She asked me about it. I said, “Well, let’s remember that Friedman also thought the war in Iraq was the right thing to do.”
Because he did. And not just at the very beginning when everyone was all wild-eyed and gung-ho and the minds of pundits everywhere were bathed in terror and gushing with fantasies of revenge. He kept arguing that Shock and Awe and the carnage that followed and follows and will follow on for years was the necessary and noble sacrifice that Americans had to make to bring peace and democracy and progress to the Middle East. That it was not the strategic thing to do but the right thing to do. I know, because my mother’s opinions about the Iraq war appear to have been almost wholly formed by reading his New York Times columns. So this is not a response to Friedman’s column. I feel like I’ve been arguing with Thomas L. Friedman for ten years and I’m tired of it. He never learns.
No, really, the only interesting thing about the piece itself is how nakedly Friedman displays his hunger for the particular kind of stardom that the Massive Open Online Course makes available to male intellectuals. Read the following two paragraphs from the original piece:
“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas.
Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”
Can you hear it? That sighing sound as Friedman happily contemplates a world in which the men who think brilliant thoughts with their massive brains can finally turn to the actors and the athletes and say, “At last, I am FINALLY cooler than you?” Because I can.
I say men because apart from Daphne Koller, the computer science professor who, along with Andrew Ng (who of course gets top billing in Friedman’s argument about this) developed the software for Coursera, which Friedman hailed in May 2012 as the harbinger of educational revolution, all of the professors named in the three columns that Friedman has written about this phenomenon are male. I figured they would be.
Though Friedman claims in his latest piece that the MOOC will replace the outdated “sage on stage” model of higher education, others have argued—and they are absolutely right—that the MOOC is simply the “sage on stage” model amplified a bazillionfold. The question of what happens when we lose the “liveness” of the classroom experience—when, instead of sharing a physical space with the professor and other students, the student follows the lecture, whether in real time or not, in mediated and infinitely replicable form in a completely different physical space—is theoretically an interesting one; but in practical terms I do not believe for one moment, as Friedman persistently claims, that the MOOC model actually leads to more and better interactivity.
Why do I not believe this? Well, for one thing, take a look at what Friedman cites as his prime example of how awesomely interactive the brave new MOOC is:
Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000 students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free course in introductory sociology. ... My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. ... Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”
I’d just like to point out a few things here:
1) Duneier seems quite pleased with the fact that he’s had “more feedback” from this course than from his entire teaching career. He says nothing in this passage as to the content of this feedback. Indeed the opposition he sets up between the “few penetrating questions” he got under the old model and the “thousands” of comments produced in the discussion forms suggests that his enthusiasm over quantity is discreetly concealing his assessment of quality.
2) Note that what Friedman emphasizes by citing this passage is how useful all of this feedback is for the professor. One hopes that the hundreds and thousands of students posting these comments are learning something from conversing with each other; but they’re certainly not conversing with Duneier, who can’t possibly be reading and/or responding to them all.
For another, I have never forgotten an experience I had in graduate school back in the late 1990s. Like many of my colleagues, I was teaching in the composition program, which was at the time directed by people who were extremely enthusiastic about classroom technology—partly, if not largely, because they had been very successful at pulling in grant money to pay for it all. They were planning to transition to a model in which more and more composition classrooms would be set up with individual terminals so that they could carry out their discussions online instead of face to face. Yes. We were moving to a model where instead of talking to each other, the students and the instructor would be essentially be texting the people sitting next to them. The comments all went into one big chatroom, and the instructor handled them as best s/he could. As part of our training we ran our own online discussion. It was a bizarre and frustrating experience, partly because you could never focus on any one conversation for any length of time, partly because things moved so fast that by the time you were finished typing a response to something it had already become irrelevant, and partly because of the irreducible weirdness of communicating with people who are after all in the damn room with you in this highly chaotic and mediated way.
