Remaking Liberal Education: The Challenges of New Media

New media and technology can radically alter liberal education. What we need to know now is how much we don't know about learning and teaching.

By T. Mills Kelly

Across the country, enrollments in introductory survey courses—the primary vehicle for giving students a dose of liberal learning—are growing rapidly. Although those of us committed to liberal education wish that this growth were a response to increased student demand, the reality is that ever-expanding general education requirements force many, if not most, of our students into a brief and sometimes painful flirtation with liberal learning. As a result, faculty teaching the introductory survey—in whatever discipline one cares to name—often find themselves face to face with students who wonder why they are in such a course and how they can escape with the least damage to their grade point average. Students understandably worry about how they can consume and internalize the mass of content thrown at them by an instructor trying to cover as much as possible in that one chance she has to expose students to her discipline.

As a humanist, I strongly support the goals of general education. So many of our students today bring intense pragmatism to their choice of courses and majors. If they were not forced to take a history course, a literature course, or a course in the arts, how many of them actually would do so? I suspect that the number is greater than our fears, but still far less than our hopes.

By exposing first- and second-year students to liberal learning, we hope that we will perhaps lure a few of them away from business, computer science, or engineering, and into the liberal disciplines. Along the way, we work hard to teach them something we like to call "critical thinking"; we acquaint them with the epistemologies of several disciplines, inculcate an awareness of and appreciation for diversity of all kinds, and educate them about how to communicate effectively—in speech, writing, images, and, lately, new media. A strong argument can be made that such skills and a broad intellectual horizon substantially improve a citizen's ability to function in our society. But many students do not get or are not given this message. Instead, many see the liberal arts, as represented by general education requirements, as an obstacle to be surmounted on the way to one's "real" studies.

New Media

Faculty and administrators across the country—on campuses large and small—understand the challenges of liberal education, which in many ways are much the same as those Haskins noted a hundred years ago. One challenge that he could not have anticipated, however, is the transformation of our campuses and curricula by new information technologies. Faculty increasingly feel pressure—from administrators, colleagues, and students, or within themselves—to infuse technology into their courses, as though a course Web site or a PowerPoint lecture will somehow improve learning just by its existence.

Anyone who has tried to "ramp up" liberal learning on campus knows that many obstacles must be overcome before we can realize the potential of information technology to transform education. The learning curve required to use new media (beyond simply putting a syllabus up on the Web or creating a basic PowerPoint presentation) is steep, and only a minority of faculty come to this task with any prior training. Most of us simply do not have time to set aside from our teaching, research, or service to become adept users of these technologies.

The continued lack of sufficient technology infrastructure on most campuses means that only a few classrooms have the equipment necessary to permit students and faculty to maximize their experience with new media, and the competition for these rooms is often intense. Moreover, the share of new students on our campuses who come from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds continues to grow, and many of these students lack the skills needed to take advantage of technologically enhanced learning opportunities.

As daunting as these challenges can be, and as familiar as they are, they are administrative problems that can be overcome by increased investment in curricular change, technology infrastructure, and the equalization of student access to technology. The path to their solution may be expensive, but it is not especially complicated.

Tradeoffs

More difficult to address is the potential of new media to transform liberal learning in substantial ways. New technologies offer students immediate multi-media experiences—simultaneous encounters with still and moving images, music, data, and text, for example—that conventional teaching cannot provide. This prospect alone presents a genuinely revolutionary possibility for teaching the liberal arts, especially if students pursue different lines of inquiry simultaneously and interactively in a networked environment.

Moreover, students' use of networked information transfers control over the exploratory aspect of learning from the instructor to the student, freeing the student to pursue his or her own discoveries. When a student clicks on a hyperlink to a Web resource, she embarks on her own intellectual journey, the results of which neither she nor her instructor can predict in advance. These "novices in the archive," to borrow a term from American studies scholar Randy Bass, can access, sort through, and analyze masses of data in ways that we could not imagine even ten years ago.

One of the best-known sources for teaching history and culture is the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, which offers more than seven million digitized primary sources drawn from a hundred different archival collections. Powerful searching software permits visitors to this site to locate information within the collection through keyword and other searches. Such tools allow students to pursue their own lines of inquiry and to engage in the kind of research previously reserved for advanced graduate students and faculty.

At the same time, the interactive and hypertextual nature of new media has the potential to scatter student thinking about questions posed by the sources they encounter. Rather than considering each source carefully and critically, students may become so entranced by the prospect of flitting from one hyperlink to another that they do not engage all (or even most) of the possible meanings and implications of what they read, watch, or hear.

In addition, the tactile aspects of learning disappear when students sit at a screen. They can manipulate data, listen to music, watch a movie, or read text on the computer (although most of them still print out the texts assigned online). But they cannot touch. The very medium that brings unprecedented quantities of information and analysis to students' desktops interposes a barrier between them and the artifacts with which we ask them to grapple.

There are other tradeoffs when it comes to infusing new media into a course. At the heart of these tradeoffs is an important question we have yet to answer: when new media are added to a course, do our students learn better, more, or differently? In other words, is there some sort of measurable beneficial outcome from all the time and money invested in introducing technology into a course? After all, if we cannot point to improved or different learning, then we will have wasted both our time and that of our students.

