An Essay on Technology in the
Classroom:
Do You Want to Be On the Cutting Edge or to Be Blissfully Out of Date?
Bob Jensen at Trinity University
The hard copy "frozen version" of this essay is shown below.
The online "living verison" of this essay is available at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
The online living version is both longer and has many more helper links than the
frozen version below. Please send any comments for improving this advice
to new faculty to rjensen@trinity.edu.
Message from Professor Griffin on March 14, 2000
Bob
I am the chair of the new faculty handbook committee (T&C section, AAA) and am following up on a suggestion made by Kathy Sinning, one of the committee members. She indicated you might be willing to provide an essay on using technology in the classroom. Is this something you might consider? If it would be helpful to you, I could provide you with copies of the material we have to date for the handout or simply a copy of the table of contents. I look forward to hearing from you. If you have questions, let me know. LynnLynn Griffin Department of Accounting School of Business North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro, NC 27411 336-334-7581 ext. 6008
Bob Jensen's Essay for the American Accounting Association's New Faculty Handbook
Important Questions With Frustrating Answers
Educational Technologies That Will Not Be Focused On in This Essay
It is assumed that virtually all accounting educators make use of presentation software (often PowerPoint), email, and spreadsheet software (usually Excel). These are outside the focus of this essay except to recommend that presentation software, as well as lecturing in general, be used sparingly in class. If students have five courses in a day and all five instructors flash repeated PowerPoint screens in front of them, the students are brain dead by the end of the day. Classtime should keep students active as much as possible with case discussions, student presentations, team tasks, etc. Use of e-mail with students is recommended unless the demands on the instructor's time become onerous.
This essay will not focus upon courses that never meet synchronously (at regular class times) or only meet a few times a semester. Courses that are virtually asynchronous require education technologies. My discussion of asynchronous education can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm.
Examples of Educational Technologies That Will Be Focused On in This Essay
Although I will not address each of the topics below in any kind of detail, it may be useful to note that I am referring in this paper to the following types of technologies:
Examples of what accounting professors can and are doing with educational technologies can be found in the Accounting Coursepage Exchange (ACE) program sponsored by the American Accounting Association. See http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/teach.htm
The American Accounting Association has some great Faculty Development helpers at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/facdev.htm. For example, you can read about both submissions and winners of the prestigious Innovation in Accounting Education awards.
Will educational technologies improve the performance of students and make them better prepared to be life long learners?
I don't think that there is any doubt that accounting students must learn more than ever about information technologies and the web. Business reporting is going to change dramatically with web reporting. It is vital that all accounting faculty and students become familiar with the IASC research report on this topic at http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_26.htm
In the short run, we will see rapid changes in university curricula to adjust to powerful student demands for e-Commerce. This complicated aspect of commerce is a high priority in business education. There are new e-Business and e-Commerce sections being formed at the AACSB --- see http://www.aacsb.edu/e-business/index.html.
My bottom line prediction is that education of the future will focus on development and use of knowledge bases. My analogy here is a comparison of a Model T Ford with an F-17 airplane. At age 14, my father could tear apart every component of a Model T, jerry-rig some of the parts in a barn, and have the car up an running in no time. Educators of the past prided themselves on being integrative scholars who could recite the major knowledge of many disciplines and produce a graduate who knew an amazing amount about a lot of things such as history, economics, psychology, literature, music, mathematics, statistics, etc.
When confronted with an F-17, however, an expert mechanic hardly knows where to begin. It takes a huge team of very highly skilled specialists to tackle an F-17, and that team may not be able to fix all of the 50 computers aboard a single aircraft. The knowledge base of virtually every discipline is becoming so immense that the way in which scholars approached issues in the 20th Century will change radically in the 21st Century. Future scholars will not necessarily be narrowly-focused specialists, but they will be adept at using technologies to integrate stored knowledge bases and attempt to creatively add to both the specialized components of knowledge and the integration of knowledge. The goal of education does not change dramatically over time, but the process will change radically. Learned teams will replace learned individuals. Learning will take place in real time at any place rather than in discrete time periods in classrooms.
Finally on the wild side we have a book entitled the "Brave New World: the Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-first Century," by Ray Kurzweil --- http://www.kurzweiltech.com/WIRED/. He forecasts that before Year 2050, we will be able to inject nanobots in our blood stream that will contain knowledge bases that attached to parts of our brain. How wonderful it would be if we could inject "FAS 133 Tutorial" with a needle and then know all about this standard without having to read or sweat. I will leave it up to you as to how futuristic you want to take this investigation of knowledge in a needle.
There is that nagging issue of what the accounting profession will become. Issues of auditor independence are enormous. But the profession must not follow the way of the railroads who never looked beyond transporting across iron rails. The railroads viewed themselves as "rail roads" rather than transportation companies. They missed their opportunities to expand into airline and communication ventures. The accounting profession is at a similar juncture. If public accounting moves backwards from its new ventures, it stands the risk of being a system of regulated "rail roads" rather than a relevant and viable profession in the 21st Century. My latest website on this issue is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/cpaaway.htm.
