Virtual learning

I have written before about my concerns about distance learning.  One of those objections is the belief that college represents an evolution not just of mind but of spirit.  When I talk to people about their memories of college, the conversation is almost invariably about college life, not college courses.  College is sort of a "halfway house" between childhood and adulthood, where people find out who they are and who they want to be.  It is the formation of mind and the evolution of character, "knowledge" in a far greater sense than book larnin'.  For those who claim they don't need the "college experience," then just buy a book.  If you're motivated to learn, you'll learn from a book, a classroom, an experience, or distance learning. I suppose that there are some interested in learning and are attracted to the structure and dynamics of distance learning, but for most, it is not so much about learning as a short-cut to the credits and degree, with more convenience and less rigor the carrots.  And colleges increasingly are anxious to sell the academic indulgences (in the 16th century Catholic sense).

I am well aware that test scores for distance learning vs. traditional classrooms are not significantly different, which doesn't surprise me in the least since most tests only evaluate content or sterile skill-sets, which really can be communicated by just texts and manuals (or similar "show me" mechanisms).  In fact, I'd think that distance learning would be more effective in delivering content than a classroom in that there is a record of that content, so that the content may be accessed repeatedly and at one's own pace.  So now we have what amounts books and directions for study being delivered electronically.  Nothing wrong with that, and for those content-laden courses, and to a large extent the skill-set transfer courses, distance learning is fine, especially in augmenting traditional classroom experiences.  But just as the college experience is lost in distance learning, so too is the classroom experience.  It is that real-time thinking, the give and take, the argumentation, the unplanned and spontaneous, the group dynamics and synergies, the learning experience that is very difficult to capture in cyberspace and is another source of my concerns.  However, I think that some distance learning instructors are trying hard not to lose too much of the learning experience, and strongly suspect that technology will further enable this effort in the future.  In fact, I think that we are at the point where virtual learning can and will become commonplace.  It seems odd to me that virtual classrooms are not more sophisticated.  We have so many virtual worlds online now, and I'm confident that education will be part of the virtual world to a far greater extent.

And now we've arrived at my purpose in this entry.  In the last blog I wrote that our children are becoming avatars, parts of virtual worlds of play at very young ages, and lamented the ironic reduced development and atrophication of real world social skills and experiences.  We will very soon see, if we haven't already, these living avatars enter college.  I have a visceral objection to continuing the inculcation of our children into the world of The Matrix, where the unreal is the real. Socially, we already have to plan "play dates" for our kids to see other children, struggle to determine how much time on the addictive virtual world and electronic games is appropriate, limit social experiences out of fear of all the bad people out there (Jerry Springer isn't just a TV show anymore, it's the world outside our doors), and now we have to consider virtual education too?  How far away are we from strapping electrodes to our heads to go to work, go to school,  play, have sex, and essentially live most of lives in a world of seamless connection between brain and machine?  While that specter may be the extreme, the notion that social development is being eroded by virtual and electronic worlds and will only get worse with virtual education is not the fear of a technophobe or Luddite, but the fear of a parent and educator.