The Shifting Paradigm: Transmission- to Transaction-based Pedagogies as an Effect of the Appropriate Use of Educational Technologies in the Generation of Dialogic Teaching and Learning Environments

by

Ralph Olliges and Sebastian Mahfood

The Nature of the Shift – Social Reality

Sebastian Mahfood

We have entered an age of accelerated mediated communication where the consequences of our actions have an immediate and apparent impact on the society in which we live. Our ability to transfer vast amounts of data over great distances in a matter of seconds has affected our social relationships and created the need for new theories of social responsibility in the digital age. In response, institutions of higher learning are developing courses in cyberethics dealing with the nature of mediated communication technologies and the strategies that can be used in the formation of new teaching and learning environments. All questions of ethics, however, are usually developed in response to shifting social realities, and the effect of a technologically wired world has been the immediate gratification of impulses outside of the rumination time of ethical inquiry. There has been, as a result, no lag time from the moment an action is committed to the moment its consequences are felt in which to engage in critical reflection over the nature of the act. Educational efforts aimed at teaching society how to understand the transformations happening within it, then, need to accelerate if we are to have any edge over the proliferation of these technologies beyond our ability to interact with them as viable extensions of ourselves in the world.

While it is difficult to predict the future in an age of postmodernity, which is itself defined by our inability to interpret even the present, our task as educators is relatively simple: we need only prepare our students for the paradigm shift that is presently occurring between the information age and the filtering age, between the age of literacy and the age of hyperliteracy, between the transmission of data and the management of data. Walter J. Ong argues in Orality and Literacy that literacy, more than any other invention, has transformed human consciousness. By fixing data into concrete expression, the technology of writing took away the need for mnemonic devices of formulaic repetition. The oral style, which was additive, aggregative, redundant, conservative, indelibly tied to the social reality, agonistic in tone, empathetic and participatory, homeostatic and situational gave way to the literate style that transformed us from acoustic to visual creatures. It led Plato to argue in The Phaedrus that writing was a pharmakon, both a cure and a poison, which for all its benefits separated the story from its parent and destroyed human memory in the process. In the age of text, we write things down that we want to remember so that we do not have to remember them; we engage the world through analysis of lists rather than through repetition of them; we synthesize various texts as the building blocks of new theories of social intercourse; we engage one another asynchronously. Ong argues that this is changing – that we are entering an age of secondary orality brought about by new communications media and built upon the world of literacy – the age of post-text is predominantly asynchronous (and often synchronous, too), syncretic, relational, ekphrastic (articulating a verbalization of the visual) and sisarhakic (articulating a visualization of the verbal). We can see the paradigm shift occurring around us – it is no longer a future event, but a past one – and we as a society are only just now able to respond through user-friendly interfaces with the ability to train ourselves as producers rather than consumers of the technologies that affect our interaction with the world.

The way in which we ought to engage our world as producers is to first develop the understanding that our technologies are not something external to our nature; rather, they are, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, extensions of ourselves in the world. Every new technology, McLuhan argues, amplifies us in one regard and amputates us in another. Just as writing amplified our visual sense to the detriment of our acoustic sense and restructured the way in which we ordered the universe, accelerated mediated communication has amplified our engagement in time and space to the detriment of our ability to effectively deal with the data being conveyed if we continue to use the old data transmission paradigm. We have achieved the dubiously utopian bliss of having more information than we can possibly digest, so it is only natural that we convert our efforts at moving this information from one place to another to the more efficacious task of managing the information that is being moved – and that can only be done relationally. Constructivist educators already have experience with the transaction-model, but there is an underlying reason why constructivism works in today’s educational institutions beyond the innate human ability to make sense of environmental structures – human consciousness is engaged in what Thomas Kuhn would call a crisis preceding a scientific revolution. We are being rewired by the technological exoskeleton that we have built to be an extension of our central nervous system and collective consciousness to the extent that we can no longer merely be data receivers but must transform ourselves into data managers. It is for this reason that the transmission-model, in crisis at every institution where professors still lecture by rote, is giving way to the transaction-model whenever institutions are successful in implementing meaningful technology initiatives.

