It is difficult for all of us to avoid seeing the world through our own customized set of lenses and filters.
Tom Abeles' lenses help him see current educational debates as a clash between the "bricks" and the "clicks," his favorite dichotomy. The "brick" folks, of course, are those throwbacks to Newman (I read him often), Kant (not for menow), and von Humboldt (still a force)who don't fully understand the power of the "clicks" to create a powerful new pedagogy--including the latest savior, online gaming, which can internalize the new learning into students as they build cities online, or compete with each other for market share and thus recreate the conditions of face-to-face intimacy. Fortunately (I think)there is a growing group of iconoclasts who see a third way for the young, those involved in early schooling: a way that combines the continuing need of the young for the kind of learning that is enhanced by the face-to-face opportunities afforded by the small school (not the small classroom) and the enlargements of learning afforded by "clicks." It might be that the psychologist's notion of maturation as progressive "de-centering" is important to those of us who are building the educational future. The child at the breast needs the learning that cannot be duplicated by the intimacies of the computer. As the child grows older he or she divides his time and attention and learning between the encounters with the family and friends and those learnings that come with the crayon and the coloring book, and soon the intellectual tools of the alphabet. The position of the small school proponents is that young pupils continue to need the kinds of learning and growth that the 'redundancy" of the large school make difficult, and that cannot be duplicated by the intimacies, real as they are, of the online world. My own hunch is that college age students are ready, or ought to be ready, for a more or less complete immersion in the pedagogic possibilities of the online world, including all the latest blogs,wikis, simulations, games, and the rest of the panoply of "clicks." Steve Eskow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Joseph Beckmann wrote, in a small part: >...The computer is not the Great Instructor, but, rather, a really responsive >library to which any student can contribute and from which any class can be >improved. Surely the small school movement has stressed the interpersonal >networking of a team of teachers with teams of students, but such teams are >not exclusive to the size of the school. .... > ----------------------- I am having difficulty with this thread. Here are issues which leave me puzzled: 1) The comparison between school size and brick space vs click space is done in a standard "comparative fashion. There is an unspoken "norm", for example the "small classroom" and then the variances in size or technology are made in an extrapolist mode of comparison. If one looks at MMRPG's (the world role playing games) the experience is not exactly mappable into or easily compared to any of the first generation academic use of e-learning or schools as most of us have experienced them, yet users of MMRPG's as learning tools find much of the intamcy and community of small schools and much of the didactic learning of the "no significant difference" discussants. The typical e-learning in place today, regardless of technology is a crude mapping of brick into click with the idea of not significantly changing the playing field for all players be they the teachers or the students. 2) A number of "futurists" whose forte and interest is in the arena of education, particularly the post secondary arena see little need for the teacher as either the lecturer or the infamous "guide". This may differ in the preK->9 arena and perhaps we should separate these arbitrarily. Many of these issues is based on trust- trust on the part of the teacher of a student and turst on the part of the student that the guide is there as a safety net. Yet we know that most of us from birth to death are curious learners. 3) what is the role of education. In many instance the issue is certification- the credits and the degrees. In such an atomosphere its the bottom line that is critical and not the social "games". If certification requires group play such as discussions to be certified- eg no child left behind- then students get good at playing this game. At the post secondary level, where the college degree is considered a private good, more and more, few can afford, or believe they can afford a hand crafted small college experience- that is left to those whose financial resources allow the customized educational experience. Some students go so far to admit that if they could write one check and get the diploma, they would. It seems that the exchanges here are about some ideal, the world of Newman, von Humboldt and Kant. it seems more about trying to find a way to rebuild a lost past whether using technology or good old brick space. One might want to look at technology use, not in the US, but perchance in Japan, China or in the corporate world. thoughts? tom abeles _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
