Because of the abbreviated presentation at the Spring Institute this is not what I said, but it is what I intended to say.

Mentoring and Instructional Technologies

A note from our department secretary recorded the message, “Dr. So-and-So called from the Provost’s Office.” After several days attempting to make connect, I reached her. She said, “Dr. Makamson, our Spring institute will be about mentoring and we we’d like you to discuss ‘Using the New Technologies’. You’ll have 15 minutes.” “Well, OK, I said (scratching my head).” And, now here I am.

So, last week, I stared at the PC keyboard trying to come up with something profound about the importance of the new technologies and how they were going to revolutionize teaching. I didn’t believe that… then the fear that I was going to embarrass myself seized me…so, my mind wondered. Staring down at the keyboard I saw “Esc”, “F1” through “F12” – wonder what those keys are for… Then in the next row there was the funny little symbol no one uses, the “till”, I think, followed by numbers. And below that, “Tab” and then I saw it! “ Q-W-E-R-T-Y.”

I never took a course in typing, but it does not sound right somehow say “I am a “hunt and peck-er”…. but that’s what I do. The QWERTY method of typing is terribly inefficient, but no one I have ever known has bought one of those “ergonomically” correct keyboards. The QWERTY method was invented in the late 1800’s to prevent keys on a mechanical typewriter from sticking together. This isn’t a problem, however, today. I depress a key and the letter shows up on my monitor. If a key sticks it’s because I dripped coffee, not because the mechanical arms of the typewriter levers rub together. I concluded that we really don’t like change when something works pretty well. We also find ways to retain our learned habits even when the technology radically changes – like changing from a Remington mechanical typewriter to a Compaq 700 megahertz, 40 gigabyte hard drive personal computer. QWERTY persists.

Even though the technology available to us is changing there are things that I really like about the old way of teaching. And, like QWERTY, I like them because they work, and, frankly, I’m trying to get better at them. For example, I still think that at the heart of teaching someone something new, the art of conversation is important. Socrates had it right when he pursued truth by just talking with his students. Of course, the problem for us in using this ancient technology of dialog is trying to make it work when the students number 30 to 50, all of whom expect us to extract, organize, and prioritize our little truths. Our challenge is: ”How do we engage them and help them appreciate the value of discovering the larger truths on their own, the merits of testing one another’s truths with the art of argument, and the value and pleasure of sharing what they have found?”

“Sharing” Now there’s a word you wouldn’t expect business professor to use! But it really is at the center of what we teach about successful business. In the business school we live in a schizoid kind of world: There is the Darwinian market of Adam Smith in which successful businesses learn how to win in a competitive environment, driven to some indeterminate, higher efficiency. But, when we look inside the business organization, we see a collaborative enterprise. One in which people do there best to make decisions about an uncertain world, one in which people learn to cooperate to collectively win, driven by greater effectiveness in a common purpose.

You and I understand this as the “collegiality” of a faculty. In business we are more apt to talk about the need for mentoring - uh, “sharing”. As a former businessman, I personally don’t care for the term “mentoring”. It conjures up the notion of some old, near-retiring executive motivated by the desire to leave behind some great wisdom to the young, eager protégé who is mostly interested in what you can do for them to get them on a “fast track”.

I think in Greek mythology, Mentor was a “thinking person” whom Ulysses asked to tutor his son Telemachus and to take care of his household while Ulysses was off on an adventure. Of course, when Ulysses returned home, his estate was in disarray, suitors beset his wife, and evidently his son had not learned to manage dad’s affairs. Ulysses did have a mentor, but it wasn’t Mentor. Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, guided Ulysses the adventurer. Athena’s my kind of mentor – one who knows how to go something and also knows how to keep others from stopping you.

It is in this last observation that, I think, business research on mentoring and on any teaching-learning relationship has a very important message to learners, protégés, and the rest of us. Gabarro and Kotter at the Harvard Business School after publishing one of the oft-cited articles on this relationship, after authoring a book on new managers in 1987, today offer to new managers the following simple advice, which is also appropriate to faculty: “Forget ambition. Forget promotion. Forget raises. Just think of the job and how to be effective in it.”