Now, there is a secret to this exoskeleton of information access and mediated communication that has been addressed in the work of Walter Ong – the idea of transformation of consciousness being more important than the actual technologies we use. The real nature of our technologies does not and has never been found in the implements (or tools) that we use to engage the world; rather, it has always been found in our ability to use those tools to construct viable environments for human interaction. Owning a pen does not make us literate—moreover, we can be literate without one. We are able as children of literacy to write in the air and read the world as though it were in print. Likewise, owning a computer does not make us hyperliterate--the truly hyperliterate are those who have been transformed by the technologies in such a way as they no longer need the tools to 'write in the air' or 'read the world as though it were in print.' Our understanding the paradigm shift towards hyperliteracy, then, redeems our place in the order of things by demonstrating for us how our technologies continue to be extensions of ourselves in a world that is developing them faster than we can integrate them into the structure of our lives. This opens up whole new fields of inquiry for gradations in human consciousness between the now oral, literate and hyperliterate worlds between both individuals living in developing countries and developed ones and between the social classes with varying degrees of access within developed countries. While there are already a myriad of studies being done on the effects of new technologies on class structure, there is plenty of room open for studies on the meaning of changing modes of consciousness on social relationships.

As educators, therefore, it is not enough for us to make ourselves aware of the new social realities; we must also transform our teaching methodologies so that we aid in the creation of a kind of society that can functionally interact with itself through the new consciousness that is emerging in the four-dimensional world that is no longer limited by the two-dimensional boundaries of time and space peculiar to the visual age of print. We must move entirely from transmission-based pedagogies of data transfer to transaction-based pedagogies of data management. Just to clarify those terms: Transmission-based pedagogies generally entail the direct conveyance of information from the teacher to the student who is then responsible for regurgitating the material using the assessment method assigned – usually an exam designed to measure a student’s knowledge of the subject matter. Transaction-based pedagogies, on the other hand, involve the student’s coming to an understanding of the course material through a process of discovery facilitated by the teacher and the classmates. In a sense, then, the coming to an understanding of a given discourse entails the creation of a negotiated reality between all the elements within a given learning community – the materials, the teachers and the students.

Assessment strategies are arranged around project-based and collaborative learning opportunities, such as research projects and classroom presentations, designed to measure how well students can interact with the subject matter. The means by which we assess the effectiveness of either method always occurs through our taking the ideal expectation of the method – in the case of transmission, retention, of transaction, interaction – and weighing it against the reality of student response. Of course, the technologies we use as extensions of ourselves in the world can complement either method – they can facilitate the transmission-model by allowing the teacher to replicate the rote lecture method in the linear environment that PowerPoint is capable of creating, and they can enhance the transaction-model by providing interactive ways for students to engage the course materials, their course instructor and one another in the polyvalent environment of cyberspace. Because all technologies affect social space in ways that transform human interaction, the transmission-model can no longer exist outside its being merely the foundation for engagement with the teaching and learning environment. The complete acceptance of the transaction-model is, in fact, the only vehicle we have for reconciling the social reality with our educational practice.

The realization of this paradigm shift as a part of the social reality has led most educational institutions from primary to higher education to engage in the development of educational technology initiatives. Because administrators are still engaging their educational environments under the assembly-line model of the sequential, repetitious and predictable age of print, their educational technology initiatives are bound to fall short of their changing social realities. Educational institutions hire system administrators, not constructivist educators, to run their instructional technology departments; they train the faculty on presentation software without a concurrent effort at training them on pedagogical transformation of their teaching and learning environments; they fail to engage in community formation efforts to teach the students how to use appropriate technologies in becoming producers rather than consumers of their own teaching and learning environments. An educational technology initiative should be administratively designed with the entire community in mind – not just the faculty, but the faculty and the students – because it affects the total community. It may start with one professor using PowerPoint to replicate the transmission-method of content delivery, but that is a transitory stage of development – ultimately, these technologies, because they are extensions of ourselves in the world, affect social space – teaching and learning space – in transformative ways. They affect the ways in which students encounter and are able to engage the discourse. For this reason, it makes sense that teachers who receive pedagogical training – who engage in a meaningful encounter with transactional teaching methodologies – will generate their own uses in appropriate contexts for the tools they have available to them. And if teachers in this way become producers rather than consumers of these technologies, we are only a short step away from their wanting students to follow their lead in the use of technologies appropriate to interaction within their disciplines.

The Social Impact – Appropriateness of Technology
Ralph Olliges

How should our technologies affect social space?

With the advent of new technology come many social implications. Are we teaching our students how to deal socially with the new technologies? As a society, we are still in the process of making ourselves ready for the social impact that our new technologies have brought to bear upon us. We live in a world that is increasingly demanding of each of us 24x7 connectivity. Advantages of cell phones include the stranded motorist being able to call for help, the parent in constant touch with the baby sitter, and the like, unless of course the battery is dead. So, the question lingers, what are the social implications of this 24x7 connectivity, especially with regards to us as educators as we try to teach not only the disciplines for which we were hired by our institutions, but also the nature of the technologies we use within our teaching and learning environments?

