"Technology as Lever": the story of my most influential article is as instructive as the article itself

"Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever," written by Art Chickering and me, is undoubtedly my most influential article - cited thousands of times.

• The article begins by listing the Seven Principles, in case you're not already familiar with them. They were formulated by Chickering and Gamson in the mid 1980s as a summary of teaching & learning activities that research showed were particularly powerful.

Personally, I've been influenced almost as much by how the article came to be written.

PROLOGUE

For technology to influence educational outcomes, it isn't enough to have and use the technology. That technology must be used to carry out an activity that is, even without that technology, educationally powerful. The question should not be"Does technology X improve learning outcomes." Instead it should be "When technology X is used to support a particular teaching and learning activity, does that activity improve learning outcomes?"

So what might those powerful teaching and learning activities be?

At conferences and in campus visits, I started asking faculty what technology-assisted activities seemed most powerful and most likely to have widening use in the coming years.

Eventually, I came up with a list of about seven such patterns of activity (e.g., active learning, working in teams on a realistic and motivating project). A little later, my colleagues Robin Zuniga and Trudy Banta pointed out that my list paralleled Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." So I started using the Seven Principles instead because of the extensive research showing their effectiveness.

Robin and I used that insight to develop an item bank for student surveys on their uses of technology for specific activity: The Flashlight Current Student Inventory. Thanks to Gary Brown and his colleagues at Washington State University, an early online survey tool was created to manage and extend those survey questions. Use of the Flashlight Online tool spread eventually to a couple hundred institutions.

GENESIS
In the mid 1990s, I bumped into Art Chickering. He knew of how I was using the Seven Principles. "Why don't we write an article together about how to use digital technology to implement them in undergraduate education?" he asked. .

I was highly skeptical. Examples of technology enhancing seven principle activities seemed so self-evident. I literally could not imagine anyone reading or valuing such an article. Chick persisted so I asked him to send me a first draft. If, when I'd read it, I thought I could help, I'd send him a rewrite. He did, and then I did.

Eventually, our article appeared in the paper Bulletin of the American Association for Higher Education, where I worked. It was 1996 and AAHE had just created its first site on the World Wide Web. There was very little content on it yet. I suggested to the websmith that they link the text of our article to the AAHE home page.  The initial URL: http://aahe.org/ehrmann.

VIRUS
Readership started strong and multiplied each month. For at least a decade, the article drew over 4,000 hits a month. Impressive for an article I thought no one would read!

I got some insight into why the article was so influential on a visit to the University of South Carolina (USC) in the late 1990s. In a talk, I described one way in which technology could be used to implement a Principle: giving rapid, useful feedback to students. When I was in high school, teachers had given the same comment on papers so many times that explanations and suggestions had disappeared. If a passage seemed awkward to the teacher, they'd write "K" in the margin. Not helpful!

 Today, I said, USC faculty can ask for student work to be submitted electronically. Then they can use the "Comments" feature to type detailed feedback about specific elements of the student's work. Better yet, the next time you want to make a similar comment, you can copy the initial version of the feedback and, if necessary, adapt or improve it. The more times similar feedback is given, the better and more helpful it can become.

Here's the kicker: Later in my visit, Bill Hogue, the CIO, introduced me to another audience of faculty. Bill remarked that he'd heard my talk the previous day.Then he explained the time-saving idea for improving feedback on student work. Bill added that he'd never considered using a computer that way.

The ideas I'd thought too obvious to need explanation were in fact 1) powerful, 2) easy to comprehend, 3) easy to spread from person to person by word of mouth, and 4) could be useful to the listener no matter how much or how little relevant experience they'd had.

MORAL
I'm writing my first book in quite a few years. The hidden assumptions beneath my draft may well be the most important ones for the book to explain. Perhaps those insights will be simple and powerful enough that readers will want to share them with their friends.