One of the hottest topics within higher education these days is virtual learning. Almost every institution is exploring how to integrate electronic learning into their programs. There are many reasons for this not the least of which is financial. However, does physicality matter for the various aspects of education?
For instance, should students be forced to physically move for a number of years to a campus in order to study? Should conferences be held via the web instead of renting out convention centers and vast numbers of hotel rooms?
Personally, I think physicality is vitally important to almost every aspect of education and research. I think there are certain courses that can migrate online but personal, physical interaction is a huge catalyst for creativity. Students having the ability of interacting with professors in person during a class session–but more importantly, chatting over coffee or something outside of class hours–is a tremendously productive thing. Meeting together for the various conferences is incredibly beneficial not necessarily because of the presentations, although there are a handful of presentations that I find valuable every year, but the conferences are the best way to make personal relationships and explore tentative ideas with other experts over lunch or dinner.
As much as telecommunications and IT technology have helped and will help education, the most effective learning environments are physical learning communities.
A blog on The Atlantic has a very fascinating post about creative clusters in the music industry. Even though it would seem that the technology exists to create music from any location with a high-speed connection, LA, NY, and Nashville are still the places to be if you want to be in the music business because they posses the infrastructure and the community that facilitates creative expression. Similarly, this is why physical campus education remains so important.
What do you think?
I think physicality is most important for a professor to evaluate how well a student is grasping the concepts being taught. I often find myself becoming discouraged by the amount of classes being offered through alternate formats. For example, teaching a language on-line is in my opinion difficult at best.
I agree 100%, Charles: Education is more than what happens in the 50 minutes of classroom instruction. One learns not only from her professors, but also from interaction with classmates.
Chip, great to make learning from classmates explicit–I certainly agree with you. The entire learning community contributes to our educational formation.
The internet is a great way to deliver information and I think it can be used very efficiently for learning, but information ? knowledge. I especially worry about seminary settings where people tend to come with many idiosyncratic presumptions about the subject that they have already picked up from years of isolated learning. More isolated learning can’t help. Some education doctoral student ought do a thesis to determine if their is a difference in how someone’s views change and mature in the traditional classroom setting versus full time distance learning.
I guess your comments can’t handle unicode. The ? in “information ? knowledge” should be a “not equal” sign.
At the SBL Annual Meeting I’m doing a paper
At the SBL Annual Meeting I’m doing a paper Degrees of presence: using various technologies to provide distant students which a degree of ‘presence’ in the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies session. In it I’ll both discuss just how, and how far, some technologies make us present to each other in educational settings, and suggest that we cease thinking about a dichotomy virtual/real and think more of degrees of presence.
I work in a country whose population is not dense, therefore some students simply cannot come to an institutional base on a weekly basis, or for more than a week or two a year. Elements of partial presence can add to and enrich their education.