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Diane
Schallert Jenn: First maybe you could discuss your own research..I read over your web page and it stated that you are interested in studying language and knowledge and the interface for that..I wasn't exactly sure what the interface was relating to-- Diane: Right now I am teaching psycho linguistics and that is the place where I am particularly look at the interface between knowledge and language because what I mean by it when I use the term in that little bio sketch is that I mean how we express ourselves, our meaning and intentions get revealed in our words, and how are language shapes. I could have used the work interaction I suppose, but interface a little more ambiguous and therefore allows for a more bi-directional idea. Jenn: I am particular interested in how technology has impacted your field of study or.. DIANE: it is certainly integrated more and more that is for sure. In the sense that when we were thinking about this.. how does language and cognition interact, we were not thinking about technologically mediated language. I suppose there were studies as to how people talked on the phone as opposed to face to face. Because those technologies were so common we weren't aware of all the differences really. They became in a sense part of the background (Jenn: they are too integrated?) yea.. as email becomes available and synchronous chats and asynchronous conversations, as they become more and more common I think that they actually create a different thinking pattern that has never been there before. I think it is so wonderful--now in terms of how this affects my field ..what people are studying is the kind of mental processes that are different because of technological use. Like the whole business of creating coherence, which is so hard at first when you are not used to simultaneous ..when you have 15 people typing and communicating at once. That sort of experience is at first discombobulating, but I have grown used to it, and you find that your mind can hold more topics open and more easily connect . The field is looking at these new sensibilities that are developing. Jenn: Is it so drastic... some are the observations you have seen, that you could make the statement that people who have access to technology and who's thinking and conversation patterns are changing because of the use, that that is going to cause a large divide between the people who don't use technology? DIANE: (moment of thought..she says to herself..will it compromise?..that is a very interesting question) I bet you that it is exactly the same divide we.. if we talk not so much about communication technology but if we talk about people who go to the movies a lot versus people who don't go to the movies a lot. If you go modern movies you start to have a different way of looking at reality, there are just all kinds of possibilities that people who haven't had that kind of exposure couldn't have. They haven't yet thought about or developed that and I think that has happened all along that a particular technology confusing to us in our society causes us to have that experience--a different approach to reality than people who haven't had that experience. I don't think that is any way a bad thing. There are multiplicity's of possible experiences people have. Some people have a lot of experience with chatting on line and some of people have a lot experience rapping..I can do one but can't do the other..there are strengths and weaknesses everywhere. Although I suppose if economics are applied to technology then that becomes a different question, but just in terms of the way that the mind works, I don't I do think there are different ways that are then encouraged by the different kinds of technologies that are around, but that phenomenon is not new, it just seems to be happening more and more. Jenn: There seems to be a much larger entourage of technologies like cell phones, pagers and buying on line and so I was just wondering.. DIANE: yea, yea, in the last ten years we have done like a little revolution. It is amazing that we don't make more of a big deal about it. Jenn: What is surprising for me is that I didn't really think along these lines necessarily until a year ago that maybe my small and sometimes intense interactions with all these technologies were maybe changing my patterns, my daily life, who I was interacting with..even like the fact that I email my professors now where I didn't think I had such easy access to them before DIANE: It is so much easier now! When I was an undergraduate, I was so daunted by the thought of going to their office. Even now I am daunted. I would so much more easily write to a colleague on campus than call them on the telephone. I'd say 'Hi, you know I am a professor in the Educational Psychology and I am interested in this. If you are interested then write me back.' And then I don't feel..well you save face! You can say exactly in the right way and you have time to think about how to say it..you don't stumble over your words on the phone. All of that is so wonderful and I didn't have that before. I love it. Jenn : Can you think about any particular experiments that you know of that directly relate to technology? DIANE: Well the ones that I have done we have been interested in the use of Daedulus..you know the interchange program..it was created in the English Dept it is the one that allows for..it a local server so you can chat so that everyone who is logged on (Jenn: it sounds a little bit like the Moo environment ..have you heard of