TITLE: Meaningful Interaction and On-Line Education
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 10, 2013 11:18 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
After tweeting
<A HREF="http://twitter.com/wallingf/status/299873431053271041">
   a jewel</A>
from Clay Shirky's latest article, I read the counterpoint article
by Maria Bustillos,
<A HREF="http://www.theawl.com/2013/01/venture-capitals-massive-terrible-idea-for-the-future-of-college">
   Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College</A>,
and an earlier piece by Darryl Tippens in the <EM>Chronicle of
Higher Education</EM>,
<A HREF="http://chronicle.com/article/Technology-Has-Its-Place-/133329/">
   Technology Has Its Place: Behind a Caring Teacher</A>.
I share these writers' love of education and sympathetic to many
of their concerns about the future of the traditional university.
In the end, though, I think that economic and technological forces
will unbundle university education whether we like it or not, and
our best response is not simply to lament the loss.  It is to
figure out how best to preserve the values of education in the
future, not to mention its value to future citizens.

While reading Bustillos and Tippens, I thought about how the lab
sciences (such as physics, biology, and chemistry) are in many ways
at a bigger disadvantage in an on-line world than disciplines that
traffic primarily in ideas, such as the humanities.  Lab exercises
are essential to learning science, but they require equipment,
consumable supplies, and dedicated space that are not typically
available to us in our homes.  Some experiments are dangerous
enough that we don't want students trying them without the
supervision of trained personnel.

Humanities courses have it relatively easier.  Face-to-face
conversation is, of course, a huge part of the educational
experience there.  But the sharing of ideas, and the negotiation
of shared understanding, can be conducted in a number of ways
that are amenable to on-line communication.  Reading and writing
have long played a central role in the growth of knowledge, alongside
teaching in a classroom and conversation with like-minded individuals
in close personal settings.

I soon realized something. Bustillos and Tippens, like so many
others, seem to assume that collaboration and meaningful interaction
cannot happen on-line.

Bustillos puts it harshly, and inaccurately:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
MOOCs are an essentially authoritarian structure; a one-way process
in which the student is a passive recipient required to do nothing
except "learn."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Tippens expresses the sentiment in a more uplifting way, quoting
Andrew Delbanco:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Learning is a collaborative rather than a solitary process.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

On-line education does not have to be passive any more than a
classroom has to be passive.  Nor must it be solitary; being alone
a lot of the time does not always mean <B>doing</B> alone.

A few faculty in my department have begun to create on-line
versions of their courses.  In these initial efforts, interaction
among students and teacher have been paramount.  Chat rooms,
e-mail, wikis, and discussion boards all provide avenues for
students to interact with the instructor and among themselves.
We are still working at a small scale and primarily with students
on-campus, so we have had the safety valve of face-to-face office
hours available.  Yet students often prefer to interact off hours,
after work or over the weekend, and so the on-line channels prove
to be most popular.

Those in the software world have seen how collaboration can
flourish on-line.  A lot of the code that makes our world go is
developed and maintained by large, distributed communities whose
only opportunities to collaborate are on-line.  These developers
may be solitary in the sense that they work in a different room
from their compatriots, but they are not solitary in the sense
of being lonesome, desolate, or secluded.  They interact as a
matter of course.
<A HREF="http://vocamus.net/dave/">
   Dave Humphrey</A>
has been using this model and its supporting technology as part
of his teaching at Seneca College for a few years now.  It's
exciting.

My own experience with on-line interaction goes back to the 1980s,
when I went to graduate school and discovered Usenet.  Over the
next few years, I made many good friends, some of whom I see more
often in-person than I see most friends from my high school and
college years.  Some, I have never met in person, yet I consider
them good friends.  Usenet enabled me to interact with people on
matters of purely personal interest, such as basketball and chess,
but also on matters of academic value.

In particular, I was able to discuss AI, my area of study, with
researchers from around the world.  I learned a lot from them, and
those forums gave me a chance to sharpen my ability to express
ideas.  The time scale was between the immediate conversation of
the classroom and the glacial exchange of conference and journal
papers.  These on-line conversations gave me time to reflect
before responding, while still receiving feedback in a timely
fashion.  They were invaluable.

Young people today grow up in a world of on-line interaction.
Most of their interactions on-line are not deep, to be sure, but
some are.  And more could be, if someone could show them the way.
That's the educator's job.  The key is that these youth know that
on-line technology allows them to be active, to create, and to
learn.  Telling them that on-line learning must be passive or
solitary will fall on deaf ears.

Over twenty years of teaching university courses has taught me
how important face-to-face interaction with students can be.
How well experiments in on-line education address the need for
interpersonal communication will go a long way to determining
whether they succeed as education.  But assuming that
collaboration and meaningful interaction cannot happen on-line
is surely a losing proposition.
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