I guess there are several people who'd like answers to that question, each with his or her own view of why we shouldn't still be here. What a lot of fun I could have! But I had something less destructive in mind.
When you think about it, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned: the idea of people sitting in a room listening to another person speak, even with multimedia accompaniment, or talking to one another. What's wrong with them? Don't they have internet in their houses? Surely that's enough, whether they want to know about the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Laplace's Equation, the Killing Times or medieval tapestry. More and more scholarly articles are widely available for those who want to delve deeper. Why come to a class? - you can just teach yourself.
Of course there are a lot of obvious answers. I hope anybody who reads this and is interested will add some of them as comments - just a word or two will be fine, guys! But I'm also wondering, not for the first time, how we can use the new opportunities these media present, what useful revisions of practice they offer us. We need to keep thinking about this because the technologies keep changing.
I was grappling with this topic two or three posts ago and I deferred to Aimee Mann; now I think it's either write a book or tackle it a tiny bit at a time, with no idea of where we'll wind up. And I guess that's what a blog is for. So, first of what may become an extended sequence. Give us your thoughts!
Vinyl or CD? Paper books or ebooks? Snail mail or email? I don't think any of these are "or"s, because both will continue. And this must be true with traditional classes vs new media. I'd like to continue talking to people in a room and serve it up as text, audio and video too.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm thinking events might overtake us, whatever we'd like to do ourselves - I agree with you completely. Courses on computing skills have died over the last ten years. People needed some help to get going as home computers became commonplace, then they can use online help and they don't feel they need help from a person any more - even if they really do! I wonder if the same thing will start to happen with, say science courses - even if it shouldn't.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. I believe availability of new media is a great thing and, without contradiction, there's no doubt in my mind that a loss of actual face-to-face teaching would be a bad thing. So, I guess we need to fight that corner and keep it going!
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