Teaching with a Screen
Lawrence M. Hinman
Department of Philosophy
University of San Diego
5998 Alcalá Park
San Diego, CA 92110
"Teaching with a Screen," The Socratic Tradition: Essays on Teaching Philosophy, edited by Tziporah Kasachkoff, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).
Four years ago I began teaching with a screen, that is, teaching classes with a computer and projector and screen in the front of the room. Initially, conditions were primitive. The computer for the classroom was kept in a locked storage room down the hall. Before each class, it was necessary to get it out of the room, roll it down to the classroom, hook it up, and then pray that the internet correction worked. There were not speakers, and our academic computing services looked puzzled when asked about sound capabilities. (Napster changed all that.) Now, at least in the newer classrooms, all is changed. The computers are built into the front podium desk, room-darkening shades are on all the windows, the sound system is excellent, the projectors are brighter. All that is necessary is a little key to open the cabinet in the desk.
In the following remarks, I would like to reflect on some of the ways in which the presence of a screen in the classroom has had an effect on my teaching. The presence of the screen serves to bring more clearly into focus exactly what is happening in a classroom. At the same time, I will talk about some of the technology, especially the software, and indicate some of its strengths and weaknesses.
The impact of the screen in the classroom has been mixed for me, depending on the type of course being taught. It has been most helpful and least intrusive when teaching logic. Teaching ethics with a screen, on the other hand, has proved to be a more mixed experience. In some ways the screen was a positive factor, but in other ways it proved to be an impediment to the most important activities of the classroom. Let’s look at these issues in more detail.
For the past twenty-five years, I have taught introductory logic every year and, for the past fifteen years, have used Pat Hurley’s Concise Introduction to Logic. In some ways, the course teaches itself. Teaching logic involves helping students to develop certain skills. In order to develop those skills, they need a certain amount of knowledge and understanding. Teaching logic then involves (a) conveying the requisite information (such as the conventions for Venn diagrams) to the students, (b) helping the students to understand that information through explanations and examples, and (c) helping them to develop proficiency in the application of the concepts they have studied. Classroom time is devoted primarily to the first two tasks. Since the amount of information conveyed in logic is in fact relatively small, much of class time is devoted to understanding the key concepts being presented. Homework is the principal way in which students develop a proficiency in using these concepts. Going over homework during class time is usually directed toward uncovering misunderstandings of the concept.
In teaching logic with a screen, I found the screen to be a tremendous help. In logic as well as other courses, the use of the screen was integrated with a course website. I started running my own web server in 1994, primarily because our support from academic computing for web sites was so bad it came closer to resistance than support. In the end, this proved to be a tremendous help, since it made web publishing and the development of course web sites far easier.
The introductory logic course gradually evolved to have the following components. First, the full syllabus, including with schedule with all the class assignments, were on the web. This was particularly helpful, because changes to the schedule could be posted on the web site and even students who missed class could access them easily.
The on-line syllabus quickly evolved into a substitute for handouts. Many of the materials I would previously have duplicated on paper and distributed in class, I could now put on the Web for easy student access. Sample quizzes and exams, review questions, case studies, and the like were easy to put on-line for students to use. It also became easy to include links to other on-line logic resources that would be beneficial to my students. Ron Blatt, for example, wrote an elegant Java application for teaching moods and figures on Venn diagrams, and he is happy to have links pointing to it.
Second, answer keys for the homework assignments were posted on the web. Although students are advised not to consult the answer keys while they are doing their homework, they are encouraged to check over their work with the answer key to see where they might have made mistakes. Not only was this advantageous to students who missed class, but it made classroom work easier as well. Instead of writing on the board in my semi-legible way, it was now possible to project neatly typed or computer-drawn answers to homework assignments. When it was time to go over homework assignments in class, all that I had to do was click on the appropriate link on the web-based class schedule and the answer key for that set of exercises would pop up on the screen.
Having answer keys on the website proved to be a problem in a way that I had not initially anticipated: because these website were open site accessible to everyone, students in courses other than my own also had access to those answer keys, and in some cases their instructors did not want them to have access. Dedicated course software packages (which I do not use) solve this problem by restricting access to the whole site to authenticated users only. In the end, I made access to answer keys password—protected so that only my students could access those files.
This issue raised for me an interesting new area of academic integrity problems. Is it cheating for students in a course to surf the web and find other course sites that can help them, perhaps in ways that their instructor would not like but which were not explicitly forbidden? Jim Moor has argued that new computer technologies can create “policy vacuums,” areas in which we have yet to develop explicit rules to guide conduct. This is an example of such an area. Often instructors do not have an explicit policy forbidding students from accessing other course sites or restricting the ways in which they can use those sites, and usually this is because they had not even thought of the possibility.
