The digitization of education - A Memoir

This week the Reflective Writing club invites us to consider the impact of digital technologies. For me, the best entry point to explore this topic is to consider how my experience has evolved over time. Only then will I have enough perspective to reflect on my relationship with such technologies and how they influence my learning and how I interact with students. 

As a xennial - that strange micro-generation that is not quite Gen-X, but not fully Millenniel either - I have been profoundly shaped by the advent of digital technologies over my lifetime. Unlike my students, I can remember life before the internet. However, unlike many of my colleagues and mentors, I entered the New Age of computing while my brain was not fully formed. 

At the tender age of six, I was given access to our home computer. I learned how to navigate DOS and load content from floppy disc to play fun learning games. It wasn't until much later in life that I would grapple with how I wanted to shape my relationship with computers and the larger interwebs - indeed, it is something that I am still grappling with (and perhaps will continue to do so until the end of my life).

I attended high school as the internet was entering its toddlerhood.  It was the mid-1990s and BBS were all the rage. I had dreams of becoming a hacker and enthusiastically immersed myself in the digital world whenever I had the chance... until a dear friend of mine, who was quite a bit farther down the path of being a hacker, got busted by the FBI. After that, I lost some of my enthusiasm for the nuts-and-bolts of internet protocol. 

But still I recognized the value of this new way of connecting with people, even as I failed to grasp the concept of having an on-line identity.  If I gave it any thought at all, it was to affirm that I wanted anonymity to the fullest extent possible. It is in the teen years that we forge our identities as individuals. My on-line activities would surely become a part of that process, but I was not fully cognizant of that fact until much later. Indeed I was barely aware that I was, at the same time, developing a digital identity in the on-line world.*

When AOL became a nationwide sensation, I was just making the transition from high school into college. I spent a lot of time in chat rooms and eventually started a LiveJournal account to document my college experience and my travels abroad - in all its

tumulteneity Yes, this is a portmanteau word of my own creation that combines tumult with sponteneity

.  I participated in some file sharing, but none of my college classes ever required any kind of on-line interaction - at least as an undergrad in the Liberal Arts. The greatest use my computer saw in those days was as a word processor to type essays. Sometimes I also used spreadsheets to record data for my job in the Environmental Engineering Lab.  Sure I surfed the web for fun and occasionally did a scant bit of internet research for school projects, but the vast majority of the information I needed was in my textbook, lecture notes and course packets. And of course the library. God how I loved to get lost in the stacks! What wonders I would find! (Now-a-days it is the Wiki wormhole that makes me lose track of time and space. Call me old-fashioned, but without the musty smell of old paper it just doesn't have quite the same appeal).

After I earned my B.A. in Latin American Studies, I entered the world of work as a preschool teacher. It would be about three years before I would return to higher learning and go on to complete my M.S. in Geology. In that time, the internet grew up. And how! We relied on the internet A LOT more for research. And although we did not use them in any of my classes at first, LMS were coming on the scene of higher ed. It was in my PhD program that I first encountered Blackboard. Course content was beginning to be aggregated on-line. Assignments were posted (and often completed) on-line. Web-site design became an important skill for me to develop. As a grad student, laser-focused on her research, I did not give much thought to how the increased use of digital tools was changing landscape of higher ed.

After grad school, I once again entered the world of work - this time as a consultant. It was enjoyable work, but I felt a familiar lack - I was not fulfilling my life's work. From the age of eight, I always knew that I wanted to be a  teacher. By ten, I knew that it was science I wanted to teach, so when an opportunity arose to take on a part-time teaching assignment at a local community college, I jumped on it with gusto.  Finally, I was on the path, working the job of my dreams, helping to inspire and enlighten young minds.

My mentor was not an advocate of on-line learning. He was the complete opposite in fact. Instructors had previously developed on-line classes in the discipline, but he dismantled them and brought the classes back to the standard face-to-face format. Still, I could see the value of offering on-line classes to students, so when the college offered an on-line training to learn how to teach on-line, I once again jumped at the chance. This first training was in the Moodle platform, but the very next year we switched to Canvas, so I repeated the training again in the new LMS.

As part of the class, I began to design a hypothetical class focusing on California's water resources. It was exhilarating. I was hooked. At first, I only used these LMS as a way to share resources with students: readings, lecture notes, URL's, and stuff like that. In addition to Moodle and Canvas, I also got to work somewhat with Etudes at another institution. Slowly, tentatively I began to experiment with designing low-stakes quizzes on-line and surveys to integrate with my classes. And I continued to learn about all variety of digital tools - some seemed too cumbersome to be worth implementing, but others sit on my ideas shelf, waiting for their chance to shine.

Just this past semester, my students initiated a collaborative project to build a study guide for the class in Google Docs. It was such a brilliant idea that I've adopted it as a group assignment. My students are naturals at digital collaboration. When assigned a group presentation project, they immediately began working with Google slides, all simultaneously editing and refining their work, chatting face-to-face in the computer lab, while fully aware of the on-line chat capabilities.

I offer my classes now in a light-hybridized format, but am looking forward to teaching my first fully on-line class this Spring. I fully recognize how rich the digital world has become and how much I still have to learn. I am also aware that the digitization of education continues to innovate - for better or for worse: 

• better because sometimes the innovations really do fulfill an essential need and facilitate learning in a meaningful way, 
• but worse because it adds yet another digital tool that must be learned in order to extract some marginal benefit therefrom, thereby detracting from the deeper learning higher up on Bloom's Taxonomy.

It seems like on-line education is itself still in its childhood, with still much neural pruning to take place. Each of us has a role to play in wielding our metaphorical pruning shears - and what one educator values in their garden, another will eschew. Still, it is helpful to be connected with other educators - both those who value on-line education and those who don't. For that reason,  I am grateful to be a part of the Reflective Writing Club #CCCWrite.


*Forming a digital identity is something our students have had to grapple with from the very beginning of their lives and I wonder how society's relationship with digital tools might help (or hinder) them in developing a meaningful relationship with themselves and others. This is a HUGE question that I will likely elaborate on in future posts (what with the latest research finding links between social media use and depression).