[Air-l] Technology Transforming Education--EE-Learning

[Charles Ess]

> Not quite sure how I came to be the champion of the face to face
> classroom - my argument is simply that all teaching/learning methods
> will have advantages and disadvantages for some.

Hang in there, Marj!
This has been a terrific discussion and my only regret is that preparations
for overseas sojourns have kept me from participating.  Now I can't
resist...

While there are clear advantages to online learning environments - one of
the best teaching moments in my life occurred during a brief stint with
WebCT - because, like Mark Johns, I'm privileged to teach in a private,
liberal arts place with classes ranging between 8 - 20 students each, I'm
also profoundly convinced of the many sorts of teaching excellences that I
can do only in f2f environments.
A great deal of it has to do with what I teach - logic, philosophy, applied
ethics, religious studies, critical thinking, writing.  All of these can
deeply challenge not simply the intellect but also the whole person as a
complex, embodied being.  First of all, the f2f context lets me gauge how my
students - both individually and collectively - are responding to these
challenges in ways that allow me to then judge (though it's always a
judgment call, and sometimes an incorrect one) whether they're "getting it,"
how much further, if at all, they may be pushed, what turns I might take to
help them come along - and what ones to avoid - etc.  I know from hard
experience that I can make mistakes in these judgments in f2f - but I make
them even more frequently in online settings (and we're off with the
disadvantages of relative anonymity, etc.).
One of the points that may be missing in the discussion so far - though I'm
being quick here, so if I've missed something, apologies - is the nature of
the "information" at stake.  As some know, I've written a couple of articles
on teaching not simply information, but wisdom and virtue vis-à-vis online
environments - wisdom and virtue of the Socratic and Confucian sort.
Following the taxonomies of Hubert Dreyfus (based on a phenomenological
focus on embodiment and learning), I concur that there is much good that can
be taught in virtual environments as they currently exist.  But there is
also much that, in my view, cannot be taught in such environments as they
currently exist, because they depend on being close at hand to and with
someone with great and embodied familiarity with not simply the material and
content, but most centrally the _judgment-making process_ (what Aristotle
calls _phronesis_) as it works in a given discipline or area.
My analogy for this is learning to sing in the choir.  I suppose such a
thing could be done - up to a point - through an online venue.  But I find
it difficult to conceive that a master choir director and even modestly
capable choir would be able to make much progress in an online environment
with helping a novice (such as myself) come along with learning how to
engage with the music - not simply in terms of learning to read notes, but,
more fundamentally, of learning how to produce music out of one's own mind
and body in concert and harmony with others.  So much depends on immediate
verbal and nonverbal communication - hearing how the person next to me is
finding his note; seeing the choir director cut us off together at a tricky
rest out of the corner of my eye while simultaneously looking at the music
for the current and next measures; trying to hear how the tenor part blends
(or fails to blend) with the larger choir and the music, adjusting
accordingly, etc.  Most of all, what is learned there are judgments about
how to do it right, or at least well (with many possibilities for that, of
course, not just one).  So much of this sort of embodied learning seems to
crucially depend on spending hours and hours, weeks and weeks, years and
years, face-to-face and side-by-side with a group of sister and fellow human
beings struggling to learn the same things.
I had exactly the same experience this past year as I struggled to improve
my all-but-non-existent French - reading is easy; repeating drills on the
computer is straightforward.  But learning to speak appropriately - not only
to get the grammar and vocabulary right, but also to learn to judge
face-to-face with another human being in response to his or her actions and
responses what the right thing to say might be is an entirely different
matter.

All of this is to say that I think Marj has it exactly right.  Each venue
has its strengths and its limitations.  The point is not to fall into false
polarities of "good" / "bad" - but to learn to use each environment
effectively for specified pedagogical goals.

O.k. - back to packing ...
- charles ess