Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  The value of attending a live lecture in college is a bit like the value of doing fieldwork. In fieldwork, there can be dry spells, but you learn to read people in real time. You share a bit of road with those around you and you come to understand how a group thinks. And you learn the rewards of patience: You have followed arguments as they unfold. If you are lucky, you learn that life repays close, focused attention.

  Clickers Versus Conversation

  In the political theorist Michael Sandel’s classes, students have to pay very close attention. Sandel faces hundreds of students with a brief presentation and an interactive conversational format. Students speak up—there is no anonymity. Sandel calls only on students who raise their hands, but once they have made a comment, Sandel engages them. In one of his recent classes, “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature,” he asks the question: “If you’re a vegan, would you eat a ‘hamburger’ that has been bioengineered from cow muscle that did no harm to the cow and was cultured in such a way that it used no fossil fuels?”

  A vegan student says, “No, it still uses animal tissues, it’s still from an animal.” Sandel nods. “But what about if we now have a technology that grows the hamburger from skin tissue that has sloughed off the cow. . . . We’re solving the world food shortage and helping global warming by eating derivatives of a single cow. Are you okay with it now?” Now, the vegan is unsure, but holds firm: “No. No. It still comes from an animal.” The student is embarrassed, but she has stood her ground. And in standing her ground, she’s had to reconsider her position.

  Only the vegetarians had reason to rethink things when Sandel brought up the example of the cow. Now Sandel expands the challenge. Would you eat biologically engineered human meat—meat made from taking a sample of human skin? Is it worth it? One student is impressed. It is as though we could solve world hunger by taking fingernail shavings. The class, animated, picks up the discussion.

  Imagine how different the conversation would be if Sandel presented the case (food products made from cow tissue; food products made from fingernail shavings) and asked his class to hold clickers and register anonymous preferences. You would learn what the class thought, which is certainly interesting. But members of the class would not learn how to summon the bravery to voice and defend their opinions. One Harvard senior in Sandel’s class says, “You do get embarrassed, but you get over it and get used to hearing yourself say things aloud. You say to yourself, ‘Did I say that? I can’t believe I think that, but I do think that. I’ve thought about this; I just never thought I could get myself to say it.’”

  This is teaching by conversation: It is a delicate thing, a walk toward boredom and embarrassment. (Sandel allows awkward moments. Some of the students cannot follow through on their thoughts even as he asks them to find their courage.) These days, teaching by conversation is talked about as crucial (after all, the stated goal of putting content online in the flipped classroom is to have more dynamic in-class conversations). But at the same time, there is pressure to use technology in classrooms in ways that make conversation nearly impossible. Interestingly, this technology is often presented as supporting student “engagement.”

  An MIT colleague has just returned from a demonstration of high-technology classroom tools. Lecture slides were streamed to a front screen. Twitter comments from students were streamed to a back screen, fielded by a moderator. The professor asked questions and the class responded by electronic polling. In contrast to the extended examples and responses in the Sandel lecture, my colleague reports that here, terseness was all. Twitter limits comments to 140 characters, so, she says, “We were asked to keep our responses short, no more than two sentences.”

  But the students objected to the professor’s original plan to have both his content and their commentary displayed at the same time, each on a different screen. The students said that the two screens made it hard to focus.

  In this environment, my colleague found student comments disappointing. It was not just, she said, that remarks were short. It was also that for her, anonymity flattened out the discussion. It was her response to being asked to separate the dancer from the dance. “Real people,” she said, “have real concerns and interests. . . . But once the questions are turned into a flat stream of questions and comments without faces . . . you end up not caring about them. You care about a question when you know whose question it is. A question that doesn’t come from a person—it’s only half a question.”

  For technical reasons, a final class poll was not taken, but no one suggested canvassing the class by asking for raised hands. My colleague shrugs and says she was not surprised: “After the blizzard of apps and demos, taking a poll by simply speaking with the people around you, or with a quick show of hands, frankly didn’t come to mind. That kind of low-tech solution had lost its status. In this atmosphere, it seemed almost ephemeral, no longer worth it.”

  The high-tech class seemed to keep students too busy for Facebook, but when students wanted a break, they did some texting to get away from the buzz.

  But in Sandel’s class, it is, for the most part, tools down. A senior assesses the scene: So far, in his three and a half years at Harvard, he has seen texting in every class, even in small seminars where students take advantage of the brief moments when professors turn to the blackboard. In Sandel’s class he isn’t sure. He thinks there must be some, but he doesn’t want to assume it: “I think people text but less so than in other courses because this class is very conversation-based!”

  We want technology put in the service of our educational purposes. But this can happen only if we are clear about them. If not, we may be tolerant of classroom technologies that distract teachers and students from focusing on each other.

