Sphinx

One of the incidental benefits of researching the piece I’m currently trying to finish, exploring my attempt at turning the Melian Dialogue into a ‘choose your own adventure’ game, has been the discovery (courtesy of an article by Shawn Graham) of the concept of the ‘creepy treehouse’. To quote a definition from Jared M. Stein (cited from this blog, as the original page seems to have disappeared from the internet and links are broken):

Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards. Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. Creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

A concrete example: the blog or discussion board facilities on Blackboard and similar Virtual Learning Environments. We look at these and see a useful tool for our teaching, encouraging students to engage with the topic and with each other outside class, hoping to draw on the fact that they allegedly spend all their time online anyway; they see somewhere that is trying to look welcoming and familiar but isn’t, because they didn’t build it, and so at best this is a bit creepy, and most likely it’s some sort of trap…

Part of me wants to think of an equivalent concept that isn’t quite so specifically American – but it usefully puts a name to something very familiar. I’ve given up trying to get students to participate in blogs for any of my modules, after years of trying to promote this (simply because I get so much from online discussions), as response rates were always so low, even with the promise of additional marks for good contributions or reductions for non-participation.The problem is clearly not (or not just) idleness or disengagement, as the discussions in class were frequently great, and they’d clearly done the reading…

Rather, the idea of a space intermediate between the seminar room and everyday life, where they would be expected to talk about the subject only, in a more or less formal tone (not least because they would be writing rather than speaking), with the possibility that they’re being secretly monitored by me or others, pretty well epitomises the creepiness of the artificial treehouse; something’s not right, don’t go in there. And of course I couldn’t see this, not just because I was the one building it and setting the rules but also precisely because of my good intentions in doing this. I would feel quite at home in such an environment, and so don’t immediately think that someone else might not, or not for the reasons I would tend to imagine. Likewise attempts at encouraging them to use the Twitter, and even to live-tweet lectures if they felt so inclined; if any students are still on Twitter at all, that’s not how they use it, and so me encouraging them to do this feels odd.

Now, this doesn’t automatically rule out any attempts at using social media in teaching; given that blogs, online comments and Twitter are still commonly used by academics for academic purposes, there’s a case to be made that students ought to be inducted into the professional norms of these forms of communication as well as more traditional ones. But we need to do this in full consciousness that it is not, as we may have tended to assume, a matter of asking them to turn their existing practices and skills to academic use, so they ought to take to it naturally. On the contrary, these may be entirely unfamiliar environments and practices to them, and insofar as they do resemble familiar environments then we risk making them seem very creepy simply as a result of trying to turn them to other ends.

At least for someone of my vintage, a major part of the problem is a different sort of creepiness or alienation: the sense that the world is increasingly baffling and elusive, that there are too many new developments to keep up with, things that young people take for granted because they’ve grown up with them (whether this is entirely true or not doesn’t really matter). The adoption of social media as part of teaching thus becomes a way of trying to engage with an alien world, to find points of connection with what I assume to be their very different experience and expectations – again, with the motive of trying to meet them halfway rather than insist on them conforming completely to my old-fashioned ideas of how the pedagogical experience should go (however, the Buffy references are non-negotiable, even if they are now incomprehensible to everyone else). But this either creates a strange new place where none of us feels comfortable, or it starts to shade into the sort of creepiness where professors want to hang out with their students and pretend to be young again.

I’m starting to think that the motto needs to be something like ‘Keep it in the Classroom’. That is, make it clear to students that they’re expected to do a load of work outside scheduled teaching hours, and encourage them to talk to one another – but leave it to them how they organise that. Offer them opportunities to develop different approaches to learning and assessment, rather than requiring it of them. And then take full advantage of the opportunity presented by formal classes, when they’ve chosen to enter a different sort of space and accept its – my – rules, to unsettle, disorientate and terrify them (pedagogically speaking), knowing that it’s only for the duration of the class…