A Brief Conversation with Dr. Chris Dede
Dr. Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. His scholarship addresses emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. His funded research includes four grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education to explore immersive and semi-immersive simulations as a means of student engagement, learning, and assessment. Dr. Dede’s co-edited book, Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement, was published by Jossey-Bass in 2005. A second volume he edited, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods, was published by the Harvard Education Press in 2006. In 2007, Dr. Dede was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher. On September 23, 2009, Dr. Dede presented at Austin Peay State University.
Before his presentation, he and I had a chance to sit down and talk, and I asked him the following question:
If we teachers reorganize our lectures into five-minute chapters in order to facilitate our students’ media-influenced attention spans, are we not forfeiting an opportunity to help build our students’ memories? Will we not ill-prepare our students for the concentration they’ll need in the workforce?
Before he answered the question, Dr. Dede pointed out that often in the workforce, a three-minute pitch to the boss in the elevator is more productive than an hour presentation in the conference room. In other words, effective brevity is just as important as a longer, more comprehensive approach.
He also argued that “concentration” doesn’t mean “concentration on one thought.” A complicated study is a weaving of multiple thoughts, a synthesis. So the pedagogical imperative is not that we teach our students to concentrate on one idea at a time.
With those caveats in place, Dr. Dede doubted the premise of my question. He didn’t believe that teachers should reorganize their lectures into five-minute chapters, even when they’re podcasting their lectures. He argued that students will listen to a speaker or an audio-visual file for an hour and a half if the presentation is interesting. Millennial students do not require soundbites in order to process information.
But they do require an engaging presentation of that information. Due to the wiki-structure of their user-created world, millennial students often do not accept titles like “professor” or “Dr.” as representations of authority. If the rhetoric of a blog is more convincing than that of a news site, millennial students will believe the blog over the news site. Rhetorical power is key to this millennial world of earned, not position-granted, authority.
Dr. Dede suggested that teachers determine their students’ starting places and then move them to the learning objectives. If students have five-minute attention spans, then the teacher might organize the early lectures to suit those attention spans, earn his or her position of authority through rhetorically effective presentations, and expand and complicate the lectures over the course of the semester.
I found Dr. Dede’s answer to be worthy of reflection. Not too long ago, pedagogues shunned the charismatic teacher for emphasizing his or her own likability over the importance of the material. If millennial students rely on rhetorical power to judge authority, do we not have to reconsider, at least in part, the pedagogical value of charisma? Is there a rhetorically powerful way of presenting all of the complex topics in the natural sciences? What are the implications of our having to rely on rhetorical persuasiveness to convince students that they should evaluate sources based on criteria other than rhetorical persuasiveness? Is an easily distracted student merely in an earlier stage of synthesis? Does our modeling the synthetic approach with our lectures and examples really move such a student to that more developed stage?