  A Love Letter to Collaboration

  In a recent course, I required students to collaborate on a midterm project. I imagined my students in conversation, working together at long tables in a dining hall. I imagined late nights and cold coffee in Styrofoam cups. But there had been no late nights or long tables. All the collaboration had happened on Gchat and Google Docs, a program that allows several people to work on the same document at once. When my students handed in their projects, their work was good.

  But when I gave out the assignment I was interested in more than the final product. I know that the alchemy of students sitting around a table can sometimes spark conversations that lead to a new idea. Instead, my students found an app that made presence unnecessary. They had a task; they accomplished it with efficiency. My experience in that course is a case study of why measurements of productivity in higher education are dicey. Gchat and Google Docs got the job done by classical “productivity” measures. But the value of what you produce, what you “make,” in college is not just the final paper; it’s the process of making it.

  My students are unapologetic about not meeting in person. Jason, a sophomore, says, “The majority of my studying in the past year has been that someone makes a Google Doc with the terms that need definitions, you fill in the ones you know, and then you work on it together. You have a chat session and you do that to collaborate.” This joyless description made me rethink my fantasy of long tables, cold coffee, and late nights. My fantasy, from his point of view, asks for the unnecessary. But his reality allows little space to talk about a new idea.

  Sometimes, students who collaborate with online chat and electronically shared documents work in the same building. They simply choose not to study in the same room at the same table. They go into online chat sessions rather than chat in person. Why? For one thing, they tell me, roles can be made clear and it is clear when someone falls behind. More important, when you collaborate online, everyone stays on point. People may drop out to text or do some online shopping, but when they are on the chat, they are on topic.

  In a face-to-face meeting, you can see people’s attention wander off to their phones. On Gchat, the inattention of your peers is invisi
ble to you. Once you make the assumption that when people work, they will want to text and shop as well, it helps to collaborate on a medium that hides what Jason calls their “true absences.” Gchat lets the simulation of focused attention seem like attention enough. Whenever you see them, your colleagues are working on the problem at hand. So, Jason says, “We take the route of technology whenever possible.”

  Gchat makes Jason’s group seem “on topic” even as their minds wander. But it doesn’t leave room for what I’ve said I want when my students collaborate. I’ll call it intellectual serendipity. It may happen when someone tells a joke. Or daydreams and comes back with an idea that goes in a new direction. None of this is necessarily efficient. But so many of our best ideas are born this way, in conversations that take a turn. I want my students to have this experience.

  But given an opportunity to collaborate, my students glide toward the virtual. Some tell me that anything else, regardless of the merits, is totally impractical in today’s college environment. Everyone is too “busy.” I can’t help but think that talking in person is one of the things they should be busy with.

  In my interviews with college students, most insist that they will know when they have to schedule a face-to-face meeting. They will know if something comes up that they can’t take care of over Gchat. But my experience is that you really don’t know when you are going to have an important conversation. You have to show up for many conversations that feel inefficient or boring to be there for the conversation that changes your mind.

  When the economist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize, he was, like every winner of the prize, asked to write an official Nobel biographical statement. One section of his biography is a tribute to his late colleague Amos Tversky. Kahneman explained that the ideas for which he won the prize grew out of their time spent working together. In the end, his Nobel biography amounted to a love letter to conversation.

  We spent hours each day, just talking. When Amos’s first son, Oren, then fifteen months old, was told that his father was at work, he volunteered the comment “Aba talk Danny.” We were not only working, of course—we talked of everything under the sun, and got to know each other’s mind almost as well as our own. We could (and often did) finish each other’s sentences and complete the joke that the other had wanted to tell, but somehow we also kept surprising each other.

  Here we see conversation as not only an intellectual engine but the means by which colleagues were able to cross boundaries that are usually only dissolved by love. Conversation led to intellectual communion. When I explain my current project, people often say, “You’re so right to study conversation. For communication, it has the broadest bandwidth—it’s the best way to exchange information.” Kahneman and Tversky teach us that while this may be true, it is far from the whole story. Conversation is a kind of intimacy. You don’t just get more information. You get different information. The bandwidth argument leaves out this essential.

  What also is striking in Kahneman’s Nobel address is his description of the pace of his work with Tversky. In 1974, Kahneman and Tversky wrote an article for Science that went on to be one of the founding documents of behavioral economics. It took them a year, working four to six hours a day. Kahneman writes, “On a good day we would mark a net advance of a sentence or two.” So the people who support conversation because they think it will make things go faster (“Don’t email me, it’s faster just to come to my desk and ask me!”) are seeing only a small part of what makes face-to-face conversation powerful. For Kahneman and Tversky, conversation wasn’t there to go faster, but to go deeper.

