A look back at #teachertech

Part 1 of several - first, the watched pot that boiled

An analogy I’ve used often to describe instruction during the first few months of 2020 is that of the watched pot - the pace at which the water is heating seems interminably slow…then suddenly it’s HOT and there’s a change of state.

In the UC-Berkeley case, that was the notice from Chancellor Christ on March 9, 2020. We would be going remote. Through spring break. This came after some foreshadowing on March 6, in which we were told, in essence, to get ready to go remote. My last in-person classes that semester were the week of March 3. That semester would have been an intense workload under normal circumstances. There was the slow simmer of Covid-19 as backdrop, but we persisted. Mentally, I thought this would be like SARS in terms of longevity, and was back to using disinfectant and more frequent handwashing, but the show went on. I remember bantering with MBAs in Strategy for the Networked Economy on March 3 about their past summer internships, or post-graduation plans. Little did we know? Then Stanford went remote on March 8. Private school, not public like the UC system, but nonetheless, at that point, it seemed a matter of time, and indeed it was - on March 9, 2020, it was official.

It was two days after the notice from Chancellor Christ that the WaPo’s Geoffrey Fowler put out this article on “hermit tech”. And yes, this pretty much sums it up -

It’s a Netflix-and-quarantine life. But it’s not particularly chill.

And like Fowler highlights, what if broadband goes out? I did face this choice, once, with an undergrad class in April 2020. Power had gone out where I was, and thus broadband had too. Were this a business setting, I’d probably have proposed dialing into a conference bridge by cellphone, and narrating materials somehow (magically, perhaps by driving to a WiFi hot spot somewhere, and uploading materials to the course page) pre-shared with the group. But, really? A three-hour strategy elective, by cellphone, with college students, some of whom have gone back to their home countries? It might have been a magical moment of community. It also might have led to needing to drop the bridge if someone fell asleep (something I experienced during a standards meeting in the late 2000s). But the power came back on and instead we met over Zoom as originally planned.

Which gets us to the first initial set of learnings of that time, i.e., the #teachertech of the subject line. Returning to the guidance from the school to

begin planning more ways to offer their course content and lectures outside of the classroom, predominantly online.

Haas uses Canvas by Instructure as its instruction LMS. Email and calendar and Drive on the G Suite; for storage and large file sharing with external resources, Box. As of early 2020, premium Zoom licenses were available to faculty on request.

When I first started teaching (in 2014), my bCourses pages looked like a 1990s webpage done in FrontPage (ahem)- one long texty page, perhaps with artifacts from pasting from MSWord. Fortunately, and fortuitously, I had begun more muscular use of bCourses, and took a course on digital pedagogy in summer 2019. By fall 2019, course pages were designed such that assignments would show up in students’ overall CalCentral pages and bCourses calendars.

But, as we learned, designing a more navigable coursepage is, of course, only part of the game. Running a class over Zoom, it turns out, was not the same as sharing a presentation screen, something I had been already doing for years, whether over Zoom or WebEx or Skype. Audio quality mattered. Light quality mattered. Interaction frequency and quality mattered. And, audience circumstances and mood definitely mattered. Figuring this out….may very well be a life’s work.

I’ll end this post with photos of my home setup in mid-March 2020 and as of January 2022.

Yep, that was the set-up for the Adobe case in spring 2020. Wired headset, and a Logitech C922 camera for video. No halo light or keylight as of that point. I’m pretty sure I used a virtual backdrop. Snacks and coffee off-screen. I think I was using a kneeling chair.

Here’s the January 2022 setup. The first two weeks of the spring 2022 semester were remote, thanks to Omicron.

bill of materials: Fifine USB mic; two Asus 27” flat panels; 1 keylight; Sony vlogger DSLR; Logitech C922 as a second cam; standing desk. Laptop upgraded to a refurb ThinkPad X1. WiFi from Netgear mesh Orbi. (As my better half has reminded me, you are trying to provide an enterprise-grade experience using DIY tools.)

Now, better hardware doesn’t necessarily make a better instructor. But hopefully the frictions of being able to see and hear are removed, and maybe even made pleasant!

And hardware is only part of the instructor stack - the software tool chain, and, of course materials and course design, are, of even greater importance. More on that to come.