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

Wed May 23 06:49:30 PDT 2007

Charles:

Great to hear you are doing well and your insights and wording are excellent as usual. One technical caveat though, when acting in my capacity as a motion picture producer/director, I have been routinely blending mixes of singers and voices from multiple locations with the assistance of computer editing technology like Avid and Final Pro and utilizing specialized phone lines and conference calls to speak to the singers or actors or both. I actually began using this around 1996 with video and earlier than that when I produced and hosted a radio show for multiple locations. Many, if not most, of the sound recording for music or films, often take place with musicians in one location, lead vocalists in another location and background singers who may come in later into the studio or from another location. The editing and recording technology is so clean now that only a trained musician/artist/conductor/editor/producer/sound engineer can notice the differences and it is now a legitimate argument among audiophiles. The entire phenomenon of homogeneous radio that has occurred due to media consolidation during the late 80's and 90's has actually developed these technologies to the point where radio hosts may live in one location but syndicate nationally simultaneously or in different time zones live with hosts in different cities. I am not sure that most educators realize how advanced these technologies are now and how much better they will become if embraced by academia. The natural partnership of entertainment and media is coming and has real potential if the media people don't try to pimp it like they have done with publishing and the universities really listen, adopt and adapt the media for educational purposes. Another unintended consequence of media consolidation is that there are and will be a wealth of media talent available for institutions of higher learning who already develop future professionals in the fields of media and technology.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Charles Ess
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 7:31 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Technology Transforming Education--EE-Learning

> 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  

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