that?) I don't know.. (Jenn: I used itinPeg Syverson's course for the first time in her Knowledge Ecologies class, you can create your own rooms but you can chat with all those who are logged on) yea, I have a feeling that those are a little more fancy, because this is just a textual interface and it is just your name and the name is automatically attached to your message. The use of it that I have been interested in is when it is used in a classroom to foster discussion..content discussion, so not so much self-presentation that you might have if you were engaged in a social afternoon where you would be on line meeting people, but where you would be discussing a topic like language acquisition, which is what my classes did on Thursday. We all logged on and discussed language acquisition and what my research team and I have done, how does this work when discussion in a classroom is not done in written mode as opposed to when discussion in a classroom is done in oral mode. One of the things that we always get from people listening to us present our results, is they always say, if all the people are present in the same room typing to each other, why don't they just turn around and talk to each other? And we always say that research shown that access is different when you so in written mode b and everyone can talk at the same time basically. And they talk differently (Jen: they are not as scared) yes, it becomes whole different dynamic, who gets the floor, which topic arises out of the talk that is going on and that is all now new. Because it changes the pattern it will allows some people to speak who have never spoken before. It may then quiet the people who have taken over too much. This is what we always tell the people and instructionally that is why you would do that. We have done al kinds of studies to show that infect.. at first we did a comparison showing oral and written participation patters. Than we did comparing the types of linguistic features of the message that got a person to then create a topic that was then interesting to everyone. The name of the paper was the 'Life and Death of a Topic'. What features of a comment would kill off a topic or would allow and trigger others to respond. Then we, lately, we have been interested in how knowledge gets socially created by the written exchange. We are looking for things like can you actually show that you change somebody's mind, that somebody has actually come to a new understanding if they hadn't had the exchange that they were having. We find some evidence in some beautiful places where someone says, they start in with this comment, and this person doesn't understand but says something, there are more responses and then the first person who asked the question goes 'oh maybe it is this', and they see what they were not understanding. You get that sort of wonderful effect of social construction of knowledge. Which of course you do get in oral exchange as well, but because in the written exchange there are more and different people allowed into the conversation, it then creates a new possibility for a different kind socially shared knowledge. Jenn: I found too, would you even say that the construction of questions and the way people talk is different? There seem to be more abbreviations and shorter constructions and more dot, dot, dots. Would you say there is less formality? DIANE: you mean that spoken? (Jenn: yea) not really, it is more formal actually. It is pretty nice complete sentences compared to their oral. But, there is a lot of what you are talking about too. The nice little shortcuts people use to say what they want to say in less words. And it does happen every once in a while because they want to give a long story to make their point and they can't because it takes too long to say all that (Jenn: yea and they would lose the strand that they were discussing) exactly. That is one of the effects that we were talking about where because you were doing it on line you have to think differently. Like what exactly is my point and how can I say it efficiently as possible. You know, capture the essence and get at my meaning.. you know people have to do all that a new and something that they are hardly aware of all time. Jenn: Like in email I know that..well it depends if I am emailing a professor I am almost always formal and always use spell check..it is just like turning in a paper I think. Then I am writing a friend and I use all sorts of shortcuts for getting my point across..i do however always use spell check because it is a pet peeve when people send things with (Diane: lots of misspellings) yea, and I can still read it an understand it. The message is being conveyed, but it is a different format than a letter or Diane: Do you think the grammar of the language will change? Jenn: Yes, I think so. I question how things will change. My little sister doesn't write letters, she emails friends. I have to think that something in her learning process changes because of that. Do you have any record of those kind of changes? DIANE: I had not thought about how the you could see this whole things as is we use things the number times of times when correctness is an issue and therefore increasing the number of times when people let go of sloppy or poor expression. What that does is change your ear and make you less sensitive to something that is not said quite right. I hadn't thought about that. My students when we are doing these synchronous discussions, I tell them not to worry about spelling. I notice different styles that people adopt. Some people