Later on I attended the meeting at which the directors of this program invited undergraduates to give them ‘feedback’ on this new model. The fiction of this meeting was that they were presenting this idea to the students to see what they thought of it. The reality, which was clearly obvious to those of us who had some classroom experience, is that the decision had already been made, and the purpose of this meeting was to manufacture consensus. Nevertheless, I was impressed at how much resistance was voiced at this meeting. Most of the students who spoke were alarmed at the prospect of giving up face to face interaction in the classroom for this new thing, no matter how often they were assured that it was much much better. It was touching to see how much they valued this face to face interaction, even if it was also depressing to know that they were going to lose it anyway because after all, the program directors had their grant and were going to order the flipping technology regardless. Now all of that was in the dark ages, of course. The idea of making people interact online while in the same room has no doubt by now been largely abandoned. But I do still believe that the “revolution” Friedman hails so joyfully is in fact driven by the corporations that manufacture this technology, the people who develop the software, and the university administrators who are looking to maximize profits and minimize expenses. And yeah, the MOOC can get content to more people faster than the traditional model. So can Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean the education you get from a MOOC is better than, or even comparable to, the education you get from the bricks-and-mortar classroom, where at least there is a human being who knows who you are (even if it ‘only’ a teaching assistant), speaks to you face to face, and is responsible for a) ensuring that you are doing the work (Friedman’s first piece admits that a vast percentage of the people enrolled in some of these MOOCs don’t complete the coursework) and b) evaluating it and providing feedback.
But this was not supposed to be about arguing with Friedman. And here I’ve gone and done it. Isn’t habit a curse.
No, this is about the ‘sage on stage’ fantasy. Because I will admit that the image of myself up on stage, addressing a large lecture hall, watching them all hang on my every word as I explain my brilliant and extremely interesting thoughts on literature to them, was part of what drew me into the profession. I went to a university that followed the Sage On Stage model in its English curriculum, though I hasten to say that their English major also made considerable use of the seminar, and that in terms of my future life in the profession, the seminars were in the long run much more influential. I took quite a number of courses that consisted of listening to a professor talk for 100 minutes a week and then discussing the material with a small group of students led by a graduate student assistant for another 50 minutes. I remember some of these courses quite fondly. It was, in fact, during such a course on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies that I looked up at the professor who was lecturing—Suzanne Wofford, who like nearly all of the professors whose courses I took there has since moved on to another university, since at that time, at that institution, the description of these jobs as “tenure-track” was purely a prevarication—and I thought, I think I would like to do this. And I bet I would be good at it.
I ran into Suzanne Wofford a couple years ago at MLA and told her this. She, of course, had no idea who I was, since during the actual course we never met. Still, I hope it cheered her up.
I still believe that this moment was possible only because the professor was another woman. That allowed me to see myself in her place. It allowed me to imagine that one day I too might be treading the boards at an august university, lecturing about the great works of literature, basking in the admiration of hordes of young English majors. It was that fantasy that enabled me to form an image of my own future, an image to which I could point and say, “Yes. I want to be that.”
I call it a fantasy for two reasons. One: I now understand more about the realities of being an assistant professor at that institution during that time period. Two: After fifteen years of doing this job, I have never taught a large lecture course.
Why? Well, mainly because my department doesn’t offer them. Why not? Because our department is big enough and our university small enough that we don’t have to. And since we don’t have to, we don’t. Because here’s the thing: when it comes to how much and how well the students learn and how long they retain it, the seminar kicks the Sage on Stage model’s ass.
I am frequently struck by this because I’m teaching the closest thing our department ever had to the large lecture format, which is our British literature seminar. Partly because the class used to be twice the size of the typical seminar, I teach it as a combination of lecture and discussion. The one thing you can do better in a lecture format is straight-up content delivery, and in a survey course some of that is unavoidable. And so this course gives me a chance to live out the Sage On Stage fantasy in a small way. I enjoy preparing my lectures. I venture to say that I’m good at it. I base this not purely on my own delusions but on student feedback. I am funny, they tell me. Perhaps the most interesting student comment I had on that course was the one that began, “I just can’t help but pay attention when Professor Lucy Cannon lectures.” As if this student was sitting there struggling with all his might not to pay attention and yet somehow, I managed to foil his intentions again and again.