To this advice I would add: the collaborative enterprise is in the sharing, “mentoring “ if you like, in discovering how this job of teaching can be made more effective. We beat the competition by pulling together to attain organizational “synergy”, that is we become greater that our collective individuality by creating shared experiences.

Oh, yea. I am supposed to share about the new communications and commuting technologies – I nearly forgot. Two things scare me about this: one, there is the fact that I am talking to a lot of people who have been teaching much longer than I. I’m new to this, and coming from business, I have no perceived idea about how to teach. Second, trying to convince others about the advantage of the new technologies is problematic because:

First, we have seen the promise of these technologies in business tortured by the stock markets this past year. There is not much real literature to assist us in identifying which of the new technologies will benefit our pedagogy. There is also uncertainty as to how the Internet and computer technologies will evolve.

Second, it may not matter if any one protests the new technologies. They are here. They are ubiquitous, and your students are using these technologies, even if some faculty is not. Like the new “new economy” of the Internet businesses, Internet technologies are now just another way to do our business in education.

I point this out because only three years ago I started my own website when 30% of my students reported that they had ever been on the Internet. For business students whose jobs would require this skill and whose careers would be molded by the e-commerce of industries, I simply wanted my students to be encouraged to use the Internet. Today, Hampton University has become a wired campus; students bring to class their experience from home and high school of using PC’s and the Internet. 80% of U.S. homes have a PC, nearly a third of the population is on the Internet daily, and last year while the U.S. Postal Service delivered 101 billion letters, the there were 4 trillion e-mails transmitted. The novelty of a professor’s website is not a sufficient enough reason to warrant the time and trouble of creating a website.

The challenge for us with these technologies, like trying to make Socratic method work in a class of 40 students and trying to get our students to read the assignments, is finding out what will work for us. Since there are no authorities and little research, if you experiment with them, you are the authority.

I guess that statement is my sole credential, then, to share with you what I have attempted and what my observations about new computing and communications technologies are and how they may benefit others.

1. E-Mail: I require all of my students to have e-mail, and I ask students to communicate after office hours with me by e-mail. I post every student’s e-mail address at my website behind a password protected screen, to encourage students to use this medium to communicate with each other. The advantage of this is that I ensure my student has this skill, and, I find, I sometime get interesting comments about ideas discussed in class from students who otherwise would not participate willingly in the class discussion. Mostly I receive excuses for attending class, complaints or inquiries about grades, and questions about assignments. I feel like I have a better capability to communicate directly with a student. I also feel like I have less private time away from my students. I also use e-mail technology in class management and in student self-assessments, which I will explain momentarily.

2. Website: I maintain a growing website for my courses which I use for the following. -

a. Student Registration. I use an e-mail form that students must complete in the first week. This provides me information that I once collected with an in-class form. I use this to set up a student database to include the student’s advisor, major, classification, career objective, interest in MBA or doctorate, and campus contact information. This gives some insight into the individuality of each student, and I know whom to contact if I have a problem with the student’s attendance, grades, or conduct. Because the form is completed early in the semester, I typically obtain a much better record of the students actually in my classes in advance of the third official registration list, which is notoriously too late to be of much assistance in organizing my classes in the first few weeks.

b. Grades. I post grades and attendance behind a password-protected screen to ensure privacy using a code that the student provides. I find students do audit their grades and are more attentive to accuracy than I am. To meet the University’s requirement for a final exam and a final grade reporting within a short time, I have found that posting grades helps limit errors in calculating the final grade. Students find it useful to know their course grade before the official grade is mailed to them.

c. Attendance. I also post daily attendance in a spreadsheet. Students know what their attendance record is. They know that I monitor attendance and even include it in my grading. I do believe that the posting of attendance and relating attendance to grades have improved attendance and, indirectly, course grades.

