Classrooms have Four Walls and Two Portals. Use Them!

I remember first being invited into my college’s boardroom for a meeting. I experienced several sentiments. “Wow! This is like being asked to the principal’s office, look but in a good way!” And, “Yes! This is like being asked to sit at the cool kids’ table in the high school cafeteria!”

I walked in and settled myself into one of the comfy, high-backed leather chairs. I looked around, and was stunned to see something I had always dreamed of having in my classroom: a gigantic LCD screen with a wide-angle video camera. I thought to myself, “Alright! This is like Skype on steroids! How do I get my students in here?” When I externalized my thoughts into a question, the response was not enthusiastic: “A boardroom is not a classroom.”

Yes, indeed!

Best or Worst of Times?

Today’s widespread high-speed internet intra-structures make for the best of times and the worst of times for real-time collaborative learning across geographical distances. The times are best because so much of the necessary equipment exists.

The times are the worst for two reasons. One is because many institutions have installed that equipment in their boardrooms but not in their classrooms. Another is because the use of synchronous audio-video over the internet is dominated by an individualistic paradigm. Almost as bad are the implementations of tools like videoconferencing and Skype for the delivery of lectures. In my experience, most lectures given through a screen double the mind-numbing boredom of the original lecture. At their best, even a TED talk is nothing more than ‘television’ (remember those things?!).

Not Like TV

If there ever really were any days of television-based learning (Sesame Street?), they are over.

Way back in 2005, Thomas Friedman proclaimed that “the world is flat.” Friedman meant that outcomes from the dynamics of globalization effectively close all sorts of divides heretofore deemed too-big-to-bridge: such as geographic, national, linguistic and cultural divides. Rapid movements of people, goods, capital and information have been facilitated by cheap international flights, global market supply chains, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have bridged these gaps.

I think that all these dynamics matter greatly for higher education, but the last is most important. ICTs do not flatten the world entirely, and that is important for educators. ICTs enable learners like never before discover – like never before: in real time – the world’s peaks, valleys and gaps that make for all sorts of important differences: social, linguistic, cultural, economic, architectural, ritual, religious, etc. The streamed lectures of MOOCs and YouTube are radically limited in their ability to be used for this purpose.

They look a lot like TV in comparison.

Entirely Different Learning Experiences

Synchronous web-based communication creates entirely different learning experiences.

Over the last year, I have facilitated regular classroom learning experiences at my college in Montreal, Canada. My students have discussed what it means to be a woman seeking higher education in Afghanistan. Another teacher had her students debate the meaning of life and religious freedom with peers in Russia. My class has interviewed a UNESCO team based in New York about HIV/AIDS in black diaspora communities. Another colleague was “visited” by an anthropologist who studies “work-out culture” among Muslim women in Turkey. Another class conversed about the influence of Francophone culture on life in the Great Lakes region of Africa with a young man in Nkozi, Uganda.

None of this has been difficult; we simply take advantage of morning-scheduled classes to best facilitate crossing international time-zones. The result is nothing short of astounding. Students do not learn from a documentary or a video stream, they learn from real…live…people!

Imaginative Solutions Needed

Left to their own devices, people view only what they want to see. This is why we have Fox News. Students are no different. With the click of a mouse or flick of a gesture, whatever they don’t like vanishes and is replaced by something they think that they like. When educators and administrators think about the internet and higher education, they do the same as students. Without imagination, the ostensibly higher-enrollment creating “solutions” are adopted: blended learning, distance education, remote campuses or classrooms. Thank goodness for brick and mortar that is difficult to flick away!

I think that educators and administrators need to realize the amazing power of the two portals that exist in every classroom: the door and the TCP/IP connection. Closing one and opening the other is a means by which I have repeatedly engaged captive audiences with real-time learning experiences. Teachers and institutions can use their personal and professional networks of scholarship and alumni to plan collaborative class sessions with dynamic resources in the classroom. By planning ahead, exchanging emails and leveraging “guest” capacities of an LMS, students can be confronted by and learn about the peaks and valleys of our not-so-flat world through the use of in-class, synchronous audio-video links to real people abroad.

Best of Both

So, I think that you can get the best of the boardroom into the classroom. And furthermore, students can experience the “big screen” for so much more than a TV-like, viewing experience. You can put that stuff on steroids! A future post will explain my process for planning an interactive, synchronous, learning experience.

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