Pacific Lutheran University

On June 30, 2008, the 20th anniversary of crossing the threshold to the modern Internet and all that is to come was celebrated at “Supercomputing Online.”

Scene took the occasion to assemble five PLU faculty members for a conversation about technology and its affect on teaching and learning. The faculty forum was moderated by Robert Marshall Wells, assistant professor of communications, and included Spencer Ebbinga, assistant professor of art; Greg Johnson, associate professor of philosophy; Rose McKenney, associate professor of geosciences/environmental studies; and Bridget Yaden, assistant professor of Spanish and director of the Language Resource Center.

This is an excerpt from that forum and first appeared in Scene. It has been edited for space and clarity.

Do you use Facebook? Is there a place for Web-based tools like Facebook or YouTube in the classroom?

McKenney: I have a Facebook page, but I use it to communicate with people in the field. I don’t use it in any other way.

Johnson: I do have a page. I started using it about a year and a half ago because I found out, with maybe the exception of two or three students, every student has a Facebook page. And this is a very real world for them. I have a profile and I use it to communicate with students and for office hours. Are these hours “real” or “virtual?” All I know is that it has worked well … until the semester is over and I usually delete these students from my “friend” list. Many, I have found, are absolutely offended to no end. They come up to me and say, “You deleted me from your list of friends! Why?” And I’d look at them, and say quite frankly, “Well, I’m not your friend.” You can imagine the reaction, but it again helps me to think about not only the “real/virtual” distinction, but in this case how they use such so-called “social networks” to define not only themselves but what constitutes a friend.

You can also use technology to introduce philosophical questions. For instance, I use YouTube in my existentialism class. I’ve also used clips of “The Simpsons” to talk about a range of issues…Students, again, lead the way here in merging their academic lives with popular culture.

Yaden: I remember when Rona Kaufman (associate professor of English) started off her class with a video clip on the use of the direct and indirect pronoun. When to use “who” and “whom.” If you start speaking directly about a topic like that in class you’ll put them to sleep. So she starts off with a two-minute clip from “The Office.” In the clip, it states that “whom” is not a real word, but one that professors make up to scare students. This kind of approach is a hook, a motivator, and lets students know that faculty are interested in what happens outside of class.

Ebbinga: I had my students do a project in new media for YouTube, where they had to publish a stop animation video piece. One consideration in the project is that they had to publish it on YouTube. I was trying to introduce and expand the scope of what art could be, that it isn’t just taking a chisel to a piece of stone or oils to canvas. Art can be so much more, and we should explore technologies like this.

Wells: I can hear several of our colleagues protest that this is dumbing-down content.

Johnson: Perhaps, but then I would ask what exactly does it mean to “smart-up” content? Who is to say that a clip from “Fight Club” is less effective for addressing the question of self-liberation than, say, Kierkegaard’s “Sickness Unto Death”? Both are resources, and whereas the former reflects more the lives of students, the latter reflects an old philosophy prof like me!

Your point, however, raises the question of lived experience as it relates to what we do in a classroom setting, not in the sense of simply relating material to students but showing how their questions have a history. They have similarly been asked before, even if in different settings. It may be that faculty tend to think that life revolves around the seminar setting and that “real” teaching occurs in this way. It’s just not the case for students. They get their lives from “The Hills,” “Rock of Love” and so on. I can use their interests to show that philosophy has a history of asking similar questions. For instance, Aristotle on the nature of friendship, or the existential question of an authentic self work perfectly in discussions of Facebook. But, I have to know something about their lives, which is why I am convinced more and more that faculty need to become a little more “multilingual” here in the sense of learning about the lives of students. And this means, among other things, letting go of the “high culture/low culture” distinction.

McKenney: In science, if you try to teach something and don’t hook it back to the real world experience, it’s going to seem detached. And how long are they going to remember that?

Content Development Director Barbara Clements compiled this report. Comments, questions, ideas? Please contact her at ext. 7427 or at clemenba@plu.edu. Photo by University Photographer Jordan Hartman.