A professor I work with recently decided to use Ning to create an online social network for a course. Like Facebook, Ning provides a space where users can communicate and share links, images, and videos. However, Ning allows instructors to create a space that is used exclusively for course-related collaboration and is only accessible by their students. This increased level of privacy and focused purpose helps everyone involved maintain boundaries between their academic and personal lives.

Shortly after the course began, the professor noticed many of her students were having trouble with basic tasks such as uploading images, embedding YouTube video clips, and writing blog posts. The professor told me, “I have a blog and I’m almost fifty. I was shocked that my students have no experience with blogging.” I wish I could say I was as shocked as she was. Unfortunately, I know this problem all too well and I’ve been writing about it periodically for the past year. Back in February of 2008, I wrote a post about the importance of defining computer literacy. My major complaint at that time was the lack of agreement on a minimum technology literacy level for college students. The lack of computer-literacy requirements and classes to support students who don’t meet such requirements places an unfair burden on faculty. Professors who wish to use new technology in their courses wind up serving as tech support for students who lack a fundamental understanding of interactive media.

Back in November, I also wrote about the misleading stereotype of the tech-savvy millennial learner that I hear about so often at conferences. As much as people love to refer to today’s twenty-something college students as “digital natives,” many of these students are more like “digital resident aliens.” They’ve learned just enough to get by, but ask them something that’s not in their phrasebook and you’ll quickly see how superficial their knowledge really is.

Sadly, the lack of a well-rounded technology education isn’t just failing students in the arts and humanities. Students pursuing technology-focused degrees are also suffering. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted that many Web-design instructors are not preparing students for the demands of employers in the field. In “Colleges Get Poor Grades on Teaching Web Fundamentals,” the author cites a survey developed by Leslie Jensen-Inman, an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jensen-Inman interviewed thirty-two professional Web designers and discovered that universities are either encouraging students to overspecialize in a particular piece of software or programming language or teaching outdated tools and techniques that are no longer relevant in the working world.

As a part-time Web-design professor, I found this article vindicating, because it supports my belief that students need a broad range of up-to-date knowledge to become successful designers themselves. In addition, I think the basic skills and knowledge that aspiring Web designers need are becoming increasingly essential for all college students. Knowing how to manage digital files, maintain a blog, participate in an online discussion, embed media in a Web page—these are all skills that will prove valuable no matter what a student’s career aspirations might be. Now we simply need to recognize that this knowledge won’t reach critical mass by osmosis. Hundreds of hours of Wii Tennis or text messaging or Twittering might do a lot to reduce technophobia in a new generation of students, but it doesn’t necessarily increase their understanding of how interactive media works and enable them to transfer knowledge from one tool to another.

Many instructional designers might disapprove of the idea that we should relegate new-media education to a single “Technology 101” course. Instead, they often support an integrative approach in which technology is used across the curriculum as a means to an end for a variety of disciplines. I agree that it’s wonderful to see faculty using technology to improve learning in a variety of subject areas, from philosophy to chemistry to mathematics to the fine arts. However, I think attacking the problem from both sides could help ensure the push for technology integration doesn’t always come from the top down.

A Technology 101 course could help ensure today’s students can live up to the tech-savvy stereotype we’ve already forced upon them. With a little support from the bottom, we might finally see more students pushing faculty to use new tools and helping instructors improve their technology literacy. Until then, I’m afraid we might be stuck in an inefficient, reactive model that attempts to support students once assignment deadlines are looming and panic has set in. This approach is a bit like asking students to drive cross-country after giving them the keys to an eighteen wheeler and an 800 number to call if they have questions as they’re barreling down the highway. Will some of them make it? Sure. But a little driver’s ed up front could prevent a lot of disasters down the road.

My mother is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in retail for many years. She often says that the toughest thing about her line of work is the demand to always be “on”—to be perky, pleasant, enthusiastic, and accommodating at all times. Now that the new quarter is under way and I find myself teaching again, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similar pressure for instructors to be “on” when interacting with students.

The last time I taught, multiple students noted in their evaluations that I seemed annoyed and impatient when answering their questions. It came as a bit of a shock, particularly since my previous round of evaluations had turned out so well. After a healthy dose of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, I traced my steps and recalled a few instances in class when I was visibly frustrated with students who weren’t keeping up with a tutorial. I also knew I’d been particularly bad about reminding students if I’d already answered the same question multiple times, and I had probably mentioned more than once that certain mistakes on the assignments could have been avoided by reading the assignment instructions more carefully.

