Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

Author:Sherry Turkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

“Showing Up to Something Alive”

The college junior who spoke about appreciating the in-person classroom as “showing up to something alive” brings me back to an earlier experience studying technology for educational innovation. Over twenty-five years ago MIT launched Project Athena, an educational initiative that used computer software to substitute for traditional classroom teaching. There, too, educational reformers had the lecture in their sights. But in the 1980s, the idea for reforming the lecture wasn’t an online course but computer simulations that would substitute for demonstrations in lectures. The world of natural sciences—as well as social sciences and the humanities—could come alive, it was argued, if students felt in control of these simulations. MIT faculty were challenged to write the software themselves. Much of what they came up with gave students an experience of being able to manipulate data in a more direct way than had ever been possible before.

But there were also objections, and back then, most of them came from faculty who insisted that the lecture and live demonstration was a sacred space. Faculty talked about the importance of debating with students, responding to questions, and presenting a model for how to argue a point and respect differences. They talked about the sanctity of live demonstrations—the importance of doing science in real time. They wanted students to watch live, imperfect lectures and demonstrations and feel part of an in-person community. They saw the classroom as a place where you learned to love the “as-is” of nature as much as you love the “as-if” of the virtual. They fought hard for their lectures and live demonstrations and kept giving them. Now, a new generation, tutored in simulation, is moving toward putting those lectures and demonstrations on MOOCs.

More than years stand between us and those defenders of the live lecture and the flawed real. These are the decades in which most of our dreams have been centered on what the Internet might bring us. It is not surprising that when MOOCs arrived, we were so willing to imagine an educational revolution that looked to the perfection of virtual possibilities.

The professors who objected to Athena’s incursions into the lecture hall were also defending what Thoreau might have called a “one-chair conversation.” As teachers, they saw themselves thinking aloud, declaring openly. They wanted to lecture because they wanted their students to learn that there is not only something to know but that there are ways, and more ways, to know it and tell it. And questions after the lecture, for them, made the lecture hall also a place of friendship, collaboration, and community. For them, it was at the lecture that one-, two-, and three-chair conversations all came together.

The lecture is the easiest form of in-person pedagogy to criticize. It is the oldest form of instruction. It is the one most likely to have a passive student and an active teacher. It is the one most easily caricatured as having a teacher who might be passive as well, perhaps reading notes that were written many years ago.

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