Be that as it may, there is still the question of what technologies you use in your classes and how much you and your students rely upon such technologies. It is possible to conclude with a sigh that adapting to newer technologies is just not for you and your courses. Familiar reasons or excuses include the following:
In spite of the numerous excuses and reasons why instructors may resist using technologies other than PowerPoint and e-mail, my advice to you is think of what is best for your students. Wouldn't it be awful if the only writing students did in college was in English composition courses? It would be terrible if the only time they made an oral presentation was in a speech class. The best universities have students writing and speaking in virtually all courses. The same should be true of computing and networking technologies. These skills and resources should be used in virtually all courses.
Should I give students what they want or what they need?
Generally, good students will master the material under most any pedagogy as long as they are clear about what they have to learn. They may, however, not learn at the same rates under different pedagogies. Technologies generally increase the rate of learning, but they do not necessarily improve long-term recall of what has been learned.
Pedagogy may have more dramatic impacts on long-term memory than on short term performance across a given semester. These issues are taken up in Working Paper 265 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm. One of the real problems is that what students want versus what they need differs dramatically. Students want us to make complex material fun, easy, and crystal clear. They want us to teach as if we can pour knowledge into their brains like a stop at a full-service gas pump! But for their own good, they are better off struggling on their own with lots of sweat, stress, ambiguity, competition, and even fear. It's a pity that our brains tend to work better when things learned were not learned easily! Thus we have a conflict between what students want and what they really need. There are no easy shortcuts with or without technology. One problem with technology is the urge to make learning unambiguous and crystal clear in hypertext and hypermedia routings. But preparing students for ambiguities they will encounter in their careers should entail learning to cope with ambiguities that do not have routing lights. Students think learning should be on a lighted path, when, in fact, the best learning entails groping in the dark. Unfortunately students do not usually appreciate this until they graduate and discover that most roads in life are not lighted.
Formal studies of technology versus traditional courses are almost useless. One problem is that technologies keep changing, and therefore anything discovered a year ago may not apply under new software, new learning materials, new uses of chat rooms, etc. Another problem is the Hawthorne effect problem that tends to bias outcomes in favor of technology applications. Still another problem is that both instructors who use technology and instructors who do not use technology tend to revise, adapt, add to, and otherwise change courses every time the course is taught. Comparing performance over time is very risky even when comparing two or more semesters of traditional courses. In addition, each class tends to take on a life of its own. For example, a case that worked wonderfully in one course may fall flat in another course.
There is little doubt that technology probably improves both the effectiveness and efficiency of training (military experiments repeatedly bear this out). This may carry over into education, but with education there are many more variables and much more complex goals in learning and motivation. Results are less clear cut in the education arena. Hence, any published study comparing educational outcomes should always be viewed with skepticism.
Other advantages and disadvantages are dealt with much more extensively in Chapter 2 entitled "Why? The Paradigm Shift in Computer-Aided Teaching/Instruction and Network Learning" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245ch02.htm
How can I author my web materials?
If you must use your school's web servers, chances are that you will have to use whatever systems are already in place. I do not recommend that you operate from your own web server. It is too costly and troublesome to maintain your own server, invest in backup servers, and have around-the-clock technician service for a web server in your office. If your students are depending on a web server, you just do not want to have the server be unreliable. In fact, some universities have such unreliable servers that faculty have chosen to install courses on some of the "External System Web Authoring Shell Alternatives That Do Provide External Servers" --- see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm.
Alternative web authoring and delivery systems are critically analyzed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245soft1.htm
Should I Publish My Research and Teaching Materials on the Web?
This is a complex issue for which there is no easy answer. The spirit of education and research is to freely share your intellectual property. I tend to do this more than many professors, and the messages of gratitude from literally all parts of the world sometimes bring tears to my eyes. But for younger faculty, such a spirit of sharing must be constrained by individual circumstances. Universities have an interest in both your course materials and your research. You must be aware of what restraints are imposed by your employer.
In the 21st Century, the rights of professors versus the rights of universities are being pitted against one another. These issues, including the lawsuit of Harvard University against one of its own professors, is reviewed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm.
There is no crime in putting a price on your intellectual property. The Harvard Business School charges $10,000 just to have breakfast with selected faculty members. If there were no monetary rewards for development of both hard copy and hypermedia learning materials, the world will be deprived of great works that would just not be developed without rewards for effort and risk taking.
For tenure, promotion, performance rewards, self respect, and reputation, professors must conduct research and publish research findings in refereed outlets (usually hard copy and/or online research journals). When an article is published isn such outlets, it is common for the author to lose control over distribution rights. The journal that accepts your paper may not allow you to make that paper available for free at a website. In some ways that is unfortunate because this freezes your paper in time. I prefer to publish "living documents" that sometimes change almost daily. For example, the document you are reading now will be frozen in the American Accounting Association's New Faculty Handbook. However, I am assuming that the AAA will also let me keep this document posted at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm. I will probably update and modify the online living document from time to time. That is what makes web publishing so great. It does, however, create refereeing problems if the author can freely change the content of a document that was refereed and an earlier point in time.