Fortunately, researchers across disciplines—history, English, chemistry, and mathematics, among others—are inching toward answers to this vexing question. And their answers are rooted in their own epistemologies, rather than being the sole property of cognitive psychologists and schools of education. Although some of this research is being conducted by individuals working in isolation, much of the inquiry is occurring in collaborative endeavors like the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Visible Knowledge Project based at Georgetown University.

Greater Transparency

As a participant in both of these efforts over the past several years, I can say that the researchers affiliated with the projects have framed some of the right questions to ask about technology and liberal learning; some have even begun to offer interesting, albeit tentative, conclusions. I have been able to show that Web-based assignments can induce greater recursive reading of sources, in which students return repeatedly to the sources assigned, often rethinking their first analysis in light of later learning. Similarly, Sherry Linkon's students at Youngstown State University have demonstrated a deeper understanding of the interdisciplinary concepts central to American studies as a result of certain exercises in new media that she created for them. These small successes did not, however, merely result from the adoption of technology in a course. Rather, they grew out of carefully designed assignments based on specific learning objectives and several trials (with accompanying errors along the way) spread over multiple semesters.

What has not come out of any of these efforts—individual or collaborative—is a consensus about what we know, as opposed to what we hope or suspect, about the real impact of technology on student learning. Much more research is needed before such a consensus will emerge.

Still, the very technologies we are experimenting with are expanding our understanding of their utility for teaching our students the liberal arts. So much of what we don't know about student learning is the result of the closed environment of the classroom. The new media, however, have the potential to make teaching and learning transparent.

As scholars we will not accept the results of research that we cannot evaluate for weaknesses, contradictions, or just plain lack of imagination. But as teachers we regularly nod approvingly at colleagues whose student evaluations are strong and who evince a commitment to teaching and learning in our meetings and private conversations. Only rarely do we probe deeper in the way we review a new monograph in our field. Just because our colleagues say they love teaching and their students like them, how do we know that their courses achieved their stated goals? I am not saying that these colleagues are not excellent teachers, nor that their students are not learning. I am simply pointing out that we don't know whether these propositions are true or not.

New information technologies are breaking down the literal and figurative walls that hide our teaching and our students' learning from public view. When students post written work in a threaded discussion forum, it becomes visible to a larger audience, is searchable, and can be analyzed in ways that are all but impossible when that same work is turned in as printed text. And when we respond to our students online, the content of our own critique and support is equally transparent. These new public texts—whether they are in the form of Web sites, hypertexts, online film clips, or other media—offer us opportunities to ask questions about faculty teaching and student learning that were unavailable to us just ten years ago.

As new media open up what is happening in our classrooms, faculty interested in teaching and learning with technology are posing their research questions, charting the progress of that research, proposing conclusions, and ultimately publishing online the results of their inquiries. Examples of this research are available on the Web sites of the Visible Knowledge Project , the University of Nebraska's Peer Review of Teaching project , and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. As more faculty offer their teaching up to public scrutiny, their contributions will help us determine just what is and is not happening when we change our curricula to accommodate information technologies.

To be sure, transparency presents risks. Each of us knows a story—true or apocryphal—of a colleague victimized by negative peer teaching evaluations. However, as our teaching becomes more transparent, critics will find it more difficult to make unsubstantiated charges about it. As long as we hide our classrooms from public scrutiny, any tale told about what goes on in them might just be true. But if we allow the world to peek in and poke around, it becomes all but impossible to make up stories about what is and isn't going on in them.

Unanswered Questions

For all these promising developments, we face a challenge from our students that we are ill equipped to address. As they become more adept users of information technologies, they will probably begin to produce new forms of knowledge that cannot be readily assessed by our conventional measures. In my own discipline, we have relied on the narrative for more than 2,000 years to present historical information and argument. New media, especially the emerging tools for networking information, offer new ways to convey that knowledge and to analyze and organize historical content. How will we assess student work developed through these novel means? How will we know if what students create extends our understanding of the past, or merely complicates it?

Today, we have no answer for these questions. Until we do, we will remain on the brink of new forms of liberal learning rather than fully engaged in them. How will we move forward? Right now, funds for the disciplinary-based classroom research that is needed come solely from individual institutions and rarely amount to more than a course buyout. Real scholarship—that which significantly advances our understanding of complex problems—does not happen when a faculty member teaches one fewer course. That kind of research happens when a scholar takes a semester (or a year) away from his other duties and devotes all of his intellectual resources to the problem at hand.

Across the country, colleges and universities are installing the wireless Web and completing the technology infrastructure on their campuses. We would be better served, however, if our institutions spent some of the scarce funds they are devoting to these goals on research into how the good old wired Web influences student learning and how that new infrastructure can best be used. If we do not find funding for this research soon, we will end up with instruction in general education that is technologically advanced while we are left wondering whether real learning is actually happening.

T. Mills Kelly is assistant professor of history and art history and associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

 Printer-Friendly Page