don't do any capitol letters and it is kinds of weird. But for me, I have been just totally pleased by the variety and not yet worried that nobody writes a normal English sentence anymore. Because they write so many good normal sentences that the variety seems like novelty and it makes you pay attention to how you use capitol letters even. Jenn: I wonder if the styles are unique to the application like if a person is used to typing in IRC chat or something.. DIANE: Like I noticed that I noticed that my son dies instant messaging. He has used all sorts of shortcuts. Sometimes I think he will never know how to write out the word 'you' I mean using the letter 'u' is not going to work when you are doing a college application. But in the mean time, he so much faster at typing. He can now type school papers to a much more competent level than my other son who is 8 years older. I used to type all his papers because he had never developed the quickness. My younger son has learned to express himself fast in written mode. Jenn: That is another odd thing because you are having to read and type at the same time.. Diane: You can't sit there and wonder 'how am I going to say this' I am not pessimistic about the outcome of all of this but we are going to see..well I think some aspects of it will be wonderful in terms of the changes that we will see. Jenn: How do you think school should be preparing students for the technology? DIANE: I do think they have to. I think they are trying to. In fact, one of the classes where I used that mode of discussion was in a teacher preparation class and my main reason for doing it is not because, like with my graduate students, I know they have a lot to say and I know some of them are so affluent they could take the floor for the whole two hours and wanted to give the others a chance to speak out however, with my undergraduates, the level of thinking that is going on is just not there yet and a lot of them would learn just as much by listening to a few people have a good discussion, well one could think that way, I happen not to fully agree with that, because I think you learn always by trying to put it in words and trying to be engaged and active. You can be active without talking though, but I do it as well with them because they are going to be teachers. They need to be so comfortable with technology, that they don't even think anything of it. They have absolutely no qualms with writing messages, turning on computers, sending things, finding the right program. They need to feel that it isn't a big deal because we are changing our modes of communication and they can't be left behind. Jenn: And they will be responsible for the future generations of users. Studying technologies effect on culture is a emerging field of study. Can you suggest any specific research projects and who should be doing the research? DIANE: The one that I am trying to figure out and I am not sure what they are already doing..social practices..and I am not going to do this kind of research but I think socio-linguists for example could have a heyday with like the etiquette of the cell phone. I noticed the other day at a ball game where I was watching my son play, the phones are ringing all time in the stands, and most everyone when the phone rings, they see who it is and then they pick it up. I think partly it is because the people in the stands are parents and the people who are calling are their children who have been left at home. But I did notice one man who had the phone ring, picked it up, and looked at it and then put it back down. He did that two times and he was in a conversation with someone and I can tell that he was deciding that this conversation with a real live person was more important than this conversation with the interruption coming in. It could have been that the call was a business call and he knew he could get back to that person. I though it was interesting he in was in a sense valuing his real life conversation over his technologically mediated conversation. I think some nice research could be done about that. How do you decide when you get permission to answer the phone. Jenn: Etiquette is really just forming around the cell phone. I think some people don't have any concept how disruptive a technology it is. In a few years it seems that there will those unstated rules that people understand..maybe they won't go off when you are trying to teach class for example. DIANE: I have only had that happen once to me. But I know of someone that teaches a class of 500 students and she has this whole thing at the beginning of her class where she says if the phone rings, I better not find it because she has the this box called the jail, and she puts the phone in the jail. At the end of the period she gives it back. But it had gotten that bad and with 500 people it would be too disruptive. That is her response. I think that would be a very interesting study..just the rules. Even, what is the etiquette for responding to email? How quickly do you have to respond before the other person decided my email must not be working or should I write again? Jenn: I was talking with somebody about that the other day and they were saying that with the phone call if you leave a message on the answering machine, you would be safe returning it that evening or even the next day would be okay. With email though, you have to get back that day. For some reason the expectation is that.. DIANE: You could spend the whole day answering email if you do that! Obviously something has to evolve for a rules that we consider normal. Maybe we would be better off if we expect a response sometime during that day. Jenn: Or being attached to a cell phone and being expected to be reached all the time. That is really breaking down the personal barrier (Diane: yea exactly) Over the last 100 years what do you think has been the most influential technology? DIANE: ..its gotta be the computer..