c. Course Materials. Materials that I once copied and passed-out in class are now posted at my site. Students retrieve this material by downloading it or printing the web page. This is a convenience to me. Because my web host provides data on accesses, I can also see that students do use these materials.

d. Syllabus. I now put my syllabus on-line and have a copy available for downloading. I no longer replace “lost” syllabi – a minor convenience. When other faculty ask for assistance on building a personal website, the most oft cited rational is to put their syllabus on-line for downloading.

e. Links. I use the Internet for student research. Business students need to now what information of value is available to them from the Internet, and there is a lot that is there. I post these links at my site and use them in assignments.

f. Interactive Testing. Last semester I experimented with on-line multiple-choice testing as an aid to student mastery. These are tests at my site that provide the “correct” answer or reference to source materials when the student selects the incorrect answer. Although a “grade” is automatically provided to the student, I did not record the grade and used this tool as an experiment to see if it enhanced learning. I did provide course points to the student for simply taking the test. The student types her name and pushes the “submit” button at the end of the test, sending me an e-mail message that the student has completed it. Students reported that the tests were “helpful”, but in-class testing of the material did not support this. I will continue this experiment this semester, but will record the earned self-test grade. I also have developed a better capability to document that the student actually took the tests before submitting it for points – to preclude “cheating” and claims that “I really did take the test, you just didn’t receive the e-mail confirmation.”

g. Teaching Notes and Plan. I post my Teaching Notes for major topics where I have no reading materials that cover the topic. These can be read either at the site or downloaded as a Word document. Last semester I experimented with positing daily Teaching Plans for one of my courses. Frankly, I have never planned a course on a day-by-day basis until now. I have found this to be tough to do, but very helpful. Some students use this information for class preparation and complain when this help is not available. The finding that students actually use this is to me perplexing. When I was in college my professors often did not even supply a syllabus. Class notes were my problem. I am sure that my professors had a mental map of where the class was headed, at least programmed by the textbook. Today, my students seem to thrive on structure and clear expectations that my Teaching Notes and Plans offer. Students tell me it helps, but there is this part of me that worries if I am really helping them survive in a real world in which structure and order must be often contrived by them rather than provided by others.

h. Student Projects and Assignments. Because of the vast amount of information available now on the WWW, my web site has permitted me to attempt assignments with my students that I could not otherwise attempt. For example, all my students in the introductory management course complete an extensive personal career development assignment that includes on-line activities of taking multiple career tests, researching future demand and salary for an occupation, and identifying prospective employers. I consider this to be one of the more important activities that I assign my students. Most students find the career development project to be informative as to what to expect about their future careers. A few even reorient their career direction.

i. Internet Research. The web is a great resource for student research. In the introductory management course, students do structured Internet research to investigate the business ethics of a company, track stock prices, and develop a model to create a web-based grocery store as a lesson in the linkage of business systems. At the senior level, students use web-based research to track historical stock movements, forecast economic data, and investigate the rational and effects of current mergers. While I understand that there is also a lot of bad information available on the Internet, this is also true of books. To learn to differentiate and use judgment, students must also learn to access and use relevant Internet sites.

j. Personal Information. Seeing many professors post personal information, I too post at my site my resume and family album. This may help to personalize the professor. Students do ask questions about me that they did not before. This is clearly a vanity item that may only have benefit to someone in the job market to demonstrate that they are web-literate.

3. Computer Simulations. Gaming or simulations are practicable teaching tools in business. The simulation I have used is a commercial product in which student teams manage a firm competing against other teams. The simulation requires students to make human resource, materials, financial, price, and similar kinds of business decisions each week. The decisions are entered on a diskette and all diskettes are processed to yield a new state of the market each week, when subsequent sets of decisions are made throughout the course. The project is graded on a competitive basis by rank ordering results. While this kind of technology does get the student involved in decision-making and engages students in the use of “real” business information, I have ceased the simulation for now to focus on reading – in my opinion, a much greater concern which surfaced one day when I asked unprepared students to simply read aloud the material we were discussing. I have mixed feelings about simulations: They do engage students in appropriate skills and decision-making, but it is not clear to me if students see the relationships between the decisions they make and the outcome. Doing is not always the same as learning.

