Connecting with People and Resources
Teaching with Technology Interview
SIMONE LAUGHTON(Continued)
Clearly there are implications for my teaching style in large lectures. It is about access to information for students. Particularly in a place like U. of T. Mississauga where faculty have commitments on other campuses and often like to work from home, it makes a big difference if students can email you. I know some instructors are inundated with email, but I am not. The only policy that I have is that students have to use their utoronto.ca email address. Come exam time I may get a flurry of emails. Most days I only get 2 — 3 emails per course, sometimes none. I certainly don't discourage them from emailing me. I'm not sure if my colleagues experience the same levels of emails. I never ever receive 20 — 30 emails in a single day, even when the test or exam is the next day. For the really big courses, most students would probably email their TAs first. We now routinely build in contact hours into their contracts for this.
I don't have a Facebook page; I have only visited Facebook once. I have no interest in doing anything like that, but seeing what the students do, and all the things that they do with technology, makes me more conscious of the gaps between me and students. They have very different ways of looking at things, and I have to adjust to that. I cannot conceive of getting up in the morning and not spending at least a few minutes reading the paper. If I have even a modicum of time at the start of the day I will spend it with a newspaper. That's just not how my students operate, even though I harangue them that reading the paper is extremely useful for political science students. Seeing them organizing things through facebook, and using MSN, because I don't do that, and don't really understand how it works is very useful in bringing home to me that I have to be more explicit and attentive to communicating in ways that will make sense to them.
SL: What has been the most exciting aspect of using technology in your teaching and/or research and what has been the biggest challenge?
GW: The most exciting aspects of using technology for me have been on the research front. My research involves, among other things, political developments in Canada's territorial north (the 3 territories). I've been doing this for a little over 20 years now. For the first few years, the only way to get information was to go there, talk to people, and get documents in libraries or offices there. Now the amount of information available through the Web and the ways in which I can contact people have been improved enormously through technology. I used to spend a lot of time writing letters to people I wanted to interview, mailing them, calling a few days later. Often due to time differences I would miss them when I called. That would take a huge amount of time just to contact people. It is now possible to do this using email, very easily and quickly.
I remember that for one of my courses I thought it would be really useful to contrast something I was doing in Canadian politics with the provisions of the "Good Friday Agreements" in Northern Ireland. Still having the old mindset, I wondered where I would find the text of the agreement. I shifted mindsets, Googled it and was able to find the document right away. Ten years earlier I would have known that I could only have found it in a big library after a lot of looking. I would have known that ahead of time, but likely wouldn't have bothered. With the technology it is literally right there.
Technology has made life an awful lot easier in many respects but it does present challenges. It is very easy to drown in the information, and to keep on top of things requires constant attention. I'm not on many listservs, maybe about a half dozen. Every day there will be several items of direct interest to me coming through the listservs. Some of them I will read, and think ‘that's interesting,’ and file it away in the back of my head. Other ones I will print out because I want them and things have a way of disappearing on the Net. Then I end up with massive piles of press releases, government documents. All are really useful to have but they can be really overwhelming. I don't know to what extent this is me or a function of the availability of information through the technology. I find that one of the implications is that research is never over, particularly given the type of work that I do, which is essentially contemporary political developments. There are always new things happening, new things going on.
A huge benefit is how the technology can help with keeping in touch with people. Most of the people I keep in touch with for research purposes are in Canada, but a number of them aren't. It's stunning to think that I can e-mail a colleague at the University of Edinburgh to enquire about a reference or a document and if she happens to be at her computer I will get an almost instantaneous answer. At the worst I'll get it the next day. That simply would not have been possible before - the easy connectivity. This of course also comes at a price, as anyone who uses email knows. Overall technology provides us with a stunning ability to connect with people.
