"N.Y. Times and Dist. Ed."
Conversations
This e-mail message was originally posted by Nick Carbone and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.
On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Marcy Bauman wrote:
> What, exactly, is a true campus experience? Is it the experience my f2f
> students have as they rush from the Detroit suburbs to class and then off
> to their 30+ hours of work? Or is it something a bit more leisurely, a
> bit more pastoral, a bit more expensive, a bit rarer in today's higher ed
> marketplace than people would like to think?
I'm sure the phrase, for those who used it in speaking to Mendels, is both nostalgic and in their mind still existent. As a general rule I think it would be fair to guess that most--not all certainly--but most people who are faculty today were people who as students took full advantage of the cultural and intellectual climate that coalesces around a college, permeates its grounds and the neighborhood around. They likely attended visiting lecture series, heard innovative concerts, hung out in bars and had intense conversations, and so on, all those romanticized things that serve as a backdrop to college life. And chances are that most of those faculty liked school, liked the reading, writing, learning, discussion, class attendance, teacher visiting way of it, enough to stay on for advanced degrees and later on teaching jobs.
This makes faculty a rare lot among students, if you think about it. Consider the numbers who drop out, stop at one degree and go off to a nonacademic life, who may have struggled more as students. For them, what was true about college is certainly different. This is an aside, but re: writing, I wonder if faculty remember student writing as having been better when *they* were students because they happened to be students who were better at writing, got better grades, took to it more easily, bought into the college way of things more fully?
Anyway, faculty will seek to preserve what they remember as good--if they remember it that way. What I worry about is a rich campus life being further lost to those who cannot afford to be on a campus with the time and leisure to investigate the full range of offerings possible. Steve Gilbert raised a similar question a while back when the Washington Post reported on the Latent Textual Analysis software that purports to grade writing. Would wealthier students be shifted to teachers who provide face to face feedback and poorer students, or less academically able students, shunted to machines? A recent study of computer use in grade schools done, by I think, Education Week, found that poorer school districts tend to use more skill and drill software, offered less use of technology guided by teachers to create learning commmunities and more by students following the dictates of software programs.
We know what good online teaching should be, what values we like to see in it. To a large extent they're the same ones claimed by physical campuses--people meeting to learn together, to share ideas, to hear leaders in a field describe what new ideas are emerging. It can be done both electronically and physically. But there are trade-offs in either direction, as Nancy Tucker suggests. If the choice is between experiences of comparable value, re: learning communities, then dist. ed. will have a lot to offer. But if dist. ed. is configured as isolated learner plowing through reading and plugging in answers on the cheap, then it's bad, just as it's a bad thing if that happens to a student on a campus.
--
Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999