Center for Teaching and Learning

In the New York Times book review “The Chess Master and the Computer,” former world chess champion Gary Kasparov outlines the history of chess grandmasters vs. computers and what that history has revealed about humans’ and computers’ capabilities. Some of his observations offer us possible insights not just about chess, but also about teaching and learning.

Kasparov was the world champion who oversaw the dramatic transformation of technology that has lead to computers’ surpassing humans in the game of chess. He has worked closely with programmers both to develop computers’ capabilities and to challenge them. In 1997, Kasparov lost the human vs. computer battle — but to the dismay of A. I. advocates, not via computer self-consciousness.

This difference between computer processing and human reflective thinking has produced some interesting chess experiments. In 1998, Kasparov hosted and participated in a computer-assisted tournament. Each player had access to the software of his choice. In Kasparov’s words,

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.

Kasparov discovered the extent to which his advantage in chess depended on his having the upper hand in memory and performing calculations with fewer errors. As Kasparov explains of his games with Veselin Topalov, “since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage [now] came down to creating a new idea at some point.”

We all know that technology levies an equalizing force onto performance. I will never forget exam monitors’ checking the aisles for hidden calculators. In fact, I have a confession. My memories of exam monitors encourage me to refer to the above tournament as “assisted chess,” as if an unassisted game were somehow tougher or a more authentic measurement of capabilities. The real title of the tournament, however, was “Advanced Chess.” And the tournament took place twelve years ago.

Kasparov is discussing a new era, an era in which computer assistance is not cheating — and moreover, is expected. We live in a world not only of ever-improving immediate access to vast information and processing capabilities. We live in a world also in which we demand from each other immediate recourse to more than the human mind can memorize or process. This new era has brought about more than new learning objectives and pedagogies in chess — or in the college classroom. It has promoted changes in the way the human mind performs even an “unassisted” game — or unassisted learning.

Schools of thought have broken down. Bricolage has become the norm. According to Kasparov,

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

This loss of allegiances, norms, or even what an older generation might refer to as “standards of play” has not impeded the younger generation. On the contrary, players reach the level of grandmaster at younger and younger ages — and not because of their unparalleled genius:

Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Technology has leveled the playing field by facilitating access to information. Even in areas where there are not a lot of chess players, children pick up the game online. The normal child whose attention span is not ready for complicated books on chess tactics or theory still learns that information, only now in more abbreviated forms on websites and in podcasts. On their own, children study parts of games. When it comes to study, their attention is limited. But in the name of their entertainment, they assemble those parts into wholes.

What about in the learning of course material for a college class? I’ve known students who watched YouTube podcasts to gleam information they didn’t adequately understand in the classroom. Some have admitted openly to relying more on random, online content than on their professors or textbooks — because they didn’t understand or were bored by those more traditional engagements with the material.

But what about students’ accessing the internet on their phones or laptops during a lecture? What if they’re on Facebook?

I have an interesting anecdote to relate. My sister-in-law is an undergraduate at a different university. One morning she initiated a live chat with me through Facebook by asking a question about a particular philosophy. After telling her that I didn’t know the philosophy but would look it up, I started with Wikipedia and then worked my way up to quick skims in Google Scholar to provide her with a piecemeal answer that at least acknowledged some debate — and then sent her links so she could research the nuances more fully on her own. Our online conversation took less than ten minutes with a lot of extended pauses. When I asked her if she was writing a paper on the subject, she said no, that she was currently in class, the professor had mentioned the philosophy as if everyone knew what he was talking about, and she needed a little more information in order to understand the rest of what he was saying.

This is not an entirely isolated incident. I’ve had multiple law-school friends initiate online chats with me while they were in class — usually to debate about real-time course content because the lecture format prohibited them from immediately discussing or challenging the professor’s statements.

There are a plethora of negative and positive ways of describing these occurrences. Maybe my sister-in-law and law-school friends have grown so accustomed to immediate satisfaction that they lack the attention span for sustained engagements with a lecture. Perhaps their experiences with mobile technology have enabled them to acquire the multitasking skills for multiple, simultaneous engagements with the course content. Possibly they prefer social learning to more solitary experiences like that of sitting quietly in a lecture. Maybe they’re bad students. Maybe they are taking a more active approach to their learning. Perhaps they are developing a more nuanced understanding. Possibly their multitasking is forcing them to miss the overarching narrative forest for incidental trees.