4. PC Spreadsheets and Word Processing. Often overlooked as part of the instructional technologies, these are the tools that our students will use, so I require that they use them. In my senior classes, all budget and statistical analyses is done on Excel spreadsheets. Although not required, most students generate graphical displays of their data for presentation. I require all students to print out of class assignments using a word-processor.

Well, that is what I have done with Information Technologies that would be evident to the student. As I have identified, most of these are benefits in class management and student communications. The greatest advantage to me provided by this technology is not evident to my students. By using the Internet I am able to visit sites of other professors and universities and see what they are attempting. I am able to look at the syllabus of the authorities in my discipline, borrow and configure their ideas, reading materials, tests, and assignments to my own needs. Because my web site records the origin of visitors I can see that other professors “out there” are also borrowing from me.

The kinds of ideas that I have successfully borrowed from others and am now using, include:

1. Critical Thinking Skills. Seeing an experiment on critical thinking at one university, I have adapted much of these ideas in my teaching of decision-making. I do not teach formal logic, it’s not a business topic. We do teach decision-making and judgment. In the past in my course this has been a quick survey of theories. Observing that even at the senior level case analyses were often bereft of simple logic or “common sense” linkages across facts, opinions, and conclusions, I now spend two weeks of course time in the introductory management course to expose students to the elements of a well constructed argument, the use of judgment in the absence of facts, and critical evaluation of another’s argument. I would not have known how to approach this subject if I had not seen it modeled at someone else’s website. Student’s mastery is assessed by an in-class test requiring composition of an argument on a business topic and, after an exchange of student papers, providing a critique of another’s argument.

2. In-Class Materials. I have had a growing concern about textbooks in my courses. Beyond my criticism that they have become more “merchandise” that solid content, my students simply often have not read them, relying on my lecture and the bold-faced type of the text’s key words. Using the Internet to review syllabi of the best authorities in my field, I found that many do not use textbooks for their undergraduate classes. This gave me the courage and the authority, if questioned by my higher authorities that in the past, it seemed to me, insisted on using textbooks, to do what I already wanted to do. I got rid of textbooks and now use only original sources to build reading and integration skills. I, the professor, provide the context and framework for the material. I now use only readers and cases in all my courses, thanks to the Internet. I also use the Internet for much of my class preparation and research – its fast and convenient once you learn to use it.

What I do not experiment with in my courses is the new classroom presentation technologies. I occasionally use an overhead projector when I am demonstrating financial data, but that’s about it. The presentations that I have seen using Front Page and other computer-assisted projections in the classroom are impressive. Videos in the hands of a master who interacts with the story to teach and demonstrate concepts can provide valuable learning. While my classrooms are not now set up to attempt these applications, I would find a way if I believed in their merit. For me, striving for the traditional seminar with a discussion among 30-50 students is more effective. I also was impressed at a Harvard Business School workshop on case study methods in which one of our learned authorities addressing an audience of 50 in an up-to-date technology intensive classroom pointed out to us that when we resort to entertaining presentations we run the risk of drawing the student’s attention from the message, from the conversation, from the interactions of students and teacher. Whether it’s presentation technologies or other new instructional technologies, the media is not the message – the message is your knowledge that is made accessible to your students.

Perhaps presumptively, I am going to assume that my experiments allow me to offer some general observations about using the new technologies in your classroom:     

1. As well intended as their applications may be, expect that the initial excitement about something novel will dissipate if there is no integration with content. Learning how to use the technology over time will help you understand what has value in student learning and what does not. We are in new territory; and, if you experiment with these technologies, you are the authority.