(pause and reflection)..I don't know..I just read a book by Dill Bryson called Making America, which is the story of in a sense American English. It is almost a history book because he situates his discussion of words and vocabulary around certain events. He talks about the telegraph and the telephone and the whole set of language patterns that got set up. Like the first people didn't know what to say when they picked up the phone. They eventually got into the habit if saying hello, but the hello doesn't occur in this language before the 1900's. It is interesting to think of and by reading that book I started to re-appreciate the technologies that we take for granted that actually must have been incredible. The idea that you could communicate with someone and hear their voice in your ear so the problem with the computer is that it is not just a communication device. It is information processing, a computation machine, and it has several functions, so I think it probably takes the credit for being the most important technological advance. But as a communication device it is really just a telephone in written mode, so it is not as innovative as it must have seen to hear the voices and to have it capture personality in the voices and is some ways more astounding than writing. Jenn: People have tried to replicate emotions in written mode through the use of those icons that represent happy, sad etc·. Diane: yea, it doesn't quite do it though. It doesn't quite capture the full story and for that reason I think the telephone is the most amazing thing. What do other people say? Jenn: Actually, I have never formulated the question in exactly the same context. I ask different questions all the time. But most people do tend to think of computers when I say the word technology. (Diane: yea) What is interesting to me is that a lawnmower and a pencil are pieces of technology (Diane: yes, exactly, and a button) There are so many different levels of how you could think about that. Computers seem to be at the forefront of our minds right now. Looking at the flip side, can you think of a negative technology that has been developed in the last 100 years? Diane: There has to be..I suppose germ warfare, but that is so obviously bad, and technology can of course can be bad. I have been thinking today about artifice. I was thinking about artificial as opposed to natural because I was getting ready to teach my class, and artifice and technology go together. It is a artificial means of accomplishing an end, but isn't part of you when you are naked in nature. No of course you could pick a branch of a tree to accomplish an end, but then it becomes technology at that point. So anytime there is a kind of artifice going on you do have..you could always say that it has that side that has changed nature in some way. We call it improvement but.. Jenn: Maybe all the implications are not clear. Diane: Right. I think there are always negatives. As you were mentioning about the computer about if you get used to typing this way, you might lose the facility with speaking on the phone in polite gracious ways, just as you might lose the facility in writing a letter in the way that people in 18th century could do so beautifully. Actually my husband's father was in World War II, and we not long ago discovered the letters that he and his mother had exchanged. They are really something. They really gave you a different look at his mother. His mother is now dead and we all knew her as an old lady who was losing her mind, and so there were all these negative connotations. These letters are just amazing! And his mother was not even remotely close to being in college, because I don't even think she finished high school, the letter is a beautiful piece of prose. Beautifully put together and she wrote one a week. Each little letter is like a poem and they are about two pages long--pretty long. She is even only talking about family things, or things in the city, or what she is worried about for him--she doesn't have a lot of topics to talk about, but she does it in an elegant way. I think we could lose that because our emails are wonderful but they are cute and full of brevity and to the point. I would give it up but.. Jenn: That is kind of how I feel too. So, you love email! Do you just use your computer for work? DIANE: Oh yes. As opposed to play? I would say I am on the computer at least three hours a day and if I am writing an article of paper then maybe more. And when I am at home I would do email anyway..on the weekend I will probably check it twice..but I often come here to do it rather than do it at home because the computer at the university is so much faster. The main problem is that at home I have to compete with the other two people that I live with (laughs)Our son loves the computer and it is very hard to dislodge him from there. I say, look I am going to do my email and it is going to take me an hour and a half..or he'll let me check my email but he doesn't want me to write back so I can download my email and then maybe I can beg for an extra ten minutes! I don't get to really relax and do it the way I want to. Jenn: Do you just use email or do you shop on line? DIANE: I am not