I usually find that I’m in a great mood for the first few weeks of the quarter. I answer repetitive questions with glee. Students who don’t follow directions don’t keep me up at night. Nothing can dampen the feeling that I’m living my dream of being a professor and that I’m single-handedly changing the world. But the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. Like a Starbucks barista at the end of an eight-hour shift or a J. Crew salesperson who has just been asked to fold the same twenty pairs of pants he just folded two hours ago, the normal wear and tear of the job begins to drain my reservoir of patience. Eventually, it gets harder to answer the same question five times with a smile. It gets more painful to grade assignments in which students disregard the rubric I so meticulously and lovingly constructed. By the end of the quarter, it can be difficult not to take things personally that have little or nothing to do with my abilities as a teacher.

When I reflected more on what went wrong during my last term in the classroom, I realized I wasn’t just in a bad mood. I had also brushed off a critical task that I had performed the quarter before: asking my students for feedback before the middle of the term. The first time I tried it, I worried that surveying my students would draw attention to my lack of experience. I didn’t want to seem needy, but I was even more afraid of waiting until the end of the quarter to find out what my students really thought of me. So, I gave them an incredibly simple survey with only two questions:

1. How challenging is the course so far? (This was a multiple-choice question.)
2. Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the course? (This was an open-ended question with a comment box.)

This survey was helpful in two ways. First, I learned that I was flying through my software demonstrations and needed to slow down. Second, I showed my students that I genuinely cared about them and wanted to make the course the best it could be. While I can’t say that my little survey made all the difference in my evaluation results that quarter, I feel certain that it played a significant role. When I taught again, I was a bit overconfident, having passed the last quarter with flying colors. I meant to ask my students for feedback but never got around to it. I told myself the students wouldn’t complete it, that I should have done it the week before, or that I should wait until next week. It was always the wrong time to ask for feedback, and before I knew it, the opportunity had slipped through my fingers.

This quarter I’m determined not to make the same mistake. I’ve already asked my students a few simple questions and their responses have helped me correct a few small problems that would have magnified over time. I made sure to include a question about my attitude and patience level, and I plan to offer the survey again to help me snap out of any funk that might set in as the quarter progresses. Asking for feedback early on also goes a long way to foster goodwill. Because I teach in a creative discipline, I have to offer a lot of criticism to help students improve. I can tell them all day long that they shouldn’t take this criticism personally, but giving them the opportunity to critique my teaching helps me lead by example. It also gives the students a chance to blow off some steam before the final evaluations, and I’d much rather get the worst over with early and in a survey that no one has to see but me.

Surveys can be conducted through Blackboard, but it can be difficult to convince students that they are truly anonymous. DePaul employees have the option to use QuickData, our home-grown tool that allows faculty to create surveys by completing a few simple forms. Because these surveys can be taken from any computer and don’t require students to log in, faculty might find they get more frank and honest feedback. For instructors outside DePaul, Web-based survey tools like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo offer a similar promise of anonymity. Of course, giving students the freedom to say whatever they like about their instructors has its downsides. However, I find it’s better to embrace this early in the quarter when there’s still time to do something about it. Hopefully, the result is a better learning experience for everyone and fewer disgruntled students venting several weeks’ worth of frustration in a course evaluation that will be read by department heads.

My students aren’t really my customers and I don’t like to think that I’m obligated to put on a happy face at all times and serve them like a Ritz-Carlton concierge. However, I do think student feedback is essential if I’m going to become a better teacher. When this feedback comes only once at the end of the quarter, it’s easy to feel defensive and powerless. That’s why it’s so important to ask students for regular feedback. It might make me seem a bit needy, but that’s an adjective I can live with, and I know my mom would agree. But just to be sure, I think I’ll send her a survey.

I took my first French class in 10th grade at a public school in a small Alabama town. The class was typical of most high-school foreign language courses. We spoke mostly in English and the assessments were designed to ensure that no one would fail the class. Vocabulary tests typically asked us to pair French terms in column A with their English equivalents in column B, like so:

Grammar tests were only slightly more challenging and usually consisted of simple sentences with missing verbs to conjugate, as shown below:

I often memorized the verb conjugations the night before (or in some cases, just minutes before the start of the test), then filled in blanks feverishly the minute the exam was in my hands. Speed was key, since my mental snapshot of the proper endings for each verb would begin to blur after five to ten minutes. Occasionally, we were subjected to some other form of memorization torture. This usually involved reciting poems or singing French Christmas carols.

