Dan Suthers (suthers@hawaii.edu)
Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:50:01 -1000
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:50:01 -1000 From: Dan Suthers <suthers@hawaii.edu> Subject: [ifets] Models of Distance Education (digital diploma mills)
Many of you have probably seen the article titled "Digital Diploma
Mills" by David Noble that is being reproduced in various forums. Two
places you can find it are:
http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/
http://med.usf.edu/HSC/diplomas.html
I first encountered the article in ACM's "netWorker" magazine, and wrote
a reply which was published this fall. Given the current discussion on
this forum, I thought you might find my reply interesting. The published
version follows. They edited it a bit, removing a call for those who are
disturbed by these trends to get involved in doing it right rather than
just making a lot of angry noise.
-----------------------------------------
Letter published in ACM's netWorker: The Craft of Network Computing,
Vol. 2, No. 4 (9/1/98), Pages 5-6
http://www.acm.org/pubs/contents/journals/networker/1998-2/
THE RE-EDUCATION OF
"DIGITAL DIPLOMA
MILLS"
I'm responding to the article by David
Noble in your April/May issue
(Perspectives: "Digital Diploma Mills:
The Automation of Higher Education").
Noble does an excellent job of exposing
some disturbing trends toward the
commoditization of conventional
instruction, and its possible consequences
for instructors' future employment prospects.
Noble focuses on political and
economic issues, with a great deal of
his piece devoted to discussion of the
motivations of the major players in
industry and university administration.
I share his concerns, as far as he
takes them. However, he does not
address equally important problems
with the impoverished model of education
behind "diploma mills," nor the
role of technology in this model.
Hence, Noble misses the potential
impact of technology in assisting
efforts to reinvent our educational
system.
Much of today's "distance learning"
takes traditional lecture-based
instruction and sends it out over the
wire. An opportunity to implement a
more effective pedagogy is thereby
missed. Decades of research into cognitive
and social aspects of learning
(some of it performed by my former
colleagues at the University of
Pittsburgh's Learning Research and
Development Center) have developed
a clear picture of the importance of
learners' active involvement in the
expression, examination and manipulation
of their own knowledge, as well
as the equal importance of guidance
provided by social processes and
mentorship.
Conventional lecture-style education
simply is not as effective as
approaches such as guided discovery,
coached apprenticeship while
learning by doing, and collaborative
problem-based learning. The computational
medium's strengths - its representational
and analytic tools, its
interactive nature and networking sup-port
for collaboration - have great
potential for supporting such
approaches to learning, yet are
underutilized in conventional as well
as distance education.
But what of Noble's concern for
the fate of the faculty member? Under
scientifically informed models of teaching
and learning, the instructor gains
an essential role as facilitator, moderator
and coach - a "guide on the
side" rather than a "sage on the
stage." Noble will appreciate the fact
that the "guide," being interactive and
responsive to needs of individual stu-
dents, cannot be replaced by a Web
site, nor by a video recording of his or
her lecture along with a collection of
slides. Hence, the goal of implementing
approaches to teaching and learning
that we know are more effective is
entirely consistent with the goal of
avoiding the commoditization of
instruction and the loss of the personal
touch that Noble and myself, along
with our colleagues, provide to our
students.
The important choice is not
whether to use technology, but rather
what pedagogy we will follow.
Technology as a category is neutral to
this choice; we can design networked
technology that supports either
approach equally well. However,
instances of technology are not neutral
- educational technology looks very
different depending on which pedagogy
is being supported.
Dan Suthers
<suthers@hawaii.edu >
Dept. of Information and
Computer Sciences
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, HI
-- Dan Suthers suthers@hawaii.edu Dept. of Information and Computer Sciences (808) 956-3890 voice University of Hawai'i (808) 956-3548 fax 1680 East West Road, POST 303A http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu Honolulu, HI 96822 --------------------------------------------------------- Forum website: http://ifets.gmd.de/ Email address for sending message to everyone on the list ifets@gmd.de Forum's contact person ifets-info@gmd.de Join/Leave Digest or Normal List http://ifets.gmd.de/maillist.html ---------------------------------------------------------
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