too big on shopping on line. I am almost resisting doing too much browsing and looking up things because you can end up spending your whole day doing that. I don't want to do that. I am afraid to get addicted. I have a bought a couple books on line but that is because I already knew the title. The one web site that I buy things from is Southwest Airlines because I love their web page and it lets you see the fares that are available for which times. They are very clean and clear about it. Compare that to American Airlines which ..I could never find anything. Jenn: I think you have to me a member to even navigate around the site. I just found that out yesterday. I think to actually make reservations you have to be ad advantage member. Diane: Oh! I guess I have never gotten that far. Jenn: I ended up just calling because after spending hours on line I wanted to talk with someone. I really prefer to just have somebody ask me questions and I just have to provide answers. I think they just have interface problems Diane: They want us to call rather than do it online. Jenn: They seem to give incentive though like maybe a discount on your ticket if you do it online and you think it would save them time that the customer didn't have to talk to the person on the phone. Diane: Last time I called I almost told them, look, I just want to give you guys some advice, your web page design is not good at all! I do a little bit of searching for things every once in a while. So far, vacation possibilities or you know things like that. My son does his assignment now, where we used to take him to the library, and now it is always on line. It is so much better! Jenn: So , it is so much better for . Diane: for the mom! Because then I don't have to take him to the library and then help him find the books and them open them up to the right page and say read this! I don't have to do that. (Jenn: Is he more..) knowledgeable and produce better papers? I don't know (laughs) I bet you though it is comparable because it is quicker to find lots of different things. He is actually developing the sense of, uh, no that is not what I want, uh..yes I do. He has gotten better at selecting. Jenn: And he is more willing to do this on a computer than he would be going to a library? Diane: Absolutely! Oh, like 500 hundred times more. Absolutely. And if he has an assignment say about rainforests, he'll actually spend a couple of hours and find all the right stuff and then looks for the pictures and blows them up and puts them on the poster. I mean the whole thing is done electronically and looks beautiful. Jenn: And is doesn't mind doing it.. Diane: He thinks of it as a version of his video game that he likes to do. It is so much better. The problem is that he may get sites that don't have accurate information and sometimes it is hard to evaluate. I also think that a lot of cutting and pasting goes and not rephrasing in your own words. That happened before where people would copy the subject, but in the copying they might actually change a few words. Well, now it is so easy to cut and paste..So I think that is the downfall Jenn: I found that when I did research on line, I wouldn't cut and paste it into my own report, but I would I reference a whole paragraph sometimes and site it as such. It felt like a different kind of research and report . Diane: So then it becomes a series of subjects that you have had the hand of stringing together and so you do have your own contribution. It is not the same as the original composition.. Jenn: Can you think of any general concerns that you about technology Anything from the digital divide to cloning? Diane: Um·.did you go to commencement? Did you hear the Bill Moyer speech? (Jenn: no) Well it was great and there was one thing that he said out there. He said ..I love science fiction but..he said, 'you know there will be computers very soon that will be making themselves', and of course I had seen Matrix, and then I thought if Bill Moyers is saying this at a commencement address people get the idea and then of course everyone thinks it‚s a great idea and then it will get developed. I don't know who controls something like that, or even if that sort of thing would get out of control, I hope not. That is a concern though. If artificial life competed..maybe it would never compete, maybe it would just be separate and not take from the human experience. Jenn: What about the integration of computers and humans that could come out of nanotechnology? (Diane: What would I do!) And who will regulate that? (Diane: I feel the same way!) Diane: My son and I have often had the debate about which would you prefer, would you prefer to be a quick learner or would you prefer to have all the knowledge in your head? And he always chooses that he wants all the knowledge already because he doesn‚t want to learn, he wants to know. I always say I want to be a learner because I enjoy learning. I like the process of sorting through materials and gaining that knowledge. Flip tape, lost a few sentences of conversation, picks up at Jenn: Who can afford to put the technology in their brains if it were available and then what consequences would that have? Do we want to produce that technology? Diane: yea, but when you think of it terms of only the wealthier people have computers and you think those are live extended tools..the problem with the disparity in resources always has always created a divide. I don't think technology can solve that problem. I think it is simply another way that it expresses itself. I wouldn't say that it exacerbates