Just as with daydreaming, their online activities might cause them to lose track of the course narrative, a particular theory, or a greater concept. However, maybe they’ll pull their disjointed understandings together when confronted with an engaging objective.

If their attention is limited, but in the name of their entertainment they’ll assemble those parts into wholes, then maybe the pedagogical response isn’t necessarily to restrict “assisted” learning in the classroom.  If we prohibit their digital escapism, then not only do we  increase the likelihood of their mentally shutting down (daydreaming) during the lecture. We also eliminate the possibility of their escaping to more engagements with course content.

The following two videos are of a workshop on classroom-assessment techniques (CATs) from Austin Peay’s 2009 Summer Teaching Academy. CATs are not merely different techniques for assessing students. They are a part of a larger strategy to assess the accessibility of lectures, promote active learning, revise the next day’s lecture to accommodate the students’ needs, and create a truly student-centered environment even in a high-enrollment course.

Classroom Assessment Techniques 1

Classroom Assessment Techniques 2

Jane takes an introductory sociology course. She doesn’t like to “read,” although she reads and writes a lot of text messages. In fact, Jane reads and writes nearly every hour of her waking life. But her sociology professor assigns more sustained reading than she is accustomed to, so Jane almost never finishes (and sometimes never starts) the reading for each class.

But her sociology professor has required that each student post “at least one interesting idea from the reading” into either Facebook or Twitter each night. Meanwhile, students who actively question, develop, or personalize the ideas in other students’ posts are excused from the requirement of posting something new from the reading. Because her text messages are connected to Facebook and Twitter, Jane gleams some of the ideas she never reads from the textbook and still gets credit for responding to them. She gets into her text discussions, but her statements are often distortions of the original material.

Does this posting assignment do a disservice to students like Jane?

On the one hand, Jane’s reading attention span handicaps her. We might argue that the posting assignment enables Jane’s handicap by offering her an alternative to a sustained engagement with the textbook. If Jane is not the only student who opts out of reading the textbook in favor of this shortcut, then we might say that the posting assignment replaces informed engagement with superficial interaction. We can go even further by adding that her handicap likely derives from our technologically supported culture of soundbite learning — and that rather than confronting the problem, this assignment is contributing to it.

On the other hand, whereas the assignment itself promotes superficial interaction, other assignments can inspire informed engagement. In other words, a “dumb assignment” doesn’t have to dumb down the course as a whole. But why would a professor require such a potentially superficial assignment?

Perhaps we should reevaluate the effects of that assignment. Without such an assignment, Jane likely would withdraw early from this reading-and-writing-intensive course. Although some might claim that merely the assignment’s easiness keeps students like Jane in the course, maybe we can offer a different interpretation: It’s not the facility of the assignment, but rather the facility with which the assignment draws her into the learning community.

It’s easy to withdraw from a course. It’s hard to withdraw from a strong sense of community.

The longer students like Jane stay in a course, the longer they have exposure to the course material. If they are more attuned to their classmates than to either the textbook or lecture, then they still acquire some of that course material vicariously, through the advent of their classmates. And eventually, they might “look stuff up” (something else Jane doesn’t always associate with “reading”) in order to improve their engagement with the community.

Jane may not pass the course. But if she enters into the course’s learning community to engage the material vicariously, Jane might improve her relationship with the material enough to engage that material directly — if not this semester, then perhaps the next time around.

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.

Last Friday, Dr. John Volker and I had a conversation about online and hybrid courses that has left me thinking. First, Dr. Volker recited the all-too-common reason for a professor’s resisting online educational trends: The students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course. Then Dr. Volker pointed out another variation of that same complaint: Students don’t get as much out of an online course as they do from an on-ground course. Dr. Volker agreed with the first point but not with the second. Why?

