"N.Y. Times and Dist. Ed."
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This e-mail message was originally posted by Nick Carbone and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.
Sue Mendels has an overview article on faculty acceptance of technology in colleges and higher ed. Gist: classroom uses pretty much accepted, but distance ed uses mistrusted. The URL is (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/cyber/education/06education.html).
Of special note for this group will be the remarks made by Paul Leblanc, currently President of Marlboro College, who lead development of CommonSpace at 6th Floor and cowrote a history of C&W in higher ed. with Moran, Hawisher, and Selfe.
Here's Paul's remarks for those who are interested:
Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Marlboro College in Brattleboro, Vt., foresees more of this type of activity in 1999, and more efforts to create technology useful to teachers and students. Marlboro, a small liberal arts college, broke some ground of its own when it launched two online graduate degree programs last year aimed at professionals who want to learn more about the Internet.
One development LeBlanc foresees is new gadgetry that would make online academic chat sessions easier to use and follow. He predicts, for example, refinement of what he calls "voice-to-text" recognition software, programs that allow a speaker to dictate his or her thoughts to a computer and to have those thoughts appear to the virtual audience as written text. Why would this be welcome to students and teachers conversing online? "Because you speak faster than you type, but you read faster than you hear," LeBlanc said.
Whatever wizardry appears in the classroom, however, LeBlanc and others predict a growing backlash from the academic community against pure distance learning efforts.
Not only does he expect continued hard questions from professors about whether distance education can ever match the quality of the classroom experience, but also close examination of other potential pitfalls of virtual learning -- from whether attrition is higher online to whether virtual students feel more isolated than their traditional counterparts. LeBlanc thinks some of this discussion could center around that mainstay of traditional college campus life, the library.
"Someone is going to say, 'Wait a minute. What kind of education is this if no library is involved,'" LeBlanc said.
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Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999