it, it is just another way that it shows the difference in wealth. I am truly a socialist and I would really like it that all the resources were equally distributed for everyone. I totally believe that, but that is a philosophical political believe, and if it were true, then technology would also follow and be everywhere. Jenn: If you were to think forward now three generation, can you imagine what your greatx3 grandchildren would have to say about this time? Diane: hmm oh gosh..it is going to be interesting. We are going to be the era that made the computer part of their lives. Kind of like when you go back in history and look at the Industrial Revolution or any of those things and you can say before that no one did things. And at the time usually, that first generation that invented a new way o doing things, there are usually so many problems with doing things. And then eventually it got resolved. It could be that it is a more democratic, more easy to access, more connecting of human beings than it is now. But they may say how backwards we were . I love the Star Trek scene where they go back to the 20th century and they have a computer. They see the computer and say, 'computer', and of course there is no response. And they keep saying, 'computer, computer'. And they just can't get it to turn on, and then they realize that they have to press a button of some kind! They are looking around 'a button?!', and then they finally figure it out. I just love it. It is so brilliant because they are beyond and therefore because they are beyond they can't do something that we can do. We know the connection between the switches that turn it on and they don't. Jenn: I just wanted to touch on something that you said earlier about the classes that you are teaching for future teachers. Is the class to gain a teaching certificate? Diane: It is for people who are in elementary education and they are going to get a teaching certificate. Jenn: I was speaking with Linda Ferreria-Buckley the other day and she was talking about what she was doing with teachers. She is interested in how teachers can integrate computers into the classroom and their lesson plans but also doing it meaningfully to the curriculum. She mentions that time is compressed so it is hard for them to learn all these skills while in the field. So, what kinds if improvements could the university make that will help the teachers learn before they are in the field? Diane: I think one of the best things.. my thing is that the faculty of the university needs to use it more well faculty and the university you can't ell them to do anything because they will always do what they want..and in a way the faculty and the university are a reflection of society which is that some of them are never going to change how they teach. But there are enough young people who are open minded and like this stuff who could give a little encouragement and start to see how to include a listserv instead of always discussion or assign papers that require web search, assignments that encourage the use of the computer that fulfill effective goals for their teaching. I think that when undergraduates see that in their classes, then they see that as normal. They start to think, oh yea that is how you do a research paper. You have a part where they have a hands on part in the lab but you add a component that includes the use of the web. Then it becomes natural and if you haven't done it as students then it is hard to see how it applies in teaching. Jenn: DO you a lot of faculty who are resistant to integrating technology into their teaching? Diane: It is so time consuming. Even making a web page for a class is so time consuming. This class that I am teaching this summer I went to a workshop to learn how to make web pages and I was almost ready to have it be in the server, it is really close, but it got to a crunch point and I didn't do it. Now we are a week into the class, so why would they need to go on line for the syllabus. Now they have it in their notebooks. The people who need this are the people who don't get it at the very beginning. If I wanted to post new information about the class in a summer course, I am going to do that by simply passing out a piece of paper. I am not going to take the time to create a new page, so I haven't done it. There is just something that is making it just a little too hard that I didn't do it this time, but I am so close that I think I am going to do it in the fall. I would say that I am medium in my use of technology in teaching. I know some professors that have a web page for everyone of their classes and they use the listserv as part of their classes. The other though don't use any at all. Jenn: And are they resistant or is the time? Diane: I think it is the time an don't thinking that way. They think my classes have worked all along so why should I change. But I think that it is going to change, it is going to change more and more because well you don't pass it out a syllabi as much anymore, you give the..the (Jenn: the URL so that they can just look it up) yea. That was the last thing that I didn't have was the URL. I didn't go to the person who gives that out. I mean that is the point of it being in the web, so let's say that they are not here for the weekend and they left their syllabus and they don't have to rely on a piece of paper, they can log on. Jenn: Yea, also if you have a list of students that way they can contact each other.. (Diane: yea)..well thank you so much for your time.
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