Two contrasting perspectives on university education caught my eye recently. The first article was an excellent exposition on the meaning of learning and why technology and teaching are not the same:
- Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education
is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As
information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto
computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not
less.
- Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The
value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer
adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide
individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of
information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.
- Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its
core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening,
understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying,
affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.
In contrast, the second article was a post lamenting how contemporary universities now resemble a plantation economy:
- The modern university is a plantation....a large agricultural enterprise that raises and sells livestock and crops for profit....
- Undergraduates are livestock. In an actual plantation, livestock are raised and sold for profit....moving undergrads through the system is how universities make a great deal of money...
- An important aspect of raising livestock is keeping them docile...
- If
students are livestock, what corresponds to crops? Research grants and
contracts. Not research itself, but research done in order to receive
outside money....
- In
the modern research university, obtaining grants is a requisite for
employment. Yes, one can do research without external funding, but that
doesn't count, at least not for much...
- Every
plantation needs overseers, bosses who enforce rules and dole out the
rewards and punishments. In universities these are department chairs and
deans...
The connection between the two posts? Increasing efforts to transpose teaching practice with the use of technology through the widespread imposition of distance education, on line and "free" large enrollment classes. What is driving these "initiatives" is not pedagogy nor the quality of education. Rather, the plantation owners and operators of the university sector are seeking to further increase revenue, decrease expenditures and sell their measures as educationally sound and driven "improvements".
Education suffers when learning is replaced by grade attainment and performance indicators for the success of your plantation university are the throughput of the livestock students. Big courses, using distance technology are the university equivalent of Google and Wikipedia: large repositories of information, data and opinions, but they are not learning in and of themselves. Teaching still requires that a teacher facilitate and empower the learning of the student. Good tools are nice but are no substitute for skilled coaching, personal engagement and emotional investment.
Too often it is assumed that education has to be structured and that learning has to be taught. A recent experiment with technology reveals just how much this proposition is a fallacy.
The One Laptop Per Child project decided to side track educational structures and, instead, just dropped off sealed boxes of Tablet PCs in two Ethiopian villages. The results are inspiring to all who subscribe to the strength of the human condition and innovative spirit:
- We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No
instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the
boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found
the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered
it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day.
Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the
village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in
our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they
figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.
