post comes from a report on professorial pushback against mindless use of so-called technology in community colleges, where the marginal payoff from developing the life of the mind is likely to be large.

[Physicist Anthony] Pitucco -- along with his Pima [Community College} colleague and fellow presenter, Stewart Barr, chair of philosophy -- aren’t Luddites. They can produce a PowerPoint when they have to. But they argued in an unusual session at this gathering of community college educators that the push to use technology in the classroom has diminished the roles of teaching and education. They said they feel that many sessions for faculty members about the use of technology are the equivalent of “Tupperware parties,” focused on convenience and not education.

Preach it, brother!

The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?

We have to disentangle the deleterious effects of open enrollment from the deleterious effects of substitutes for the life of the mind, but recognizing that each brings a different deleterious effect is a beginning.

Barr said that he thinks the real problem is that professors are over-relying on their PowerPoints, and are losing the art of improvisation. A good faculty member, he said, must be like a good comedian – “knowing the audience, responding to the audience” and either extending one line of thought or regrouping when something hasn’t worked.

Faculty members who base their classes on PowerPoint, he said, seem to lose that flexibility, which he said was crucial to reaching students. “Just because your machine tells you to go, you go.”

That need not be the case: the actor picks up the prop when the moment is there. Some of the commenters point out that the presenter who puts up a slide, then reads the slide to the screen, is unlikely to be any more effective a presenter with a chalkboard, or under a tree with no writing supplies at all.