Three decades ago in teaching a course at MIT on multimedia communications I raised many issues of interpersonal communications in an all electronic world. Bottom line, then and now, Zoom is not.
I spent well over a dozen years teaching graduate and undergraduate students. My techniques I believe now was akin to my father's and grandfather's approach to interrogation of a suspect in the NYPD. Namely you examine the suspects clothes, shoes, hands, hair, how the walk, hold themselves. When answering a question, what do they do with their hands. You make eye contact, trying to see into their psyche. You gather bits of information to see if it corroborates with what other facts you may have at hand.
How does this apply to teaching? You must see the student, see their eyes, are they engaged, did the get the point you are making. PowerPoint slides are best stage props in instructing. One hands, their movement, eye contact, bidy movement all provide the instruction with real time adaptive signals. It allows one to see if you are getting the point across. I first exercised this insight at my Freshman year at Manhattan College. Our calculus instructor refused to face the class and just coped the text on the blackboard. The class rebelled! I got the job to teach. I faced the class, inspected every suspect, never used notes and engaged them in interaction. After three weeks I knew each student as a good cop would know every suspect.
In a recent NEJM article a similar addresses the same issue. In a post pandemic world we have too much Zoom stuff. The author notes:
Most video sessions in medical education today are
lectures and discussions, which theoretically include the same
PowerPoint slides and learning points as their in-person versions. But
now that I’m an attending and clinician–educator, I wonder whether
trainees and students learn the same material over video, even if the
presented content is identical. And as a neurologist, I also wonder
whether our brains even could learn the same material by means of a
completely virtual medium — and I think the answer is no.Teaching
and learning are activities that are central to human development.
Cognitive psychologists Gergely Csibra and György Gergely have claimed
that one of humans’ most important evolutionary advantages is the
capacity for “natural pedagogy” — sharing knowledge for the sake of
sharing knowledge. The human brain has neuronal networks governing language and imitation
(the “mirror neuron system”) and enlarged sensory-association regions
that encode the identity and function of specific objects we perceive.
Together, these systems allow humans to share knowledge and skills with
others; without them, we couldn’t begin to learn what the cerebellum
does or how to calculate a score on a stroke scale.According
to Csibra and Gergely, the effectiveness of learning depends on
“ostensive signals,” or primarily nonverbal cues that tell us, “Pay
attention to this!” Most of these nonverbal cues are processed rapidly,
and often in an unconscious way, during in-person interactions: a slight
smile, a postural shift, or a moment of eye contact, for example. As
any resident can attest, there is no more powerful didactic force than a
senior attending’s piercing gaze.
Any competent neurologist watches the patient come into their office,they do not go to a room and then try to examine the patient. How does the patient walk, how are they dressed, how do they examine the room, how do the address the physician. All clues especially for a neurologist as a police officer would do for a suspect.
Thus Zoom is great for well established relationships where human contact is of limited value. But for teaching it is grossly useless.
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