A Professor's Thoughts on Beginning Web Based Teaching
Jerry G. Dickason, Ph.D.
Educause 2001
Indianapolis, IN
October 28-31, 2001
The Montclair State University Information Technology staff made an open invitation, first come, first served, to join them in
attending the Educause 2001 international conference in Indianapolis. Educause is the 1999 merger of two organizations that
address higher education digital technology issues. MSU sent twenty-eight people to this conference; ten were faculty. Bridget
Lepore, of the MSU IT staff, informed me beforehand that my job in attending this conference was to get inspired about
technology and return to imbue the campus with this enthusiasm.
I love teaching. My style is based on the Socratic method. I call it "Guided Discovery." I spend a lot of effort in teasing out
students' thoughts to expose their thinking to themselves. Technology certainly has its place in my classroom for dressing up
and imparting knowledge. I use Power Point and encourage students to use Power Point for some presentations; I use
Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to teach elementary nonparametric statistics in various computer labs on
campus; and I include URLs in course syllabi for further content information. However, I never realized, until this conference,
how digital technology shapes knowledge or influences how people learn. Technology can also tease out students' thoughts
and help them make sense of their experiences, the pragmatics--the practical consequences and/or values--of their lives.
The first session I attended at Educause was a pre-conference seminar, "Translating Research on Brain-Learning and
Instructional Design into Higher Quality Web-Based Courses," by Lee R. Alley and Kate Jansak of South Dakota University."
1 Their premise is that knowledge is constructed, not transmitted. They believe that teachers should construct environments
that enable the brain to acquire knowledge, and provide "The Ten Keys to Quality Assurance and Assessment in Online
Learning." 2 Alley and Jansak believe that learning removes the stress of uncertainty, and that motivation is the means of
learning to remove the uncertainty. After emphasizing the consequences of this logic, the authors introduce the concept of
"Instructional Epiphany," when teachers realize they have to change their teaching style to be more effective in online teaching.
What works in the classroom may not be the approach to effective teaching online. I am now thinking a mile a nanosecond
about my own approach to teaching. My first response is that I have an effective teaching style, so why should I spend time
changing it? I do not have time to acquire new digital technologies. This is reinforced by realization of how time-consuming it
is to be as accessible as I am already. To go "techno" full throttle would consume me totally. And while I might like the
start-up experiences, I might not welcome their continuation. I am in a dither at this point; my interest has been piqued, but my
spirit is very reticent. I am telling myself, "Don’t commit! Just take in what you are experiencing and make sense of it."
The next pre-conference workshop was "Designed for Success: Issues and Strategies for Managing the Development of Online
Learning."4 Lawrence Ragan and Peter Williams presented an Instructional Design and Development (ID&D) model for
online instruction. As the presentation progressed, I began feeling what the medical doctors might have been feeling when the
insurance companies started taking charge of the delivery of health care services. I was being referred to as a Content Expert
(read specific knowledge provider) in a matrix of technological staff-- Project Manager, Instructional Designer, Graphic
Designer, Multimedia Developer, Programmer, Trainer, and Evaluation Specialist.
Whoooa! Who are all these people massaging my content in constructing environments that enable students to learn? All of a
sudden, I see the idea of learning as being compressed into a "packaged product." OK. But, isn't a book a packaged
product? Aren't learning modules packaged products? Absolutely! Yet, what has become reinforced in my thinking is that
teaching logic and reason through content areas is what helps students make sense of their own experiences, and this generally
does not happen in a packaged product. It generally happens in a dialectical relationship with at least one other person. I want
to maintain an open mind here and dismiss what I am hearing. So now I am focusing on trying to understand how students
experience digital experiences, and I arrive at visual and auditory intake as the primary modes or learning. I am feeling a bit
defensive in that there are so many informed technicians who can actually teach me how to package my product better.
However, it is not the content per se that I want to focus on but rather the use of the content to enable learners to make sense
of their experiences through logic and reason. Content is important. It is foundational. For Albert Einstein, it was the
experience of the train rides to and from the office in Berne, Switzerland that caused him to make sense of the kinesthetic
changes in motion. "Is the train on the next track moving or am I moving"? These ponderances were the seeds of his theory of
relativity. We all have theories. What are they, and how do we motivate students to want to understand their experiences?
After all, motivation is what Ragan and Williams say removes the uncertainty of knowing.
Whence the motivation? How can a sixth grader spend endless hours manipulating video games at the expense of doing
homework? What motivates one to continue playing? Perhaps it is in the nature of play itself. In teaching recreation and leisure
studies, I use Frances Hearn's definition of "play."
