“Give me a log hut, and a simple bench,
Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other.”
- President James Garfield
My vote for the most important voyage of exploration does not go to Christobal Colon…Columbus to you. Nor to Henry Stanley. Not even Leif Erickson. Instead, and for its great lesson in the human predicament, I vote for Abel Tasman.
Never heard of him?
In 1642, Tasman went on his first exploration of the South Seas. He sailed south from Java and discovered the island of Tasmania, which he promptly named for himself. Then he sailed east and north and discovered New Zealand. Then he sailed back up to New Guinea, discovering new islands all along the way. It was a very successful trip, a fine example of courage and navigation.
Except for one slight problem.
Tasman had somehow managed to sail completely around Australia without sighting it.
To his credit, Tasman did discover the continent on a subsequent voyage, but the lesson of his first journey is clear. It is quite possible to follow your interests and instincts, wander thoroughly through all before you, and utterly miss something of vital importance.
The lesson for us here is that it is easy to founder in the sea of data, to forget where we were and where we are, and to miss the big picture, the big discovery. This is especially true in the online world, where we only see a chunk at a time and where whatever we are looking at is what there is. Everything fills the screen, has the same vividness, and is unfolding right now in front of us. If we jump to another place, it replaces this place, and it is easy to lose our place.
How do we make sure that we have a decent map, a sensible hierarchy, or at least a home port? How do we insure freedom of choice but not freedom of ignorance?
These questions are especially relevant when it comes to the future of education.
“Give me a log hut, and a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other,” said President James Garfield talking about the ideal education. He was referring to his famous professor at Williams College. Garfield was reflecting a common attitude, then and now, that at its core education is the unmediated direct relationship between teacher and student, master and disciple.
Very nice if your teacher happens to be Mark Hopkins. Or Plato. Or Wittgenstein, whose brilliant students gathered and published his writing. But for the rest of us, that log bench is being replaced by the endless seats in a virtual stadium.
To the critics of the new online U, education is becoming more about packaging information and less about teaching and learning. But then, every new technology raises these same questions at first. When the telephone first became popular one of the major concerns was what people would use it to talk about. Doubters at the time said the new technology had no real value because it would only increase the amount of gossip. This was certainly the case but what those naysayers failed to realize is that gossip is valuable content, the mainstay of much conversation. The phone merely facilitated the need we have for it, while also making possible emergency calls, reassuring dialogues, intelligent discussions.
The blackboard, first developed in the 1600s, must have raised interesting questions about reducing discourse to lists of words, narrowing the focus of learning to key items, and perhaps even about the new erasability of ideas. You hear the same criticisms regarding the modern use of PowerPoint and learning modules and on and on.
The one thing we can count on as the Gizmos morphs is a shift in what we mean by education…whether it is access to answers or to methods for finding them, dialogue or chatter, writing or posting, knowing about or knowing how.
The role of the teacher will certainly change as the standard metaphors turn rusty: the teacher as banker depositing information into a passive recipient; teacher as cook, creating recipes to suit the tastes of each learner; educator as coach, relying on motivation, encouragement, and inspiration. In fact new metaphors are already emerging but, needless to say, no one is especially happy with any of them: teacher as manager of data, directing students to resources like a traffic cop; as edutainer, using all the tools of multimedia to coax interest from addled adolescents; as infopreneur, designing courses and collecting fees for each class like a Medieval professor.
The role of students, the very definition of them, will change as well. Their participation in a social environment may matter more than their interest in a subject matter, their knowledge of categories more important than facts. The technology may favor those who can write succinctly, more like copywriters than essayists, who are comfortable getting most of their information through reading, and who can sit at a computer screen for hours on end rather than mix and mingle. Or perhaps mobile access to the Cloud will shift all these ideas once again.
And that will include the very nature of inquiry itself as the next generation of virtual courses find new balances between visual information, text, resource access, interaction, and so on. Teachers will no doubt need to learn new approaches, strange new methods, unusual media while still focusing on the understanding not the data, the state of the student not state of the art, brains over chips.
Will it all work?
Of course…but no one will think so.
I can already hear some future president saying, “give me a bench and a holoprojection, Einstein 8.0 at one end and I at the other…”
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