That first year, I thought my French was formidable. (Or, as the French would say, “formidable.”) I could rattle off the French names of almost any object in the classroom. I could tell you exactly how to say I go, you go, and we go. (Saying where I, you, or we were going wasn’t always so easy.) The following year, I transferred to the Alabama School of Math and Science (ASMS), a rigorous magnet boarding school in Mobile. I had to take a French placement exam before enrolling at ASMS, and I knew I was in trouble when there wasn’t a single matching question on the test. My horrible score on the placement exam meant I had to start all over again with French I—along with nearly every other student who had taken a year (and in some cases, two years) of traditional high-school French.

On my first day of French class at ASMS, my teacher explained that our lessons would be built around French In Action, a series of videos designed to teach us French through total immersion. (“Videos” really isn’t the right word, since we viewed everything on gigantic laserdiscs.) As we watched the first few episodes, I was completely overwhelmed. I wondered what language I had been studying for the past year in my hometown, because it certainly wasn’t whatever those people on the screen were using to communicate with each other.

French In Action was part soap opera, part Sesame Street, and it wasn’t great at being either. The storylines were bland and the lesson recaps were repetitive. Yet, despite the actors’ dated haircuts, the overacting, the two-dimensional characters, and the ludicrous plot twists (or perhaps because of them), the whole class was hooked. We were so hungry for anything other than the usual verb conjugation tables and vocabulary memorization that we actually felt invested in the simple narratives. We cheered when Mireille’s bratty sister fell in a fountain in the park. We leaned forward with anticipation when it seemed Robert would finally ask Mireille on a date, and we laughed when our teacher tried to explain a new verb or noun through her own unique system of charades. She would flail her arms wildly, run around the room, improvise with props—anything to avoid a direct translation to English. The goal was to make us think in French, and that’s exactly what the class did.

I went on to major in French in undergrad and was the first student at the University of Alabama to participate in a semester-long exchange program with a French university. (There was another student who was supposed to join me for the adventure, but she went home when she discovered the dorm rooms didn’t offer private bathrooms.) After my semester in France, I decided to move to Germany to live with a few German friends I had made in France. I didn’t speak a word of German at the time.

By the time I left Germany five months later, my spoken German was nearly as good as my French. Of course, there were times when I wished I had learned a few basic grammar rules the old-fashioned way. I was forced to rely on my instincts when trying to conjugate a verb in a complex tense or pair the proper article with a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun. And I still couldn’t explain key differences in the four German cases—nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive—if my life depended on it. However, none of that stopped me from understanding and participating in lots of great conversations with my German friends or communicating with strangers at the grocery store or the pharmacy.

My experience learning German made me wonder (more than ever before) why student progress in learning a new language is still assessed through fill-in-the-blank tests and short essays. Before the days of YouTube, I could understand why an immersive approach to foreign language education was easier said than done. I can still recall how my class “oohed” and “aahed” years ago when one of my professors brought in a VHS tape with a few grainy episodes of Friends that she had recorded while in France. She clutched the precious black plastic cartridge tightly, hugging it to her chest as though she feared one of us might snatch it from her before she could insert it into the VCR. She told us that it cost over two hundred dollars to convert the tape to a North American video format, and we all shook our heads to express our disbelief and our gratitude.

Until recently, supplying students with a German episode of The Simpsons or a Japanese news broadcast required about as much planning and sacrifice as a cocaine smuggling operation. A devoted instructor might record a soap opera during a vacation abroad and carry the tape home like a priceless artifact from an archaeological dig. Once the tape was transported safely, the search would begin for the rare translator of foreign media formats—an elusive code breaker who could make the artifact accessible to the instructor’s students. Today, a wealth of foreign media is only a click away.

So, why isn’t everyone leveraging foreign-language media to create more immersive learning experiences? Some instructors might argue that, YouTube or no YouTube, good foreign language education isn’t primarily about learning enough to understand words and phrases used in popular entertainment and carry on an everyday conversation. The argument over what’s really important in language education (grammar, syntax, and spelling vs. general comprehension and diction) is nothing new. Yet, no matter which side you sympathize with, I think most instructors agree that video and audio can go a long way to promote thinking in a foreign language (as opposed to translation), reinforce key concepts, and burn words and phrases into long-term memory. This brings me to the critical, concluding question of my article, which I hope you will respond to by answering the survey below. (And feel free to provide further feedback by posting a comment.)

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