When issues such as this arise, it seems like all three groups involved have responsibilities. First, webmasters must be responsible in choosing what is to be put on the web and what kind of access will be permitted. Second, instructors need to be aware of new technologies and the ways in which they may be used by their students and to publish clear policies about these matters for their students. Third, students must act responsibly by asking their instructors whether use of a particular web-based resource is permitted if there is any reason to doubt whether it is appropriate to use that source. In some classes (such as mine), students are encouraged to use answer keys responsibly to help them to better understand the material; they are not to be used as a substitute for doing the work. In other classes, especially where homework is graded, instructors may prefer students not to have access to answer keys at all. When they encounter a grey area, responsible students should always ask instructors to clarify policy.
The third on-line component included in the class schedule were the PowerPoint presentations of the material. Gradually, I developed a set of PowerPoint presentations that covered all the topics covered in the class. These became tightly integrated into the on-line schedule. It is possible to save PowerPoint presentations for the Web in such a way that users of the website can play these presentations full-screen, moving through each slide a click at a time or using a navigator to go to a particular slide. It is also possible to put the PowerPoint presentation on the web so that others can simply right click on the link and download the presentation to their own computer. Often this option is better for students who have only dial-up access to the website, since it is much faster and then the presentation can be viewed off-line.
PowerPoint presentations in logic basically worked well. They are extremely easy to create. A certain amount of animation can be added to the individual slides, although this is still fairly limited. In the classroom, PowerPoint was very useful for popping up definitions of fallacies, examples of particular fallacies, and the like. It was also very helpful in more formal areas. Venn diagrams could be presented, one premise at a time, in a neat and colorful fashion.
Although PowerPoint is very easy to use and thus highly efficient in terms of time spent in developing a presentation, it is limited in terms of its flexibility in two ways. First, it has very limited animation capabilities. Basically, PowerPoint is designed to be an electronic overhead program, flashing up one page of text or drawings after another. This is often precisely what we want to do, so sometimes when we want to do something more than this, PowerPoint falls short. Second, PowerPoint is not interactive, that is, it is not possible to click a button and interact with the program, except to navigate from one slide to the next. For classroom presentations, this is usually not a major issue, but for on-line use by students, interactivity is often highly desirable.
Animation is often important in logic to capture the flow of arguments. When I taught with a blackboard or whiteboard, I often found myself drawing arrows, indicating the way in which arguments flowed, the impact of one premise on another, and the like. It is precisely this dynamic sense of arguments that is difficult to capture in a static program such as PowerPoint.
There are at least two good ways of creating animations for the web. The first and more powerful way is through the use of a dedicated animation program. The best of these is one from Macromedia called Flash; recently Adobe has released a competing product, LiveMotion, that can create movies in the popular Flash format. Flash is highly powerful, has a full scripting language, and can create very sophisticated on-line animations that stream over the web quite efficiently. Whereas PowerPoint uses the metaphor of a slide or page as its basic unit, Flash uses a timeline and divides a movie into individual scenes.
Flash creates its drawings in what are called vector graphics. Typically, most drawings and pictures are done in bitmaps. This means that each pixel or dot has a specific numeric value indicating a particular color. (The number of possible colors is determined by the length of the number; a picture might contain eight possible colors or, in its longest form, the picture could contain sixty-four million possible colors.) Thus these pictures are a series of dots. They do not resize very well, and if enlarged they quickly become grainy.
Vector graphics, on the other hand, create pictures through mathematical equations that describe how lines should be drawn and, generally, how the picture should be constructed. As a result, vector graphics are independent of size. This proves to be a tremendous advantage for detailed drawings and pictures, since it is possible to zoom in without losing clarity. You could easily, for example, zoom in on a region of a picture fifty times, and the picture would be as clear and crisp as it was originally. As a result, it is possible to make very detailed drawings, such as argument diagrams or timelines, in a way that allows the viewer to then zoom in and see the details with crystal clarity.
Flash is also a great program for creating web-based interactions that involve a response from the user. One can, for example, create a quiz in Flash that records responses to a database or file that is then sent to the instructor and, at the same time, gives immediate feedback to the user. This makes it easy to combine quizzing someone with teaching them.