When a teacher chooses the on-ground classroom model as the basis for online interaction, Achilles never catches the tortoise. When a teacher designs a digital interaction to simulate a traditional one, all the students get is an inferior imitation that will never catch up with the real thing.

Does this mean we teachers should resist online educational opportunities? Is Achilles really an inferior imitation of a tortoise? Absolutely not, Dr. Volker insists. We instead should abandon the on-ground model when we design online interactions. Let Achilles run his own path.

Classroom interactions have an embodied crowd effect. If a teacher can generate enough personal, kinetic excitement for the material, that excitement spreads relatively easily to those students who are already engaged. Through these students’ overt excitement, other students who are more interested in their classmates than in the material, in turn, can develop vicarious interest in the material. And even vicarious, sustained interest increases the likelihood of learning.

However, online course interactions have different dynamics than those of an on-ground course. A classroom discussion might silence some shy students who are concerned about how they are perceived. But a disembodied engagement might offer those students the masks — or in digital terminology, the avatars — they need to protect their senses of self from the fires of heated intellectual confrontations.

I don’t want to suggest that this or any other difference we encounter in an online setting is always a benefit. The mask effect can embolden some students to the point of their initiating “flame wars” — or in lay terms, those unproductive contests for domination that sometimes transpire in a discussion-board setting. Where digital engagements differ from on-ground interactions, problems can arise. But those problems often unveil sites where we haven’t adequately reconceptualized online interaction. In other words, the mask effect that produces flame wars is not inherently an obstacle to the learning process.

What are some other potential benefits of an online setting?

The most common answer has to do with the difference in students’ learning styles. Many students have to utilize multiple modes of engagement — visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic — before they’ll fully grasp the course material. Others need to be able to access the course material in one specific mode. An online interface can host a variety of learning opportunities in an array of different mediums.

But an on-ground course also can diversify modes of engagement for diverse learning styles. So what is distinctive about an online environment?

There are two distinctions in particular that draw me to online learning environments. First, digital mediums potentially level the playing field for the different learning styles. What does that mean? Those who learn the easiest by reading and writing (such as those students who become teachers) traditionally have had an advantage over other students — to a large degree because reading and writing are both recursive activities. In other words, text is reviewable both in selective parts and as a whole. Students who learn the easiest by reading and writing can revisit course material either in specific areas of uncertainty or as a global narrative. For other students, the course material ends up reduced to a collection of classroom activities — singular events that fade per the human limitations of memory.

Digital mediums attribute the recursive characteristic of written text to non-written mediums. If students need to pause and review the last few moments of a lecture, they can. In an online environment, kinetic learners can actively and repeatedly engage with what in a classroom or a textbook might be little more than a stable diagram.

In fact, as far as kinetic learners are concerned, hypertext reconfigures written text into a tactile experience. That is, digital mediums level the playing field by attributing not only the characteristics of written text to non-written mediums, but also the characteristics of non-written mediums to written text.

Although digital mediums undoubtedly help students who are not inclined to learn through reading or writing, digital mediums similarly help those who do prefer reading and writing. Both teachers and students can write on videos and thereby attribute the quality of written text to visual and auditory learning experiences. In other words, digital mediums potentially level the learning playing field, not by handicapping those who excel in more traditional environments, but rather by opening up each and every learning opportunity to every learning style.

The second distinction that draws me to online learning environments has less to do with D2L, Angel, Blackboard, or other course-shell providers than with the free online learning activities, like blogging and microblogging. A professor can require that students blog or microblog about their learning experiences, link their monologues to an extracurricular online community about that particular topic, and thereby increase the likelihood that their students will remain engaged in a learning community about that topic even beyond the termination of the course. If we tie our students’ learning to the confines of a course, that learning can end with the completion of the semester. If we tie that learning to a more permanent community, our students’ learning, even about a particular topic, will likely become more permanent.

These are just two of what are possibly an infinite number of potentially positive ways that an online environment can uniquely contribute to the learning experience. In other words, Dr. Volker is right. Students don’t get the same out of an online course that they get out of an on-ground course, and if we teachers take the time to analyze how online environments differ from classroom environments, we can transform those differences into an improved learning experience.