The following appears under "Promotions, Tenure, & Risk-Taking by Daring Educators" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm
Dear Bob,
Thanks for sending along your web assignment and its rationale. I’m interested in doing a book-length project that has web links to my own set of materials and exercises. Or even doing the whole book in this way.
Question is, does one receive academic credit for producing work on the internet? Have you ever discussed this with the Administration?
Thanks,
[Name of the Trinity University Faculty Member Deleted]
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Reply from Bob Jensen
Hi ______
One problem with web publishing is that if you submit your stuff to a top journal, the editor wants you to hide your research from the world until the journal gets around to publishing your work (which in a recent case took five years "in press" for an accepted Jensen and Sandlin article to finally get published). I recently had another paper accepted for publication. Then I had a long ‘fight" with the editor over whether I can keep a "live" and ever-changing version of the essence of that paper at my web site.
I have discussed web publishing with administrators in many universities. They have not and cannot take much of an official position without action by the faculty. Matters of promotion and tenure are pretty well decided all along the way (departmental faculty, Chair, Dean, and P&T comittee) with rare administrative reversals of recommendations. Faculty bring individual biases into peer evaluation, and ,at the moment, web publishing is a new thing to most of them. Until the peer evaluation culture is changed, web publishing will not count heavily toward promotion, tenure, or take home pay.
The main issue is that web publishing is not refereed with the same rigor as refereeing in leading journals, or, in most cases, is not refereed at all. This is a concern because it is pretty easy to disguise garbage as treasure at a web site. Leading journals will one day offer refereeing services for web publishing and may, in fact, do away with their hard copy editions. Until then what do we do? Most certainly we do not put up a web counter and brag about the number of hits --- Playboy probably gets more hits per day than all professors combined.
Somewhat of a substitute for hard core refereeing is a record of correspondence that is received from scholars and students who use your web documents. This lacks the anonymity of the refereeing process. Also, there are opportunities to cheat (I’ll lavishly praise your work if you will adore mine in a succession of email messages), but most scholars have more integrity than to organize that sort of conspiracy. If you have a file of correspondence from people that your peers know and respect, chances are that your peers will take notice. You can include copies of this correspondence in your performance reports, but this process is more anecdotal than the genuine blind refereeing process.
Until a rigorous web refereeing process is established, those who must evaluate a web publisher must do more work. They must study your web materials and make their own judgments regarding quality and relevance. It is much easier to simply tick off the refereed hits (for when the binary scorer comes to write against your name, he writes only ones or zeros; to him the unread articles are all the same). It is easy to become too cynical about the refereeing process. We have all had frustrations with what we considered to be bad referees, including acceptances of our weaker output and rejections of our best work. At my web site, I have a section for my "big ones that got away" (see http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/#BigOnes). Refereeing is a little like democracy --- it ain’t perfect, but until a better system comes along it beats the alternatives over the long haul.
My trouble, and I suspect that others have the same problem, is that web publishing is addictive. The responses that you get from around the world set "your tail wagging." I have published many papers and several books (a sign of my advanced age), but I have never had the "action" following hard copy publication that I get from web publication. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that more people than you can imagine stumble upon your web documents while using a search engine on the web. Not all of them send you nice messages, but a typical message received by me is reproduced be low:
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Messages like that shown above "keep my tail wagging." I even like the messages that signal items to be corrected --- at least those users found my stuff worth correcting. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to Mike Kearl (a Trinity Psychology professor) discuss what makes his "tail wag." Mike also discusses the issue that you raised in your message to me. The web address for Mike’s audio on this is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm . That particular article is entitled "Daring Professors" and contains audio and email messages from other faculty members who were willing to take some chances with their careers.
I can offer you a wagging tail and small pay raises if you rely entirely on web publishing as evidence of scholarship. Old hounds like me can opt for more tail wagging, but young pups need more nourishment shoved into the other end. (Actually I still publish hard copy to maintain respectability, but I personally am far more proud of my "living" web research documents than of my annual refereed "dead" hits over the past few years).
Until the evaluation culture is changed in peers who hold you on a
leash, try to do web publishing alongside your refereed journal publishing. But don’t
let the tail wag the dog or you will wind up in the dog house. If your book or journal
editor objects to having your working documents published at your web site, remember who
your master is at all times. His title is Editor in Chief!
An interesting paper by William H. Geoghegan at IBM Academic Consulting is entitled
"WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY?". It discusses some of
the issues as to why the faculty are not yet adapting to education technologies. Estimates
are that as much as 95% of higher education faculty are not using these technologies.
Geoghegan analyses social and diffusion barriers in particular. His paper is at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html
Bob Jensen
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134
Acknowledgement: I want to thank my colleague Petrea Sandlin for making some editorial revisions and suggestions for this document.