“Technology and the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom”: online versus face-to-face teaching

Via a link on someone else’s blog that I forgot to note, I came across this interesting interview with Gerald Graff, author of Professing Literature (1987), a book I like a great deal, and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), a book I’ve been meaning to take a look at for some time now. The most interesting part of this interview for me is what he says about the “pseudo-intimacy of the classroom”:

I have long thought that there is something infantilizing about the standard classroom situation, where the very face-to-face intimacy that is so valued actually encourages sloppy and imprecise habits of communication. That is, the intimate classroom is very different from–and therefore poor training for–the most powerful kinds of real-world communication, where we are constantly trying to reach and influence audiences we do not know and will probably never meet. We should be using online technologies to go beyond the cozy pseudo-intimacy of the classroom, to put students in situations that force them to communicate at a distance and therefore learn the more demanding rhetorical habits of constructing and reaching an anonymous audience. We have begun to do this to some extent, but our habit of idealizing presence and “being there,” the face-to-face encounter between teachers and students, blinds us to the educational advantages of the very impersonality and distancing of online communication. Indeed, online communication makes it possible for schools and colleges to create real intellectual communities rather than the fragmented and disconnected simulation of such communities that “the classroom” produces.

I’ve been in discussions over the last couple of years with people who tell me that online communication can never replace the intimacy of the classroom. I like how Graff questions that here. That is something we don’t spend enough time thinking about. How much attention do we pay to what kind of learning occurs in the classroom. I’ve now taught two courses fully online and in both cases I’ve wound up thinking that the students in the online course have had a much better command of the material than the students in the classroom. That may, of course, be simply an illusion generated by the comments every student has to write in an online class. Those students who never say a thing in class may well have as nuanced an understanding of a particular work as those who are very articulate in the course. The problem is that as instructors we don’t have the same way of measuring what they know and don’t know when they are not obliged to comment regularly.

It will be interesting to take all that I’ve learned teaching online this past summer back into the classroom this fall.