What is happening here may be making genuine intellectual disagreement difficult by insisting that all such encounters are "trolling." If the paragraph Dr. Johns cites is in any sense trolling, I'll apologize. It seems like a piece of a position to me. The new communication technologies--the technologies with which this list is concerned--suggest a rethinking of the foundations of the college and the university. The "campus" and the "classroom" as the spatial and temporal shapers of instruction need to be made visible for the role they play in defining learning. The passive and active resistance of undergraduate students to what goes on in the lecture hall and classroom needs, I believe, to be discussed openly. The correlative practices of compulsory attendance via grading systems, and their impact on genuine learning, and the possibilities for other ways seem like important topics. So, again: there is this possibility: The campus and the lecture hall and the classroom as containers of learning, and the instructional practices to which they have led, are ancient technologies.They are the "commonsense" of current higher education, and often invisible to those who use them. In 1841 Carlyle predicted the transformation of the university by the new technologies of mass printing which he felt would make the physical apparatus of the medieval university unnecessary. He was wrong. So was Edison, who predicted that the motion picture would undo the university. And the university form, the university organizing technologies have successrully reisted the telegraph, and radio and television. The new ICT may similarly be absorbed within the present technological framework of buildings and curriculum and syllabi. There is some countervailing evidence, in the form of the spread of open universities in the world that use communication technologies to instruct hundreds of thousands of students. And the distance learning movement is flourishiing in the US. There is much talk now of "blended learning": bringing together the traditional classroom and the instructional abilities of the new technologies. There is growing evidence that the old and the new technologies often do not blend well, and that when students are given the opportunity they desert the old forms for the new. Sunday's New York Times featured an articles of the inability of Africa's brick-and-mortar universities to cope with Africa's needs for tertiary education. If there is not enough brick and mortar in the world to build the universities Africa needs, how can the technologies we are concerned with here be mobilized to help? Steve Eskow ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark D. Johns" <mjohns@luther.edu> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 5:10 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] laptops and Internet access in class
Dr. Steve Eskow wrote:
... If I were in your position, without tenure and with an institutional climate that doesn't allow for differences in practice, I would undooubtedly do as you are doing--in order to collect my paycheck. I will think about whether I would defend those practices--compulsory attendance, "points" awarded and deducted, etc.-- in public....
Gee, and just the other day I was chiding my friends on this list for taking troll bait, and now look at how I've spent my day! Only a true ivory tower academic would vilify the notion that an education ought to actually help prepare students to bear some responsibility for their actions and inactions. I have better things to do than to read further condescending posts.
No more time to play this game. There's work to be done. -- Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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