Category Archives: Language

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that if information is available more and more people will tend to use it. I love that universities are starting to try to put at least some of their information and course materials out there for the public to use. (Of course, in most cases we, that is, the public, paid for these materials already). Let a hundred flowers blossom, as Mao apparently said.

This piece on free online courses (“11 Ways to Find Free Classes Online“) shows that there is a lot of this material available now, and more is surely on the way. My only gripe is that too often these sorts of things intersect with two unfortunate myths. The first myth is that technology will be able to replace teachers; the second, closely related myth is that of the autodidact.

People can and do teach themselves, of course, but for most of us most of the time teachers– and often classmates– are an essential part of the mix that leads to effective learning. Teaching, despite what the right wing often implies, is in fact a skill like any other, and not something that just anyone can do because they “care about young people.” Call that the Schwarzenegger myth.

We all want that silver bullet for learning. In the movies it’s that computer input thing that you watch and quickly absorb the history of a civilization or maybe it’s a pill that allows you to instantly speak a language. We all want a short cut but it may be that the more or less laborious process of learning is exactly what makes learning so effective. Our brains may be structured to learn and change slowly, over time, in a a kind of trial and error, or at least non-linear, fashion.

Those of us who teach online need to be skeptical when it comes to the latest technological innovation or tool. The hype is usually louder than the reality. A recent piece in the New York Times (“Mind Over Media“) seems to have no other point but to bring us back to a kind of biological reality: our brains evolved into their current shape over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years and nothing that Steve Job invents is likely to change much of that quickly.

An excellent case in point might be the introduction of electronic book readers, which many– including myself– hoped might break the back of the textbook industry and trim down some of the costs of education. (My school is going to electronic books, which may have similar issues, but are a slightly different matter.) As it turns out, at least according to one report (Amazon Kindle flunked by college students), students felt stymied by the new technology.

Creating that messy, inconsistent process–so easy with a traditional textbook– is turning out to be hard. Fast searching, apparently, is no substitute for flipping back and forth; you can’t scribble in the margins of an electronic book– yet. Once again, the generational theory– the younger you are the more used you are to new technology and so more able to adapt– is proving to be more complicated than we thought. How long did it take for the book to take over from oral story telling?