2021 #6: Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies (Packansky-Brock)

 

Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies by Michelle Pacansky-brock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is highly informative, engaging, and also balanced--even for skeptics like myself. If you are a teacher adamantly opposed to social networking or any web-based and public applications, you may want to skip this one. However, even those who are cynical about good old Web 2.0 might find value in the broader take-aways regarding student engagement. As Pacansky-Brock stresses in the introduction: "The point here is that "online" is a culture to young people. Yet to most colleges, it is a delivery method" (7). It will be interesting to see what impact the pandemic has on the third edition of this book. Indeed, a "next edition" there must be, because not all technologies can be still considered emergent, and some, of course, have probably faded away into the ether of "cool and awesome" apps. This second edition is from 2017, and while I have not conducted an audit of all the sites and apps she mentions, I'm reasonably confident not all of them are available anymore.

Pacansky-Brock most strongly advocates for using VoiceThread, and to be sure, she is at an advantage teaching art history, which is easily curated and viewed by students online. Her aim is true -- these are tools to help build community, and to that end, they should be used thoughtfully and carefully, without burdening students.

The other big piece of this is accessibility. Pacansky-Brock's work has been touted by UDL (Universal Design for Learning) advocates, and as many of these emerging technologies do allow for greater access and different modalities, it is easy to see why. I struggle sometimes with the concept that using multiple modalities is ALWAYS a road to greater accessibility, particularly if they are engaged simultaneously (for example, I have a very difficult time listening in a Zoom meeting AND reading what shows up in the chat). She advocates for a "backchannel" (e.g. live Tweeting) as a form of participation and as Derek Bruff would have it, a form of "active" listening. My own experience is different --- I find that I listen perhaps more selectively (rather than actively), hoping to have a good sound byte to comment on or share with the world at large. Other suggestions for participatory learning activities I've found to be very useful, such as collaborative slide decks. And it is this spirit of collaboration that seems to drive most of Pacansky-Brock's suggestions: "...these learning activities in Voice Thread are peer-to-peer, so the students are doing more than submitting an assignment; they are working together to create content from which the group learns" (129).

What was one of the more compelling and interesting ideas for me was connected to DS106, an open online course through the University of Mary Washington. Evidently the course includes an "Assignment Bank" to which students submit ideas for assignments and class participants may rate the difficulty of the assignment by giving it one to five stars. Then, for a particular section of the course, participants are asked to complete x number of stars-worth of web assignments. I'd really love to know more about how this works out in terms of equity in workload --are ten 1-star activities truly equal to two 5-star activities? (152 -153). Are the learning objectives balanced out? I have lots of questions and Pacansky-Brock does not necessarily provide answers.

Ultimately that's ok, but it does get tricky to "experiment" with these emergent technologies if one wants to also build a solid foundation (the guidance of Chapter 1). My sense is that Pacansky-Brock would recommend only trying one or two tools for a class at a time and she does recognize that packing a course with these participatory activities can have the exact opposite effect. The book hovers between a survey of technologies and a "best practices" manual, the latter of which needs to be extracted a bit with a step back from the myriad apps and case studies that the book offers. Chapter 2 is probably the most valuable in this regard ("Toward Participatory Pedagogy") as it highlights theoretical foundations that can be applied in moving from a general "Instruction Paradigm" to a "Learning Paradigm" which borrows from the work of Barr and Tagg in a 1995 article published in Change Magazine. Generally speaking, Pacansky-Brock's work is balanced in terms of experiential and theoretical knowledge, and some instructors may find it possible to skim through basics of the "essential toolkit" and the like. While I remain skeptical of technological saturation, I do feel it is responsible pedagogy to know what tools are out there, and Pacansky-Brock's work helps provide a glimpse into possibilities for both online and blended learning.

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