The Martlet

Was there a time before computers? You wouldn’t know it by walking around UVic’s campus. Almost every student has a laptop in their backpack or a desktop computer at home.

Today, it’s hard for students to get by without a computer as programs like Blackboard, Moodle and, of course, USource, have become important parts of the path to education at UVic.

But even Nigel Horspool, a director of Computer Science at UVic, has some reservations about this revolution in teaching.

“Computers,” Horspool said, “have been very much a mixed blessing when it comes to education.”

While there are advantages to computers in conducting research, Horspool has also noticed they allow students to become lazy with their work, depending heavily on Google and Wikipedia for instant answers.

Even for in-depth research papers, students may never open a book. It’s easy enough to take articles off a myriad of search engines, tweak them slightly and submit them, since it remains easy to evade anti-plagiarism software.

This may seem relatively harmless, but Horspool feels that this has worrying implications.

“Students no longer have to do any deep thinking; it is a skill that is being eroded,” he said.

In many faculties, students avoid courses that don’t cater to this Internet-based mindset, forcing instructors to alter and simplify their courses accordingly. Horspool finds this disappointing.

“After all,” he pointed out “we do need some deep thinkers in our society.”

But some maintain that, for all their flaws, computers are doing more to enhance education. Besides improving computer literacy, which is important in the work place, computers allow students to work from anywhere and make group projects easier.

Writing professor David Leach has his students complete a considerable proportion of their class work on Moodle online, and believes the program provides great advantages to students.

Leach said Moodle offers a forum for students who may not have their most brilliant thoughts in class, or may be shy about speaking out in front of 40 other people.

“It allows students to continue the debate amongst themselves, promoting deep thinking in one way at least,” he said. “Most useful of all, the professor doesn’t even have to be present ... class discussions can be extended outside the time [and] geography of the class.”

For writing student Mikale Fenton, though, this is exactly the problem. Class and group discussions that occur outside of classroom hours are a nightmare for her because she is the rare exception to the rule: she does not own a computer — or rather, she’s been between computers since her last one crashed.

“If you’re not participating in the discussion boards, you are losing marks,” she said of the new 24-hour Moodle classroom. “I’m definitely at a disadvantage.”

Working nights, Fenton has found her chances to use the school’s labs limited, especially when they close at 11 p.m. and are often full during the day.

“It is unfair of the university to have such a massive Moodle/Blackboard-based component without offering 24-hour [computer] labs,” she said.

Leach, for his part, has been careful to use Moodle as a supplement to his class, not as an integral part, and to give students the opportunity to speak out in class, observing that “you have a problem if you become too reliant.”

Some schools might be pushing that “too reliant” boundary.

Consider Nova Scotia’s Acadia University. Instead of computer labs, Acadia mandates that every student must own a laptop and strongly recommends students lease one of its Acadia-approved laptops and return it at the end of the year.

Could this be where UVic is heading? It’s clear that computers are rapidly supplanting books as learning tools. With digitized textbooks beginning to appear online, Horspool foresees the textbook industry going the way of the record industry.

“The publishers are realizing this and charging what the market will bear before the market disappears completely,” Horspool said.

If anything is indicative of the times, it’s that books have been almost completely replaced with computer labs on the McPherson library’s first floor.

As for Fenton, having some time without a computer has made her realize just how totally computer-centric the education system has become. And without a glowing screen to distract her, she has been able to power through dozens of books, doing a lot of that good old fashioned “deep thinking” Horspool found so lacking in many of his students.