Welcome to Tomorrow

There are basically two kinds of opinion piece on the place of technology in higher education. A: anything which potentially distracts students’ attention from my dispensing of Truth in the time-honoured manner must be banished! Down with laptops, mobile phones and ballpoint pens! B: get with the programme, daddio! All the hip youth is on TikTok now so we must convert our mouldy old lectures into 15-second dance clips!

Yes, I’m being snarky. The latest manifestation of B, a piece on WonkHE about how we should all be using social media to engage with our students, actually warns everyone off TikTok as being “problematic”. To be honest, I can’t entirely fathom why this is judged to be the case when the all-devouring Facebook is promoted without hesitation, but, hey, if there’s no blanket recommendation of new tech just because it’s new, that has to be a good thing…

I really do understand the impulse. Hell, I’ve been lamenting on here regularly about the fact that students are mostly avoiding my lovingly-conceived online discussion activities, and I would be over the moon if they started debating my lectures on the Twitter. But responding to the “creepy treehouse” problem (we create welcoming online spaces that try to mimic their usual haunts, and they shun them) by trying instead to infiltrate their own spaces isn’t an answer – they will simply run away, apart from the few whose brains we have already eaten, who were participating in our VLE discussion threads anyway.

What really bothers me about the article, however, is the promotion of social media as the answer to issues with communication. “They don’t read their emails”. Well, no, not reliably, but we make it clear that they should, and that they’re liable for any adverse consequences from not reading them. The idea of doing this on social media is that they’re all on it anyway so we don’t have to require them to check it – but how are we going to ensure that they see our announcements, when increasingly no one sees every post from everyone they follow? Compel them all to follow our specially created module accounts so we can DM them? Muting your lecturer becomes a disciplinary offence? And what about all the students who aren’t on a particular platform – they must be compelled to hand over their information to Zuckerberg’s electronic shoggoth so we can then communicate with them in ‘their’ digital space?

This isn’t just about a bunch of sinister adults hanging around the edges of teenage gatherings; it’s an attempt at re-ordering those hang-outs so they suit our purposes, above all by doing away with the idea that they get to choose whom to interact with and under what conditions. At best, they will simply run away and refuse to engage – but at least we’d know that we’d failed. The savvier will simply create dummy accounts to engage with official university ones and then run away, so we’ll think that our announcements are actually reaching them.

Of course, the fact that something is a stupid idea and obviously won’t work has never stopped university management in the past…* It’s easy to see how these things can become an expectation and then a requirement – because are you saying that you don’t care enough about your students to want to communicate with them? Before this academic year began, we were given a model of a questionnaire to give to new personal tutees, asking them various things including their ability to engage online and their preferred means of communication. The latter question included as options phone and WhatsApp. Well, office phone isn’t a lot of use when we’re being kept off campus as much as possible, so that implies private phone number (massive alarm bells if any lecturer thinks that’s a good idea), and ditto WhatsApp.

Yes, the WonkHE article has an answer to this: separate work phone! And the university is going to pay for all these phones and their data plans, huh? This is symptomatic: the other suggestions don’t carry the same direct financial burden, but the time implications are substantial – especially when almost certainly we’d have to send out emails as well, if not messages on four different platforms just to make sure we haven’t missed anyone. I run a couple of different Twitter accounts, and it is quite hard work even if you’re committed to it. And the risk that the always-on nature of social media then leads to the expectation that we will be always available is considerable. Email can be bad enough, but what if we actually want to use social media for our social lives of an evening, but can’t avoid the work stuff?**

I don’t think anyone in university management is actually, consciously expecting staff to make themselves available to students 24-7 – but it doesn’t feel as if they are sufficiently conscious of this as a problem to recognise the implications of some of their “always go the extra mile”, hyper-sensitivity to (some) student needs proposals. It’s the difference, which is not properly kept in mind, between worrying that some students may not have brilliant broadband connectivity so we need to be careful about how we set up online learning activities, and worrying that we need to maintain communication with students so effectively allow them to dictate the platform (and we put in the work to record their preferences, switch between Teams, Zoom and Skype etc). Thankfully the questionnaire mentioned above was an optional model, so the choice of phone or WhatsApp could simply be deleted – but I can imagine how in some universities there might not be such a choice, and the fact the options were there in the first place is indicative of either woolly thinking or an assumption that, actually, yes, lecturers should lose some of their own privacy and/or invest time and money, for the sake of the students.

Seriously, what’s actually wrong with email? It’s ubiquitous for a reason; it’s easy and clear (including for substantial amounts of information, whereas communicating by Twitter could only mean giving a brief summary and link to full details – requiring students to make several extra steps to access it), it can be managed (including putting something aside for a while, whereas on social media you have to respond instantly or it just vanishes) and saved for future reference (social media: back to the vanishing problem).

And, for the moment at least, email looks set to continue to be a major part of most people’s working lives, so actually this is something students need to learn (including my regular pedantic lectures on correct forms of address; honestly, folks, you’re not going to get that internship if you write an email to the personnel director of the law firm starting just with “Hello”). If ever there was a case for our bringing them into ‘our’ digital space and expecting them to accept its workings, rather than trying to infiltrate theirs, it is surely here.

If I wanted to be really snarky about that article, I would say that it suffers from Facebook Thinking: why isn’t there a single platform for EVERYTHING (that we can control)? ‘Tha Kidz’ are using social media all the time for socialising and entertainment – so we need to get our teaching on there ASAP! They’re not using email any more – so we need to switch to WhatsApp! But what if they like having social media for socialising and entertainment, and are happy to keep the world of lectures and assessment quite separate? What if they don’t use email because they haven’t hitherto had to worry about the sorts of communication for which email is useful? What if – radical thought – we stop assuming that they are digital natives so we must accommodate ourselves to their world, and remember that there’s a lot they have to learn about how the wider digital world works?

*Maria Pretzler on the Twitter (@MariaPretzler) has reminded me of how excited some universities got about the potential of Second Life a while back. Every hyperventilating article about the wonderful pedagogic potential of new online social spaces needs to have someone whispering in its ear “Remember Second Life…”

**Also, even if we set up separate ‘official’ Facebook accounts for the purposes of interacting with students – actually that’s a bit problematic as far as the Terms of Service are concerned, unless he actually means Facebook pages, in which case the chances of interacting with students who don’t want to be interacted with are pretty well zero – then there’s still the issue of invading the privacy of the students. When Facebook first arrived in the UK, I accepted ‘friend’ requests from a couple of current students, as it seemed rude not to. Within a week, I switched to my current rule of never being friends with any student until they graduated. I’m not going to describe the image that one of those students shared, but I cannot scrub it from my memory; of course he didn’t mean to share it with me, but the whole dynamic of the platform is to persuade you to interact as if with a small group of close friends when actually you’re sharing stuff with hundreds, and with the system itself. If I create a work account to protect my privacy while sending out module-related stuff, I’m still opening up students to losing some of theirs. And leaving me open to seeing things I really don’t want to know… Honestly, do these people not actually use the social media they are recommending that we all pile into?