On 31 Mar 2010 at 7:39, dhbailey wrote: > It's amazing but more and more so-called educational > professionals that are unfortunately in charge of higher > education (and all education in the U.S.) are equating > information with knowledge, and so they figure that if the > information is made available on-line, the knowledge will > obviously flow as well. > > Nothing replaces face-to-face discussion and lecture, where > the student can actually ask questions and discuss things > with a real-live person. > > Education is so much more than information hand-off but that > seems to be getting lost in the race to cram the most > information into the shortest amount of time. > > Information is *not* knowledge!
I agree with your basic point, but the fact is, young people today interact with the world very differently than we do. Some kids are going to absorb the information better via the computer than they would from a real-world class. I think that educators have to adapt. The future is going to integrate online instruction into the curriculum whether we like it or not, and while it can of course be done badly, the real issue for the educator is to try to make sure that the integration is as sensible as possible. I am reminded of the move of library catalogs from index cards in drawers to computer databases. In many cases, technology zealots pulped the physical card catalogs, which destroyed incredibly important repositories of scholarship (a lot of cards in card catalogs had had-written annotations by real-life librarians that were never entered into the computer databases, for instance). But 30 years on, nobody would want to go back to card catalogs! The accessibility of online catalogs has made possible such incredible resources as WorldCat.org. Yes, WorldCat has its problems, but most of those are due not to the medium, but to the issue of merging data from 10s of thousands of individual databases (OCLC and MARC records can only do so much in regularizing data). I think that right now we're in the "pulp the card catalog" stage of online education, where zealots want to convert everything to online courses, whether appropriate or not. That will change as instructors and administrators and students become more familiar with the process. I expect that some courses convert very well to online instruction, while others do not. Most of the courses I had in undergraduate school would have worked very well with parts of the course converted to online instruction, while keeping the core in-person lectures/discussions. Obviously, you can't teach someone to play the oboe in a web browser. But a web browser can be a great way to do listening assignments (though I am a bit bothered by the low fidelity of most computer speakers; not necessarily worse than the crappy headphones at the listening stations at Oberlin that I used in my undergrad years, though). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