Play is context, a set of principles for organizing experience, constituted by any activity that is voluntary and
open-ended (i.e., free from both external and internal compulsions), non-instrumental (in the sense that it is
pursued for its sake and has at its center of interest process rather than goal), and transcendent of ordinary states
of being and consciousness. 4
Isn't the context of video games one of always having a second chance to start again to get it right; or, even to switch context?
Isn't a second chance always enticing if not addictive? What learning is going on here? Isn't play nonlinear and
multiprocessing? Isn't it transcendent? Transcendent of what? Isn't the video activity transcendent of the player's immediate
environment? Isn't it transcendent of all the trappings of traditional classroom learning as well? In video activity, the player is in
charge and is challenged simultaneously to perform well. The experience (learning) is spiral, always to higher levels and
bragging rights.
Why can't video games be homework? Or rather, design homework that develops video games around content areas for
students to share with each other. Instead of fictious universes, create universes and arenas for understanding the
connectedness of things in the real world. Isn't this what Claude Levi-Strauss's idea of bricolage is all about--how you tinker
with things, taking an assortment of the old and making it anew? My point here is not to make a game of learning (however,
play is an effective means to learning; for example, try saying your ABCs without singing them). Rather my point is to make
play an end into itself; then learning will evolve. Let the medium (online's far-reaching capabilities) enable the content to be the
message in play for its own sake.
This first day of workshops made my perspective of teaching and learning very vulnerable. I was bombarded with unfamiliar
words like bricolage and semantic web and old words with new meanings , such as scaling, synchronicity, and asynchronicity.
I am learning a new language. That meager awareness did enable me to infer tacit and implicit information, but I was guessing,
and my learning was shifting; it was spiraling to more abstract levels. This is good! I am experiencing what I want my students
to experience. Curiosity of what I do not know is now my motivation. For the rest of the conference, I attended every session
where faculty members were presenters. I was looking for professors in a similar situation who are making sense of their
experiences as a basis for constructing learning environments. I wanted to know their thinking.
Between sessions I attended corporate workshops for introductions to Blackboard, WebCT, and ANGEL, all online course
development packages. At other times I wandered past the exhibitors hawking their wares. Again, this was a bombardment
to the senses. I watched and was truly amazed. And every time I saw an MSU colleague, we would start rattling off what we
had just seen and learned. I was impressed that we were curious and interested in what the other was getting out of this
conference.
Here's what happened as a result of all this exposure at Educause. It is a week later, and I cannot shake the experience of this
conference. I think I experienced the "Instructional Epiphany." I want to put a course online for the spring semester. Sure it
will be a lot of work in restructuring how I do things, but this accommodating and assimilating new learning for me will transfer
and imbue all that I do and will do in the future. I've also put in for a sabbatical next year to study the new approaches to
learning theory in digital technology. Exposure to the new in learning will give me more options to be creative, and hopefully this
excitement in learning, by doing, will be contagious to the students who not only need to know content but will hopefully want
to understand the content, in light of their experiences, so that it broadens an understanding of all aspects of their life.
Am I Pollyannish? What are the options? To continue the current path does not provide me with greater insights into my
teaching. Now that I know new things about teaching, I feel obligated, to myself, to test new things and put my own spin on
the process. I must practice what I preach--learn by doing. Teachers and students alike all shy away from the things we do not
want to do. What I want to do for students (and myself) is to encourage them to explore the unlimited possibilities of their
interests. Never before have we had the world at our fingertips: instant information of our choosing to process into a spiral of
life-long learning.
References
1. Lee Alley and Kate Jansak. "Translating Research on Brain-Learning and Instructional Design into Higher Quality
Web-Based Courses." Educause 2001, Indianapolis, IN. October 28, 2001.Session 14 A.
2. Lee Alley and Kate Jansak. "The Ten Keys to Quality Assurance and Assessment in Online learning." Journal of
Interactive Instruction Development. Winter, 01.
3. Lawrence Ragan and Peter Williams. "Designed for Success: Issues and Strategies for Managing the Development of
Online Learning." Educause 2001, Indianapolis, IN. October 28, 2001. Session 13P.(Regan= www.personal.psu.edu/lcr1)
(Willians= www.rsuonline.edu).
4. Frances Hearn. "Toward A. Critical Theory of Play." Telos. 1976, 145-160.
References of relevance.
Linda E. Terrell. "Tradition and Transformation." Information Impacts Magazine (iMP). July 2000.
(http://www.cisp.org/imp/july_2000/07_00terrell.htm).
John Seely Brown. "Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn. Change.
2000, 10-20. (http://www.aahe.org/change/digital.pdf).
John Seely Brown. "Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age." 1999.
(http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html.).
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Jerry G. Dickason, Ph.D.; Montclair State University; Department of Health Professions, Physical Education, Recreation and
Leisure Studies; TEL#973-655-7162; FAX#973-655-1147