The other way in which you can create dynamic pages is by using Dynamic HTML. The advantage of DHTML is that it does not require a plug-in, whereas Flash needs the Flash player installed on the viewer’s compute. The disadvantage of DHTML is that it does not behave the same in all browsers. An effect that works perfectly in Internet Explorer 5.5 may not work at all in Netscape Navigator 6. It does, however, easily handle things like on-line quizzes and interactions. In my experience, the best program for creating DHTML and on-line interactions is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX; the earlier version of this program was called Dreamweaver Ultradev.
Typically, when we teach with a screen currently, we have both a screen and a whiteboard in the front of the room. The screen has a certain kind of autonomy or independence from the instructor, whereas the whiteboard is clearly the direct instrument of the professor. Recently, these two things have been combined into one. The most successful version of this combination is called SmartBoard. It allows the teacher to project PowerPoint slides onto the board, but then to draw on the board, pointing out important points and the like. Moreover, one can easily save the slide with the writing on it to a file by simply tapping the screen. The result is that instructors can interact much more dynamically with the screen and at the same time the results of these interactions can be easily saved, archived, and made available to students.
Before turning to the issue of teaching ethics with a screen, let me call attention to some additional considerations not previously mentioned.
Many Boards vs. One Screen. First, when you teach with a whiteboard, it’s often possible to fill up several boards before having to erase anything. During a logic class, I might have one or two board filled with reference material helpful to that day’s material, and I might use one or two more boards to work out problems. One of the limitations of teaching with a screen is that you can only have one screen at a time visible for the students. This becomes a difficulty when you are working on something that cannot fit on a single screen.
Equal Access. Second, it is important to consider the issue of equal access to computers. If some students are put at a disadvantage because they do not have sufficient access to computers to compete on an equal footing with other students in the class, then we have an unfair situation. Until two years ago, I always made sure that students without computers (or the requisite skills) could get all the same materials as the computer-savvy students. Two factors have prompted me to change this policy. First, we have sufficient computer lab access that students can get on a workstation at any time for as long as they want. Second, I have increasingly felt that students who do not use a computer are precisely the students who need to be encouraged to become computer-literate. Typically, one class period is conducted in a computer lab where all the students have workstations. This is a perfect time to set up a buddy system in which the more computer-savvy students help those who are less comfortable with the technology.
The Darkened Classroom. One of the more interesting aspects of teaching with a screen is that it alters the space of the classroom. The room is usually darkened, especially when the projector is old-fashioned. There is often noise from both the computer and the projector, although this too is diminished as equipment improves. Most interestingly, the lived space of the classroom is altered. Prior to the use of a screen, the classroom space was typically divided into two areas: the instructor’s turf and the students’ turf. With the addition of a screen, students and teacher are often put on one side, while the screen is on the other. There is something truly bizarre here as both students and professor stare at the one thing in the classroom that is inanimate, the screen. We will return to this issue below in the discussion of teaching ethics.
Equal Appreciation. Fourth, we should consider the extent to which the use of computers will transform not only how we teach but also what we teach. Years ago Marshall McLuhan told us that “the medium is the message.” This is clearly true in this context. In the future, we will gravitate toward what we can put on a screen, especially what we can put on a screen in a compelling manner that commands students’ attention. Students (and teachers, for that matter) are talented in many different ways, and we must be careful not to overlook or devalue talents that do not manifest themselves in computer-mediated communication. In order to see some of the ways in which this can be an issue, let’s turn to a consideration of teaching ethics with a screen.
Somewhat to my surprise, the experience of teaching ethics with a screen was much more ambivalent than my experience with teaching logic. This is all the more surprising to me because I spend a significant portion of my day working on my ethics websites, Ethics Updates (http://ethics.sandiego.edu) and Ethics Videos (http://ethics.sandiego.edu/video/). These sites now receive about two million visits a year, and I have been a strong and active proponent of putting ethics-related materials on the web. I was, to say the least, well disposed toward teaching ethics with a screen; indeed, I expected it to be a smashing success.
The experience certainly was not terrible. Student evaluations were fine, and in many ways the course offered students a rich experience: on-line videos, including interviews with some of the authors in our anthology as well as videos of many of the class lectures, on-line PowerPoint presentations, like to current newspaper articles on the topics being considered, case studies, discussion forums, journals, and the like. But I found myself discontent with the classroom experience.
