Technology as a Cause of Academic Divide

Academic electronic publications overflow with articles on the evils of using technology in the classroom. A significant percentage of academics who, irrespective of their age, are stuck in the mentality of the past are deeply opposed to the use of new technologies in teaching. They fill article after article with disquisitions on how students hate classes that rely on technology, how they suffer because of PowerPoint presentations, cell phones, IPads, Kindles, laptops that seemingly distract them from actual learning. Educators who use technology in the classroom are branded as lazy creatures who want gadgets to do their job for them.

I am one of those "lazy" educators. In my literature and culture courses, I use PowerPoints on a regular basis. I first started doing them last year, and the students liked them so much that I decided not to stop. I keep begging the students to tell me if they dislike PowerPoints, after which I will be happy to discontinue them. The students, however, are adamant in their insistence that they love my PowerPoints. I find them to be very useful, too. To give an example, on Thursday we were discussing Lazarillo de Tormes, a Spanish Picaresque novel of the XVIth century. When we got to the passage in which Lazarillo leaves Salamanca, I had photos of this city, of its great university, of the Cathedral of Salamanca up on the PowerPoint. Many of my students haven't had a chance to travel to Spain, and seeing what Salamanca actually looks like made them appreciate the reading in an entirely new way. After class, two of the students came up to me to say that they were now considering going to Salamanca as part of the Study Abroad program because the city sounded fascinating. 

Another thing that I like to do in literature courses, is to put up passages we are analyzing and questions students are supposed to be answering in groups up on a PowerPoint. This is saves a lot of time that previously used to be occupied with endless questions of "What are we doing right now? What were the questions? What page is it? Do you have an extra copy of the book? Where are we right now? What did you want us to do?" Maybe all of this makes me a lazy educator, but I'd much rather spend valuable class time on actual discussions than on repeating what the question was a dozen times in a row.

For some reason, when people talk about using Power Points in class, they imagine a professor who fills the slides with bullet points and then reads them out loud in a droning monotone. Most of us don't do anything like that, though. My PowerPoints mostly provide visual materials to illustrate the points I'm making. It really makes no sense trying to explain the ideological implications of the tango when you can't show the students a video of an actual tango dancing.

In language classes, I allow students to use cell phones to look up words in electronic dictionaries. Many of the students take several languages, and it makes no sense for them to lug a Spanish, a French and a Chinese dictionary around at all times. Why not use the available technology to makes everybody's life easier?

I have a sneaking suspicion that academics who are so virulently opposed to use of technology in the classroom (and who also scoff when they see their colleagues read books on a Kindle) are simply intimidated by technology because they have no idea how to use it. Instead of confessing their technological incompetence and asking for help, they try to marginalize those of us who are comfortable with technology and use it on a regular basis. Of course, technological advances cannot be stopped. We have to prepare ourselves for the advent of even more sophisticated inventions. I, for one, feel very excited about that prospect.