Challenges to the Professor

I have been focusing mostly on the college classroom and addressing my material to university faculty. this is because that's the venue in which I teach. I'm currently a lecturer at Suffolk University, part-time. (I am looking for a full-time nontenure university teaching position if you know of one.) However much of this material applies to the K-12 classroom setting as well. A few colleagues teaching in that arena should please feel free to add comments on your experience.

Bringing innovation into the classroom is a challenge to faculty. In fact it is a series of challenges, each with many dimensions. at the surface there is a simple matter of selection and a gathering of class material. Some books exist only in one e-Reader format, some in multiple formats, and some not at all. And the challenge only begins here. Having selected the book, the syllabus must be adjusted to address the material included in the text. Page numbers and locations vary from one e-text to another, and may even vary within one e-text to another depending on the font size selected by the user. Diagrams, charts and other visual aids for the students are often displaced in the device displays.

Students however show very different degrees of acceptance of the devices. Many of them, having grown up with digital devices with her whole life are very comfortable with the eReaders and they quickly embrace them. Others are less enthusiastic. Some students print out hard copies of the material on the digital device to read and study from. Others spend the time reading the digital device but they take their notes on paper which makes sharing more cumbersome. At this point about two thirds through the semester and seeing good acceptance of the devices but the jury is still out. At the end of the semester I will be looking back and see if there is any either quantifiable difference in learning as evidenced by student test or quiz scores.

I'm finding that I often have to read the material on multiple devices just to be familiar with the materials presented on them. This creates a significant amount of additional work. I also need to be able to respond to questions referring to a location number into digital text, and to be able to find references in written papers from the students that referred locations in the digital texts.

In a future blog I will write about other tools that are brought into the classroom that may eventually tie into the digital books. This includes our use of wiki's to remove barriers of time and space.

And so the experiment goes on.