A Various Language:
Knowledge, Online Learning, and Harcourt CollegeThe Background
I want to start by reading the original proposal for this talk, not out of narcissism, but because I will return to it as an example later on.
The pull of content delivery and static knowledge is strong. Last spring, literally a few days before I left for C&W 2001, I attended a presentation by one of my colleagues at our annual spring faculty retreat. The topic was developing online course materials. She opened the session with a kind of community building exercise: we had to interview each other and introduce our interviewees to the group. Standard stuff. Then she announced that this kind of interactivity and sense of community was impossible to build in online courses; it can only be accomplished, she insisted, in face to face encounters like the one we were in at the time"sitting around tables in a comfortable room.
Then she proceeded to entertain us for over forty five minutes with a marching-through-Georgia PowerPoint slide presentation which allowed no questions, no interaction, no interruptions at all. She had a good deal of content to cover, you see, carefully prepared and worked out, much time having been expended in the PowerPoint materials.
I have come to call this epistemological stance the "cannonball" view of knowledge. It owes a good deal to the particle/wave dichotomy of physics, but "particle" doesn't seem to capture the essence of this knowledge. Knowledge as hard, fixed, impenetrable, solid. Knowledge that can be captured, held, possessed intact, and, ultimately, bought and sold.
The early corporate barterers of knowledge"the University of Phoenix and the Western Governors University come to mind"treated knowledge in this way, as material that could be commodified, packaged, sold. The principle of U of Phoenix was to hire an expert (Nobel Prize winners always seemed to be mentioned in the press that UP got early on) to create a package of materials in, say, Global Economics or Java Programming, and work with a high-powered group of educational designers and graphic designers and programmers to develop course content.
Along these lines, Harcourt Higher Education, headquartered in a suburb of Boston, hired a former Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, Robert Antonucci, to oversee its foray into the for-profit selling of education over the Internet. It was awarded degree-granting status and applied for accreditation from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), the regional accreditation body.
A good deal of criticism and indeed anger was directed at the early news of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education for its awarding the lucrative contract to operate its statewide Online Learning Initiative to Harcourt Higher Education. Early criticism was discovered in the Boston Globe by Nick Carbone almost immediately after the award. Carbone forwarded Globe reporter Eileen McNamara's unsympathetic article to the TechRhet listserv, an article that questioned the appropriateness of HHE's entrance into delivery of educational content.So with a sigh and a here-we-go-again shrug, I began researching the issue and submitted my proposal. I uncovered two epistemological models.