For the Affirmative: Online Means Engagement
Fred Kemp, Texas Tech University
Sometime between 1985 and 1990 the world changed. Irrevocably. Personal computers, the boxy things that most of us now have on our desks at work and a lot of us have on a desks at home, were built to connect with each other in ways that made us realize, then and even more now, that it was indeed possible for every person on the planet to be able to bring down to his or her desktop two things: (1) all the knowledge ever gathered, and (2) nearly instant written contact with every other person.
All the knowledge ever gathered. All the knowledge, dumb or profound, that anybody has ever postulated. On the other hand, written contact between every individual on earth, with practically instant delivery. A huge, huge change that those who romanticize the Gutenberg revolution or the advantages of an elitest education are only now beginning to realize.
The great burst for mass education occured, without question, when the printing press suddenly made possible the mass distribution of inscribed knowledge. The great burst for the transformatory learning that I am describing here occured when computer networks allowed a vast, personal communication switching system among everybody and everything. On the planet.
So we talk about changes in education due to technological evolution? Give me a break. How on earth will formal learning AVOID this sudden and hugely transformative shift in human interaction? Not even the blockhouses of the American classroom, set up as they are to repel all new ideas and interesting possibilities, can long deny the massive sweep of what is happening on email and internet chat and all those news programs that tell you to find out further information by clicking on www. furtherinfo.com. How many public school teachers can complain that NBC News is simply going too far by asking its viewers to log in individually to a place where they can get further information? Isn't that the heart of learning?
And this is information, by the way, that is driven by the interest of the information-seeker, not by the coercions of grades and certificates and degrees. Do you think many people log into those sites for further information? By the millions, and they do it because they are driven by interest, not because they are driven by grades or certificates or credits.
And if you know anything about real learning, you know that it is interest that drives it, and nothing else. All of our progressive pedagogies seek to encourage interest in students, to motivate them to learn on their own. And we've never come up with the formula. It always comes down to coercion, to pushing the faces of students into the material that WE tell them that they need to know. And they naturally resist.
The Internet gives us the possibility that people can learn, even young people who are deep in the throes of rebellion, without institutional coercion. Without grades and degrees and GPAs and all that.
Most people think I'm nuts, because they assume that people don't really want to learn, and that to make them learn, or at least learn what we think they should learn, we have to threaten them. And to do this we need the institutional control mechanisms that herd people through rooms and disciplines and 'subjects' that are arbitrarily defined and categorized and pigeonholed so that we, the institutions, can meter knowledge in ways that have increasingly distanced teachers and courses from the nature of personal learning and self-sponsored effort. In so doing we steal away personal learning and deaden motivation, or we would if we were as good at what we're doing and we like to think we are. Ironically, the incredibly resilient human being constantly thwarts us by, at opportune moments, subverting our controlling schemes and occasionally breaking out into real, committed, personally appropriated learning. But it's a shame that these things seem to happen in spite of our principal efforts instead of in tune with them.