South-by-Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) is a technology conference, held in Austin every Spring. SXSWi is also a melting pot where just about anyone interested in computers, the Internet, moblie devices, and other sorts of technology comes to find out what’s going on. I attended two sessions on technology in the classroom and was struck by the curious contrast between the two. One session was a panel of college students. Their message was this. “Yes, technology is really cool and an important tool in education, but it doesn’t belong in the classroom.” The other session was a conversation attended mainly by teachers and parents of K-12 students. Their message was this. “Bring it on! Our classrooms need more technology and we need to make more use of it in the classroom.” Puzzling over the issue, I was reminded of two of research projects from the dawn of classroom computers. This blog post tells one of those stories. My next post will tell the other.

Story 1 is about distance learning. In case you don’t know, distance learning is what happens when an organization decides to offer its classes to students that aren’t physically present in the classroom. So it puts a TV camera on an instructor and streams the video to wherever the students are. Just to make it interesting the technology allows students to ask questions and otherwise interact with the instructor.

There was a time when this distance-learning stuff was brand new. So the Air Force engaged a company that I worked for to do an experiment in “advanced, computerized” distance learning. This meant that, apart from everything going over IP (and this was around 1998, mind you) that the instructor had a number of whiz-bang devices available to her, devices like an electronic white board, and a slide show capability. It also meant that each student had his or her own computer, with headsets so that they could listen to the audio stream and contribute to it. The instructor’s computer had all sorts of knobs and buttons so that she could call on students, listen to individuals, even form subgroups of students.

The IP part of the study never got working, but the research team (led by a colleague of mine) was able to study a quasi or virtual advanced computerized distance learning setup by stringing wires from one room of a building, where the instructor was, to another room, where the students were. So the instructor, who was a real instructor, could try to teach a real course to real students.

It was that real instructor-real student-real course nature that made this experiment so interesting. I asked the guy running it how things were going. “Not good,” was his answer. As it turned out, two interesting things were going on, one in the instructor’s room, the other in the student’s room.

The designers of the system had made sure that the instructor could style just about any interaction that she wanted with the students. Anything she did in a real classroom, she could do in her special virtual classroom. The problem was, all the normal face-to-face control mechanisms such as hand-raising, gesture, and gaze had been replaced with buttons and menus and other geegaws. No longer could she point to a student or throw a glance his way. Instead of being able to physically shuffle through overheads, she had to master the arcane controls of PowerPoint. As the result, she was either struggling the technology or ignoring it. In the end became a talking head that used only a fraction of the capabilities available to her.

Here’s what happened in the student room. In a normal classroom, indeed, in any social situation, conversation is the order of the day. I ask a question. If you know the answer, you’ll volunteer it. If you hear something you don’t understand, you turn to your neighbor. Someone starts a discussion. Others join in.

But what if I set each of you up in front of a display and hang a headset on you. What if I put every student in the room on line. As you can guess, once these students were on-line, they were no longer off-line. Normal classroom discussion came to an abrupt end. Whatever interaction there was among students occurred only through the network under the control of the instructor, who was less than skilled at managing the conversational facilities at hand.

In this environment technology was intrusive. It channeled communication down a narrow path in a way that subverted normal conversational mechanisms. I decided, for control purposes to look at a few videos that we had taken of conventional classroom training. The conventional setting, it turns out, affords a surprisingly rich suite of mechanisms for controlling conversation and attention: gesture, glance, body language, prosody, and physical position, to name a few. All of these mechanisms are used really without thinking on the part of either instructor or students.

What this story brings home to me is the importance of affordances in the classroom, and in other social situations. What are affordances? The easiest way to define them are capabilities run through the wringer of perception. The affordance of a fire hydrant to humans is that of a firefighting tool. To a dog it is that of a message center.

The quasi distance learning lab had all of the capabilities of a conventional classroom, but none of its affordances. Putting a headset on a student does not remove her ability to converse normally with other students, but it does remove the affordance for doing so. Once the headset is on, conversation is no longer in her perceptual space of possibilities.

The lesson here is that the classroom, the lecture hall, the meeting room are remarkably resilient tools for education and other social enterprises, but that messing around with those mechanisms in uninformed ways can have nasty unintended consequences.

However, messing around with classrooms in uninformed ways can sometimes have wonderful unanticipated consequences, one of which I’ll describe in my next blog post.