With our moving from the cosmos of the telemarketers and our landlocked phones to an ever increasing electronic world, we are now being bombarded by spam. The incessant stream of unwanted, unsolicited phone calls, emails, etc., brings an enormous task of wading through this quagmire each day. Other problems include an intrusion of personal space and/or privacy as well as a possible theft of information. Are we instilling a sense of ethics in our students? Just because the world has become more technologically literate does not mean that we discard our ethics. So, it is obvious that our place in society is being transformed both by the ways in which technologies extend us into the world and the ways in which that world extends itself inward to each of us. As a result of this, we educators need to focus our teaching strategies on the nature of mediated communication rather than on the tools we use to achieve it – that is, as we master these tools, we need to create learning environments that model the social appropriateness of their use. We need, in a sense, to engage students in meaningful exercises that interpret for them the nature of what it is they are doing in their learning communities in context with the social realities outside those communities.

Boundary redefinement?

Let us discuss this idea of social relationships for a moment. How does one engage in mediated communication while also engaging in face-to-face communication without destroying his or her face-to-face relationships? Engaging ourselves simultaneously in both synchronous and asynchronous relationships is bound to cause some difficulties in either or both of the relationships – this is because the nature of engagement with others is not one of data transfer but of interactive involvement with others through the data they share. So, my interacting with one community is interrupted when I am suddenly pulled into an interaction with another community. This means that the breakdown in data transfer exposes itself in the readiness in which we embrace interruption – in our preparedness for interruption and in our abilities to integrate that interruption into the natural flow of our social discourse. For all the value our technologies have for us, they are conduits, open invitations, for interruption. Some students, for example, carry wireless laptops; others have personal digital assistants that text message; still others have digital camera phones. This total connectivity challenges us, and it especially challenges how we educate our students. Moreover, every eighteen months a new generation of technology evolves that provides our students with even greater opportunities for interruption or for the management of interruption. Thus, developing a set of guidelines for one particular technological gizmo is a waste of our valuable time. What is needed is a set of transferable ethical standards that can be applied to emerging technologies so that we might be able to prepare ourselves and our students with the tools they will need to respond to whatever comes down the pike.

As our technologies become more normal to us, of course, we develop a sense of social responsibility in relation to them. Our first camera phone has us taking pictures of everything in sight merely because we can, but over time, we develop a greater sense of discernment over what is or is not an appropriate use for the tool we have in our possession. I have noticed the normalizing process on a twenty-something friend of mine. I will call him Brian. Every year, Brian and I have gone to three or four baseball games. During his last year of college, he purchased a cell phone. Consequently, during the first year of attending baseball games, as soon as the cell phone rang, he grabbed for it as if missing a phone call were unthinkable. We could be in the middle of a conversation and the ring of the cell phone would bring our conversation to a halt. In our second year of attending baseball games, he would look at the panel display on his cell phone to see who was calling and then decide whether to answer it or not. During the third year, he purchased a new cell phone that could send email messages as well as exchange the noise of the ring for a silent vibration. Finally, during our fourth year at the ballpark, he had mellowed to the technology considerably, only interrupting our conversation once to take a call from his sister so that I could talk to her. As the technology in his possession became increasingly more normal to him, it also became increasingly more invisible, more of a natural extension of his ability to interact with the world. He had learned through experience rather than classroom instruction to use the technology more appropriately in context with his social reality, and it is through experience that we all gauge the appropriateness of any tool that affects social space.