  College should be a time to invest in teaching students about the long-term value of open-ended conversations, but in today’s environment, it is hard to argue the value of conversation for learning because it is hard to measure its value with productivity metrics, especially in the short term.

  Adam Falk, president of Williams College, has given it a try. He argued that what really matters in a college education is learning “to write effectively, argue persuasively, solve problems creatively,” and “adapt and learn independently.” He and his colleagues investigated where these skills blossom. It turns out that they correlate with the amount of time students spend with professors—not virtual contact, but live contact. Given Falk’s findings, it is painful to hear faculty complain that students don’t show up for office hours.

  Office Hours

  The year after MacVicar Day was dedicated to educational technology, it turned its attention to mentoring. Instead of a packed auditorium, the hall was half full. Considering student-faculty relationships is less flashy than presenting new tools. In the mentoring discussion, faculty talked about students standing them up at office hours and not coming to events designed to bring faculty and students together. The year before, everyone was excited to talk about apps that might fix everything. It’s tougher to confront problems for which there is no clear solution. And mentoring is one of them. Students avoid faculty in large part because students are anxious about the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.

  Zvi, a college junior from New York City, explains why he prefers email to a live visit with his professors. He is not comfortable with conversation and he doesn’t see office hours as a time to practice. Here is Zvi on his policy of strategically hiding from the people who might have the most to teach him: “I’m much better emailing professors than [seeing them] in person. I find that I don’t represent myself well. . . . I am not natural with serious conversation [in person] yet. I’d prefer to be able to do that in email.” He says that in email, he can edit and the editing will be invisible.

  When asked when he might learn to have serious, in-person conversations, Zvi admits, “That’s a good question.” He feels it’s a skill he’ll need to develop soon, not just to talk to professors, “but also for people I’m hoping to work for.” He thinks that he might try to talk with professors in his final year of college. But then he considers the reality of actually sitting down with a professor and despairs: “It’s too late for that. I don’t know—when do you grow up? It is a question.”

  When students tell me that they want to email me rather than see me in person, they usually say that it is only in email that they can best explain their ideas. And so, they explain, an email from them will put me in the best position to improve their ideas. They cast our meeting in transactional terms and make a judgment that the online transaction will be of a higher quality. Zvi, too, uses a transactional language to describe what he might get out of office hours. He has ideas; the professors have information that will improve them. But there’s more to gain from a visit to a professor than improving your ideas, although this is certainly to be desired. You get to be with someone who is making an effort to understand you. You form an intellectual friendship. You may feel the support of an adult and of your institution.

  When students are afraid to talk, they prefer to think that office hours are for a transfer of information that can happen by email. And with little or no experience of face-to-face conversation with faculty members, students don’t have the data that might convince them that conversation offers more than information.

  Zvi admits that he stays away from professors because he doesn’t feel grown-up enough to talk to them. His professors might be able to help him with this, but not because they’ll give him information. Studies of mentoring show that what makes a difference, what can change the life of a student, is the presence of one strong figure who shows an interest, who, the student would say, “gets me.” You need a conversation for that.

  Work

  Is This a Meeting?

  My younger colleagues at the firm, the young associates, are pilots in their cockpits. They assemble their multiple technologies—a laptop, two iPhones, an iPad. And then they put their earphones on. Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits. And then they are isolated. You wouldn’t want to disturb the pilot in his cockpi
t. You wouldn’t want to disturb this lawyer in his bubble. It’s not how it used to be. . . . It used to be that associates were available to be interrupted . . . but in a good way. You could talk to them. They were there to be worked, very hard, to be engaged and mentored. Now, the feeling is that you are only getting the most you can out of them if you leave them alone in their cockpits.

  —A SENIOR PARTNER AT A BOSTON LAW FIRM

  Audrey Lister, a partner at Alan Johnson Miller and Associates, has worked at this large Chicago law firm for more than twenty years. She joined the firm straight out of law school. Lister talks about her early days at AJM, when she and her colleague Sam Berger were just starting out together. The two young associates would knock on each other’s office doors and visit all the time. Lister says that this kind of close relationship made “work feel like family.” But the meetings with Berger were not purely social: “Business was done in those meetings, exciting ideas were hatched, ideas for clients.” Together, she says, “we discovered the nuances of the law.”

  These days, informal meetings are not as frequent. Lister says, “Young lawyers feel they can accomplish more if they sit and work in front of their screens.” People get together for catch-up meetings that are prearranged by text or email. But Lister doesn’t think that these scheduled meetings are doing the work of her impromptu chats with Berger. Once you have an agenda, she thinks, you are not as likely to play with ideas. For that, she says, “You need a conversation that is truly open-ended.”