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Re: Distance Learning (Long)



As Ludwik says, DL is here and we will have to reckon with it, for bettor
or for worse. There are two things that we should bear in mind while
thinking about it. First, although the technology being touted today is
pretty new, DL itslef is not new. There has been DL since as long as there
has been organized mail. It is said that Faraday taught himself by reading
about the experiments reported in the journals and then repeating them
himself, and getting questions answered by corresponding with the
scientists whose experiments he was repeating. That' DL. Correspondence
course have been around for decades. I remember seeing ads for the
International Correspondence School (ICS) in matchbook covers when I was in
high school lo these many years ago. ICS may still be in business but I
haven't seen a matchbook cover in years. I took several correspondence
course that were required for promotion when I was in the navy many years
ago (they did away with that long before I got out of the navy). Thats DL.
With the advent of short wave radio, a source of coherent education was
opened up for those living in wilderness areas (the Australian outback,
Alaskan and Canadian wilderness, and, I'm sure, others) where the lessons
were delivered and contact with the teachers was maintained by two-way
radio. That's DL. About 15 years ago, I was involved in a project involving
weekly telephone conferences with classes in three remote high schools in
North Carolina. It only lasted a couple of years and was not terribly
successful, but we were limited by money, available technology, and lack of
a clear specification for what was to happen during the project. That was
DL, of a sort. There are a lot of people who think they have discovered
something new here. They need to be disabused of that notion, if only in
the name of humility.

Second, in my experience with various outreach projects, including the
abortive one mentioned above, I have learned that, so far at least, nothing
replaces face to face human contact. Staring at a face on a video screen is
not the same thing. I learned early on in my career of giving and attending
summer sorkshops, that the main thing that we gain from these events, even
more than any subject matter or pedagogical methods, is socialization. It's
really hard to socialize with a video screen, although I acknowledge that
it is better than nothing. While e-mail is a great way to carry on
correspondence, and I have made the acquaintance of several people on these
lists since I have been a members of them, carrying on a conversation via
this technique is kind of like talking to someone on Jupiter by
telephone--you say something, then wait an hour for your comment to reach
its destination and the reply to get back. So if you want faster
communication you go to "chat rooms." What a cozy little name. My limited
experience with them is one of confusion. Even with only two people on
line, they keep "talking" while the other is "talking" and I have had
trouble keeping track of who is saying what and when. With three or more
people it rapidly becomes a tower of babel, and I have usually quit in
disgust. When the people talking are together in a room, there are all
sorts of visual cues available to let you know when you can speak and when
it's someone else's turn. It isn't perfect, but it's better. So for most of
us, face to face learning has persisted beyond the time when it was the
only way possible because it has some tangible and intangble benefits that
no other scheme yet devised has. As an aside, companies with wide-spread
operations, who looked to the advent of phone- and video-conferencing as a
potential relief to overextended travel budgets have found that, while some
things can be accomplished electronically, nothing has been found to
replace periodic face-to-face meetings among the people responsible for a
project, or whatever those people do. My wife is a manager is such a
company, and the people who work for her are scattered in four different
locations. In order to keep track of what is going on and keep her people
on task, she has had to travel to each site at least once a month so far.
E-mail, or phone- or video-conferencing, all of which ;she uses, are just
not enough.

Is DL going to last? Maybe, although probably not in any form we recognize
today. Is it the educator's panacea? Almost certainly not. At some point it
will be realized that if it is to be done right, it won't be cheap. We are
just finishing up an $8 million building on our campus which is largely
devoted to the concept of DL, and we have hired a whole new department full
of teachers and technicians to fill it. It may pay for itself in the long
run, but the startup costs are enormous. We should all remember that
educators, especially administrators but to a large extent teachers as
well, are faddists of the worst ilk, embracing each new scheme, be it
pedagogical or technological, with open arms, only to abandon it as quickly
for the next one that comes along. If we were willing to spend the time,
money and effort now going into DL and other currently popular schemes on
the things that just about everybody agrees are the main problem with
todays schools--teacher preparation, reducing class size, providing
classroom assistance for teachers of lab courses, and motivating parents to
instill a love of learning in their children (by far the hardest to
achieve), our schools would be in fine shape now, and nobocy would be
talking about doing all these other things to "fix the schools."

But even if we reach that utopia, we will still have a need for some sort
of DL environment, for those students too far away go get to the school,
for the home-bound student because of illness or disability, for the
working student who needs to study at off-hours, for those students whose
schools are just not large enough to support the level of enrichment in
their education that we all know is necessary. This isn't new. We've been
dealing with the needs of these students in many ways with more or less
effectiveness for years. What bothers me is those politicians, school board
members, and yes, even school administrators who see DL as a way to cut
costs. If they think that this is a way to educate the students in their
charge on the cheap, they are going to seriously shortchange their students
and we will be right back where we are now in a few years, wondering what
went wrong.

I share Ludwik's concern about teaching labs by DL. Bad enough in physics,
where equipment will often be the main limit, but chemistry teachers must
live in fear of video labs in an environment where safety is a prime
consideration. But this is as issue which can be dealt with, given time,
money and rational thought. But there is a place in the regular curriculum
for DL-type things. During my freshman year in college, all the freshmen
(and women) to a course called "The History of Western Civilization" (it
could have been anything, but in this case it was "Western Civ"), in which
we all gathered in the campus auditorium (all 2000 of us) to hear a
distinguished guest lecturer on some particular topic. The other three
classes each week were small discussion sessions in which we dealt with the
topic of the lecture and the outside reading we were expected to do. Well,
the lecture could as easily have been on video tape and its transcript on
the web, as could have been the outside readings--had such an entity been
available in 1951. Any class (well, almost any) can be effectively
augmented by using the techniques we now call "DL" even though the students
are all in one place.

What I am trying to say in my own long-winded way, is that if we don't kill
DL with outrageous claims for its effectiveness and unrealistic
expectations, it will find its niche in the educational spectrum. I hope it
does. We are spending enough now that it would be a shame to waste it.
Again.

I'd like to get involved, but I'm about to retire, so I'll leave it all to
you who are still young and eager.

Hugh






Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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