Brian’s story is in microcosm what is happening throughout our society. Take for instance another baseball game I attended in 2000. Around 8 pm, a cell phone rang, and most of the people sitting around me checked their belts. It is not that the idea of social appropriateness is foreign to them, but that the use of mediated communication in public spaces is so very normal and the social response has evolved to meet the new realities. Brian, as one of these people, answers his cell phone not because he cannot distinguish between social contexts – the cell phone is an extension of Brian in the world and he is conversely tied to others who extend themselves out to him. Wherever Brian is, then, he’s plugged into a social context larger than himself. He is connected to a much larger world than he can find in reach of his physical presence. This is the world we live in, and when we engage our online or face-to-face students in electronic learning environments we are doing nothing more than contributing to the disconnected virtual mentality unless we invest some effort teaching the nature of social relationships in a mediated society. As educators, we have taught students social manners of interacting with other students and adults face-to-face. However, educators are often unfamiliar with the technology themselves, and we cannot expect educators who have no skills in engaging mediated environments to teach students how to deal with the new, rapidly changing technology with regards to their social conduct. Thus, we need to begin by educating the educators to use their gifts for creating face-to-face teaching and learning environments in the development of mediated teaching and learning environments. Perhaps the methods that we use when dealing with students face-to-face will give us a starting place; however, we will ultimately have to address the new paradigm using the tools of that paradigm rather than by using the tools of the old. It is of paramount importance, then, that we learn what those tools are and how to use them efficaciously. One way, we, as educators, can help students deal socially with the new technology is to shift our teaching practices from data transfer to data management models. It is the responsibility of the school to shift from data transfer to data management models because schools are in the business of enculturating their students into the greater society for which they exist. This kind of paradigm shift, then, should be embraced as a natural response to any institution’s mission statement.

100% Connectivity

Once we have the idea of the shifting paradigm down, we can begin to take specific instances of societal use of technology and interpret them using that paradigm. For instance, just because the student is connected does not mean that everyone else is connected at the same time. However, students have the impression that if they do not receive an immediate response to any asynchronous form of query, then they are being ignored. As we migrate from a transmission model to a transaction model for pedagogies, educators will have the opportunity to interpret for students the nature of their expectations.

For example, registration for the fall semester usually commences around March at most institutions. Inevitably, the faculty member is off contract at the end of July and early August, but students who procrastinated all spring and most of summer still expect their emails to be answered – they expect email to bridge vacation time. So, for one, we need to educate our students not to be so demanding of another’s time. It is not only socially inappropriate, but it also exposes a social inconsistency. While students themselves do not appreciate the demands others make upon their own time, they have no qualms about making similar demands on someone else’s. Connectivity does not, and should not, translate into accessibility, for the nature of mediated communication is one that allows for deferred accessibility. Our interpreting this understanding for our students explicitly and then modeling it for them over time will lead them to develop a greater understanding of their own social roles. They will develop a better sense, perhaps, for the difference that exists between having something to say and saying something. They will discover how to engage others pertinently and be able to distinguish when breakdowns in on-topic discussion are also pertinent to the maintenance of a given discourse. We are not going to prevent idle chat and gossip, but we can at least use it to interpret how social relationships are formed in an asynchronous medium. Having a meaningful connection to others entails participation in a conversation that is not disruptive to the surrounding physical cosmos.

Implications

We are not at present teaching our students how to thrive in a world of mediated communication – they are learning this in spite of us – and the reason for this is that we educators erroneously assume that rapidly changing technologies are beyond our ability to keep up with them. Our focusing on the nature of mediated communication rather than on the tools we use to achieve it levels the playing field for us – it gives us a paradigm that might help us make sense of what is happening in society around us. To begin, we should explore issues of asynchronicity – what are they? Asynchronicity basically means leaving visual or aural messages for people in any given medium. We as a literate society is used to doing that – what we need to grow accustomed to is the ubiquity of our ability to do that and the frequency by which it is done. We need to explore the meaning behind it – not just the tools used in doing so.

People need to feel connected. That sudden ring of the cell phone -- that sudden interruption in conversations to answer it -- allows displaced persons to feel connected. Not only are we often disconnected in time, but we are also often disconnected in space. So, another point of inquiry would be an exploration of issues of geographic displacement – what are they? Geographic displacement results from several reasons. First, families are more displaced. Brian lives in Saint Louis. His parents live in Quincy. He dreams of having the ideal job and living in San Diego. Thus, the cell phone allows for the social interaction that might be missing physically in families that are not as dispersed. With the advent of the car and the airplane, we move about the geographical distance as if it the idea of a place beyond our reach did not exist. The cell phone and other new technologies help to bridge conceptual distance while means of physical locomotion help to bridge physical distance. We should engage the technologies that extend us in the world on the educational level by involving students in meaningful exercises that interpret for them the nature of what it is they are doing in their learning communities in context with the social realities outside those communities.

It is essential that we instill a sense of ethical behavior in our students. We cannot make them ethical. What we can provide are models of ethical behavior. We can help them to better decipher ethical choices as the new technologies impact us differently. We cannot teach them with regards to one particular mediated communication, for example, the cell phone, since that technology will be replaced, but we can, through the teaching and learning environments we are responsible for creating for them, teach them how to interact in an increasingly mediated world.

Works Cited

Kuhn, Thomas. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.