Upon reflection, the source of that discontent centered on the use of PowerPoint presentations in the classroom. On a superficial level, the problem was that the presentations locked me into a strict—perhaps constricting—agenda. While this was fine for logic, it was not fine for ethics. This led me to asking why an agenda would be less important in ethics. Was it simply that the material in ethics was far more interesting than logic and thus digressions were more attractive? Although this is true, it is not the full or even the primary issue. More to the point, there is an additional element in the process of teaching ethics that is very minimal in the process of teaching logic. Recall the three elements in teaching logic that were discussed above: (a) conveying information, (b) fostering understanding, and (c) developing proficiency in applications. All of these elements are certainly present in teaching ethics, but there is one additional element: self-reflection.
Typically, in teaching ethics, it is not only important for students to understand the concepts and arguments being considered in the course, although that is certainly a necessary and highly important part of the course. In the area of ethics, understanding also involves self-understanding; that is, to grasp and evaluate moral concepts and theories, we need to understand what our own beliefs and practices are in this area. This may be done in journals and in papers, but it is also something that can be done very effectively in the classroom. This is the root problem with presentation software, whether PowerPoint or some other version: it locks the class into a fixed path that can often prevent instructors from exploring issues that relate to the interplay between self-understanding and understanding of the moral concepts.
If this sound like Gadamer, that’s because it is. In Truth and Method, he clearly saw the intimate link between understanding and self-understanding. For Gadamer, philosophy is fundamentally a dialogue or conversation, and the basic movement of philosophical discourse was not the lecture but the back-and-forth movement. It is precisely this “to and fro” movement that is interrupted by presentation software. Consider an example.
When considering issues of animal rights and welfare, students often find that this issue forces them to look at some of their most basic presuppositions about personhood and respect. For many Christian students, there is a deep ontological divide between human beings, who have immortal souls and who have been distinguished by the fact that the Son of God became a human being, and all other living beings, who possess neither of these characteristics. We often discuss contrasting traditions, such as Hinduism, in which both animals and humans have immortal souls, in which the same soul may be incarnated at one time as an animal and at another time as a human being, and in which some Gods such as Ganesh clearly take animal form. This is precisely a moment when students are likely to reach deep into their own experience and respond with a “yes, but…” objection that can lead to the heart of their beliefs. When they are in the passive mindset encouraged by presentations, they are much less likely to voice such a response.
The issue of self-understanding is not, of course, limited to ethics. There are many disciplines, such as literature, where it is crucial, and these disciplines are subject to the same considerations outlined here for ethics.
There is a natural reply to some of the issues raised here: simply turn off the projector and enter into a dialogue with the students. Basically, this is exactly the right thing to do, and one of the secrets of teaching well with a screen is knowing when to shut it off. However, when a class begins with a PowerPoint presentation, students often settled into a passive mindset. They see their role at that point as being passive absorbers of information; questions may be asked for clarification, but even that seems intrusive to many students. Their job is to sit, listen, and take notes. Presentation software sets up an expectation of passivity among students, and often it is difficult to shift from that passive modality to a more active one without some strong stimulus.
Some of these issues can eventually be addressed with better technology. The first step in doing this is moving to a combination of a traditional whiteboard and an interactive screen, which would allow the instructor to write, draw, an annotate on the whiteboard in a way that could be integrated with the presentation software and which could then be archived for students. This is what SmartBoard does, and there undoubtedly will be many similar competing products in the future. These remarks are certainly not meant as the endorsement of any particular product, but rather the endorsement of a specific kind of product. What products like SmartBoard do is to allow the instructor to interact with what is happening at the moment in the classroom, not merely present what was planned to happen. As argued above, this is not simply a matter of glitzy bells and whistles but rather an issue of developing technologies that are responsive to the responses of students and, in particular, are appropriate for raising issues of self understanding as well as understanding the material itself.
An additional way in which this technology could be improved to allow more responsiveness to students’ question would involve creating an on-line bank of mini-responses to specific questions that could be called up easily. Presentations tend to be bulky and to be used in their entirety, but often it is helpful to be able easily to pull up a set of three or four slides that address a specific question. This would not be a difficult programming task, although to the best of my knowledge no such interface currently exists, but it would be extraordinarily useful as we come to depend on presentation software more and more in the classroom.
Teaching with a screen is here to stay. Increasingly we will find ourselves using computer-equipped classrooms that actually work well and easily, and as these classrooms become more common, the tacit expectation that they will be used will grow in strength. In some cases, this will be extraordinarily helpful and may well improve the quality of classroom education. Yet there is a danger as well that it will encourage students to be passive and to see their role in life primarily as absorbers of knowledge rather than as active thinkers. Particularly in courses where self-knowledge is an important component, it is important to preserve the classroom space for dialogue and interaction, for the back-and-forth movement of conversation that has been at the heart of philosophy since Plato’s dialogues.