2. If you decide to experiment with the technologies, expect problems. Lectures sometime don’t work and assigned readings can sometimes not serve the purpose we thought. Computer software and Internet sites also have glitches. Students, learning the new technology, forget to save their work or can’t get a printer to work. Websites sometimes are down. Learn how to build slack into your teaching plan for inefficiencies and develop a sense of humor about the new technology. As with all assignments, you will have to learn what is opportunistic behavior by your students and what is a reasonable excuse for not meeting your deadlines or not completing the assignments.

3. Don’t expect this technology to save you time, effort, or money. Maintaining a website is labor intensive. Learn to use it only when the benefit outweighs the trouble. Running the simulation exercise took me as much time as grading tests. And, I have paid from my own pocket for everything I have attempted. I also do not have an Internet PC in my office. I use my own home PC, pay for my own e-mail and web host, and have bought all my own tools for maintaining my site. Today the University is making this technology much more accessible to faculty, take advantage of this.

4. If you opt not to do a website, I personally think that is fine. We can easily overload a student with visiting our websites. But, if you are not exploiting the new technologies you are giving up a chance to teach your students the tools that they will need. If not the Internet, try one of the following (and do not worry that you may not know how to do it – if you require your students to do it, you will learn too):

a. Require your students to use word processing on formal papers;

b. Require your students to do math problems using a PC spreadsheet and graphing;

c. If you have opportunities for student presentations, consider requiring that students create a web site, use Power Point, create a video, or develop materials that can be recorded by the student to a CD;

d. Encourage the student to use the Internet for researching assignments.

4. Do not forget: Whatever you do in the classroom, teaching is about someone else learning something of value. Lecturing is just talking, unless someone is paying attention and thinking about what you say; a book is just printer’s ink, unless the reader is engaged and is linked to the writer’s thoughts; and, a website is just another gimmick, unless it has something that makes your student do, read, or research while thinking. 

5. Have no fear! You will make mistakes. Start with the assumption that you really do not know how what we do leads to someone else leaning – I’m not sure that we do know. Much, most, of what we already do in class have very little to do with what a student actually learns and can use in 10 years. In ten years our students will realize that what you taught today in class is obsolete, if they remember it at all. If you try, you will discover a few things that work, a refreshing new way to do something you already attempt, something that will be recalled by a student in 10 years as useful. If the content that you teach does not survive, the student’s skill to use these technologies to answer new questions will endure.

6. To our Administrators: A lesson from business – entrepreneurial and innovative companies thrive when people are encouraged to take risks and are permitted to fail. Our organization memory must recall both what works and what did not work.

Now for some mentoring: For those who believe that Information Technologies may have value to you, and for those who would like to join the experiment in the application of a new technology I have provided some useful links that are available on my web site at www.mgmtguru.com – just click on “Faculty Resources” in the index banner. If you adventure forth, learn to appropriate. Appropriate ideas, even whole web pages, from other professors now on the Internet. I put my pages there to be used. I get most of my ideas by looking at what others are attempting. Taking from one another is the most efficient way to disseminate applications of a new technology and the fastest way to gain collective experience. To start you off. I have one list of links that provides Internet sites that are discipline specific. If I did not include your discipline get on the Internet, go to a University web site where the authorities in your discipline work and see if anyone has a web site. I got most of my ideas for my courses simply by looking at what other management professors are doing and adapting their ideas to what I can do and what is appropriate for my own courses. This keeps me current, teaching to what I know to be high standards, and forces me to continuously reassess what I teach.

An additional page available to you is a list of web resources. I have tried to provide a sample of Internet resources that would be of assistance to the instructor that never used the Internet and need help in learning to “surf” or use e-mail to those that would use the Internet more if only you had a free ISP, free hosting service, free editing tools, or free help in some of the advanced techniques and languages.

Once you have learned a technique or found a new idea, share it. You not only help build our organizational knowledge, but foster the collegiality that is still our common ideal of what this job was supposed to be about when we first committed to it.