Ben Reynolds writes:Well, this question is a beautifully and poetically phrased version of "What Do You Mean There's No Classroom?" Because my hearing is so bad, I've never had whispering in my f2f classes. It's been there, but I haven't had to deal with it because it doesn't exist for me. Two, all that nuance can be seen as just another way to measure teacher control. It's not that we see students learning but that we see them paying attention to us.
On the other hand, I've been shot down several times over the years for saying that f2f classes are a better delivery form. In our program, they're a luxury. You can deliver information to the umpteenth power faster in a f2f writing workshop than you can in any Internet form. Human ears -- even my wrecked ones -- can take in the individual sounds of 15 people at a table, mostly talking all at once, quicker than my eye can untangle the cacophony of a MOO.
So, I'd say the classroom won't disappear, but like the original universities, the tuition-paying student will be at the peak of the teacher-student-admin triangle. Because distance ed (or non-f2f ed) will have elevated students out of the industrial education we've run since the 1820's and into Freire's pedagogy, f2f ed will have to practically apotheosize students to get them and their money physically on a campus.