TECHNOLOGY
iPad-eology Rod Crewther Faculty of Sciences, University of Adelaide NTEU Adelaide Branch President
P
at Wright’s article ‘iPadagogy’ (Advocate, Nov. 2010, Vol. 17 no. 4, p. 30) about iPad-based learning at Adelaide raises sensitive industrial and academic issues on which I have been asked to comment. Pat suggests that the Federal Government’s plan to expand the university sector by including TAFE could go a lot further: TAFE’s ‘collaborative learning practices’ should become the basis for university teaching, and iPads are a very effective way of ensuring that this will happen. It would eliminate discrimination against low SES (socio-economic status) students, and make learning ‘more congenial’, part of a multi-tasking environment in which students could text each other during lectures and enjoy ‘Tools of Conviviality’: ‘dates’ contacts, games and infotainment, favourite music and videoclips’. Academics may get increased workloads and would certainly have to improve their teaching, but ‘why bother if it’s more work? ... it works!’
The iPad proposal came from my Faculty (Sciences) and assumed huge discounts on e-textbooks from publishers. Each 1st-year Science student and lecturer gets a free iPad, with increased enrolments paying for everything, in theory. Last September, a week before the Education Research Group of Adelaide (ERDA) conference attended by Pat Wright, the NTEU was briefed by the Dean. At that time, e-copies of some first-year textbooks were known to exist but almost none were for sale, so could academics please write e-textbooks for iPads? We said ‘no way’: the workload would be impossible. The production of each e-textbook would require academic support of Faculty size, as was evident from the preface of a 1,200-page textbook we brought with us. Perhaps this encouraged him to put pressure on publishers, because some of them have now agreed to supply e-versions at moderate discounts. Not all disciplines have the textbook they want, but competition is likely to force publishers to solve that problem by producing e-versions in the near future. So the iPad’s role as an e-rucksack seems not to be an issue. 26
The iPad is supposed to be compatible with the University’s on-line Blackboard suite (called MyUni at Adelaide). No doubt Pat knows about MyUni, but having retired to an adjunct position in 2002 (still within Labour Studies) when MyUni went live, he may not realise how much experience academics now have judging the usefulness of on-line quizzes, pre-reading boards, wikis, blogs, voice boards or whatever for their discipline (not a lot). These aspects of iPaddery will not be a problem provided disciplines are not forced by iPad-eology to use tools known not to work, such as e-mail correspondence with large numbers of individual students (workload again). Everything else is contested. First, the idea that students can learn a science or indeed anything with academic backbone while multitasking is absurd. Unless students can concentrate long enough to pick up the logic of an argument, they are lost. Surely good lecturing involves the ability to engage students in a concentrated way, with short rest breaks at suitable steps in the learning sequence. Moreover, great lecturers are good at getting students
to ask questions in front of the rest of the class so that the whole class hears the discussion and benefits from it. Why destroy this by turning it all into disorganised e-chatter? It is certainly evident to first-year lecturers that some areas of secondary education have been multitasking student ‘learning’. This has meant a shift of costs from the States to universities and a consequent increase of workload for academics appalled by the disadvantage for students deprived of a decent academic school education. The NTEU must defend members in this position, and not accuse them of discriminatory entry policies. (What is really needed is CommonwealthState agreement to fund a Year Zero for students whose academic subject choices at school are affected by teacher shortages.) Perhaps Pat could have clarified his position at this stage by noting that he was Chair of the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia (SSABSA) and its successor the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) Board from the mid-90s to 2009. (I was a University representative on SSABSA from 1991 to 2000 until Mary O’Kane booted me off.) As noted in the final SSABSA Annual Report (2008), ‘Pat has been with SSABSA since its inception, and is proud of its high standing and achievements, particularly in the recognition of VET and community learning in the SACE.’ A result of Pat’s move to adjunct status in 2002 may be his reduced exposure since then to spiralling workloads for regular staff caused by the underfunding of teaching and research, the proliferation of academically challenged control freaks, and rampant e-bureaucracy. Also he may not have NTEU ADVOCATE vol. 18 no. 1