It is telling because it reveals something true: No matter how good you are at lecturing, no matter how smart and engaging and charismatic and funny you are, the students just do not pay the same kind of attention to you in that mode as they do when you are running a discussion. I see it happen. I get up at the beginning of class and explain what the two or three things are that I’m going to talk about before we get into discussion and I look at them and it’s as if I can see in their eyes the blinds coming down. They take notes. I see them do it. Some of them do it, anyway. Others are clearly just waiting for it to be over. But I’ll tell you, when I give them the signal that lecture time is over—I don’t, like, blow a whistle, but you have to give them some signal, or they won’t start talking—I feel them all starting to pay a different kind of attention. Lest people attribute all this to fuzzy performance-theory-inspired ideas about the “energy in the room”—though the energy is real, and it matters, and so believe me does the room, but that’s another story—I will say also that I see the difference on the exams. I know for a fact, for example, that my students learned more about the sublime in romantic poetry from a fifteen-minute group workshop than they did from me blathering about it up at the front of the room.
In the seminar model, or even in the working-group model, the instructor does not disappear. You’re still guiding the discussion, you still design the activity, you still help them share the results and arrive at conclusions. But they remember it better because they have their heads in the game, and because they understand that their ideas are the fuel that makes the engine go. It is hard to convey to people who don’t do this kind of work how fascinating the work of leading a discussion of a text really is. There’s the preparation process, during which one forms all of one’s beautiful plans for what to touch on and how to link all these points of illumination together into a fabulous constellation of insights that resolves itself in the last two minutes of the period into a celestial glyph aflame with revealed meaning. And then there is the actual class period, during which you scramble to scoop up what the students toss you and shape it into something which is changing even while you handle it and at the end of which, when you finally have something mapped out with string and pushpins and tape and have thrown it onto a makeshift display board that you improvised on the fly with a cardboard box and a stapler, you realize that the thing doesn’t even have a head because 45 minutes ago you forgot to ask the question that generates the neck because someone said something new and interesting and so you went off in that direction and wound up building a pair of wings instead.
Both phases have their joys and torments. But when I think about what it is that I do, it’s this, this strange combination of the scripted and the improvised, this thing that can only happen one time in one place and in a room with between ten and twenty people in it, that makes me want to get up in the morning and do my job. I fondly believe that this is what most of my students will remember when they look back on their English major. Because I look back at my English major; and yes, I have some fragmentary and isolated memories of the sages on the stages. But I remember the papers I wrote and the discussions we had much, much more clearly. Students by and large don’t understand the point of English papers. Or at least, they don’t understand that the real reason we ask them to write papers about literature is that you will never know a text better than when you have just written a paper on it—the same way that you never know a play better than when you have just directed it. If I had a dollar for every student who has said to me, during a conference about their paper on The Waste Land, "You know, this poem is finally starting to make sense to me," I...well, I could at least buy myself dinner with it. At a chain restaurant.
Do they assign papers to the students who take MOOCs? And who grades them? Who is grading 14,000 freaking papers three times a semester?
[crickets]
I will never be a rock star. I have come to accept this. It is a little easier to accept it because I know that the rock star model really belongs to the days when women were essentially excluded from the academy; the sage on stage model is after all an image of patriarchal authority. I will instead be someone who keeps alive things that can only exist on a small scale. I believe that this is foundational to the real value of the kind of education that my department provides. I’m here, on campus, because I’m about to see a student production of a play that I love. It is directed by an undergraduate who first encountered it in a course he took with me. I have never seen this play done anywhere. It isn’t staged very often. It’s complicated, and strange, and nobody ever feels as if they fully understand it. It has never been to Broadway and it would astonish me if it ever got there. But it’s being done, here, because one day a couple semesters ago I walked into a room with twelve students in it and we had a chaotic, unshapely, but very lively discussion about this play which made one of them want to get to know it better.
There are days when I don’t feel like coming to work in the morning. We all have them. But today, I feel like the fifteen years I’ve spent in little rooms with small groups of people doing the strange form of real-time shared-presence face-to-face interaction which it has been my calling, over the past 20 years, to try to develop into an art, have been worth it. Tonight, my teaching will reach the biggest stage it’s ever going to have. I won’t be up there; I won’t be in charge; nobody will even really know I ever had anything to do with it. But it will matter more to me than any MOOC ever could.
Great thoughtful piece, Prof. Cannon. The face-to-face interactions, where everybody learns from each other in spontaneous and unpredictable ways, are where the deepest learning happens.
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