When good images go bad

Garr Reynolds does a nice job in this blog post of demonstrating the many mistakes people make when putting images in their presentation slides. The example that resonated most with me was the gratuitious use of stock clip art. I co-taught with someone once who quite literally filled every slide with irrelevant (or relevant but cheesy) clip art. Most of it came from the Microsoft Office Clip Art gallery, I'm sure. I was already pretty sensitive to these kinds of mistakes when creating my own presentations, but I will definitely check more closely from now on.

As a confession, I went through a stage several years ago when I would put cool images from Flickr as the background of my slides. I thought I was being clever, but my students hated it. The images were distracting and made the text hard to read. I stopped doing this eventually, and now when I open up those old presentations I am really embarrassed that I put my students through that for an entire semester.  That semester also resulted in my lowest course evaluations ever.  Could there be a connection between bad PPTs and student disdain for the course? I have more than a few personal examples (and I'm not the bad example in most of them) to verify this claim.

Crutches

I'll never forget my first class session ever of "Teaching with Technology." It was my first semester in the doc program at UVA, and this was the first day of the class I was teaching. After going over the syllabus and other course materials, I tried to get the class to discuss their beliefs about using technology in the classroom. Most of the students made general statements about how they thought it was important because technology is such a part of our society. Everything was going pretty well until one student piped in and said, "I think technology is great as long as students don't use it as a crutch." I had no idea the can of worms that statement would open up. The rest of the semester seemed to be a battle between me and crutch-dom. PowerPoint was perceived as a crutch. Inspiration was a crutch. Digital storytelling was a crutch. The Internet? You guessed it. I guess if one were to follow this line of reasoning completely, everything could be interpreted as a crutch. I mean, Socrates thought printed text was a crutch because it eliminated the need to set everything to memory.

I'm being a little sarcastic, but was my student totally wrong? She had a legitimate concern that students would forgo learning certain skills or knowledge because of their dependency on technology. The first thing that comes to mind is spellchecking. I have graded countless papers with substitutions of "there," "'their" and "they're." I make that mistake myself because I don't take the time to proofread properly.

I recently had another experience where technology was a crutch when my family and I moved to a new city. In the past, I would keep a map of the city in my car and learn the roads as I drove around. Initially, I would make a lot of U-turns, but eventually I would learn the city inside out. Well, this time we had a GPS, and we used it for everything. The upside of using a GPS is that I never got lost (almost never) and I was pretty much on time to everything. I experienced much less frustration learning a new city than in the past. This week, my wife went to visit her parents for a couple of weeks and took the GPS with her. I didn't think this was a big deal until I tried to get from the downtown to my office yesterday. I was utterly lost, and nothing around me looked familiar until I arrived on campus. Why is this? Because I had been staring at the GPS for two weeks instead of looking around me.

Is it possible our students do this? They can get so focused on the tools they are using that they lose sight of the big picture. This is why the role of the teacher is so important. Teachers can structure activities in ways that make the learning objectives the focus, not the technology. They can also scaffold technology use in such a way that students learn without being dependent on the tools.

Scaffolding

I hadn't ever heard the term "scaffolding" until I started grad school, then it seemed like I heard the term used all the time in very different ways. It was similar to the way rhetoric was used when I started my master's program in Communication. Every professor had his or her own definition of "rhetoric," and I quickly learned that if I synthesized all of the definitions then everything was rhetoric. And if a concept is everything, maybe it's really nothing. Well, I don't think that is true of rhetoric or scaffolding. However, after having completed my doctoral program, I will admit that I still don't think I have a good defintion for scaffolding ... the kind of defintion that would make sense to an insurance agent or sales rep whom I happened to meet at a dinner party.

I recently heard a non-education person refer to scaffolding as the ugly stuff surrounding a structure that is used to help make it bright and shiny again. This definition was given in a spiritual context, so it doesn't totally apply to education. However, there are some aspects of this definition that apply to teaching and learning. The first is the notion that scaffolding is something that is eventually removed. A builder or painter does not leave the scaffolding on forever,  just a teacher strives to remove the supports that students rely on to complete academic tasks.

The second application of this definition is that the end product of learning is some sort of improvement growth. The question about what improvement or growth looks like is a totally separate topic, and the value of the such growth and improvement may differ between student and teacher. However, an underlying premise for scaffolding is that there is  an indentifiable change in what a student knows, understands or can do. Otherwise, why take the time to put the scaffolding up in the first place?

I will explore this topic more in coming posts.