{"id":2597,"date":"2012-08-16T10:15:12","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T16:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=2597"},"modified":"2014-09-12T11:58:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T17:58:29","slug":"dont-confuse-technology-with-teaching-commentary-the-chronicle-of-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2012\/08\/16\/dont-confuse-technology-with-teaching-commentary-the-chronicle-of-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Confuse Technology With Teaching – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 5<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

Don’t Confuse Technology With Teaching – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Excellent.<\/p>\n

Like I’ve been saying for many years: education is NOT efficient. You can’t make it efficient without losing value.<\/p>\n

Online learning is not equivalent to good f2f learning. It is especially not better*. However, given well-designed and carefully tended elearning, it can make access to learning possible that is impractical or even impossible face to face. That does NOT mean we shouldn’t keep working at making the online experience better. We absolutely should.<\/p>\n

*Good online learning is likely FAR more valuable than bad f2f learning. And there’s an AWFUL lot of bad f2f learning available. Obviously bad instructors aren’t even the biggest problem – most students can tell when they have an uncaring or knowledgeable teacher at the helm and those who are motivated figure out how to compensate. A bigger problem is the pseudoteacher<\/a>: the charmer who knows how to make students like her but who really doesn’t know that much, or who provides the same old crap over and over dressed up to look like something new and worth-while. These people dupe their students into believing they have learned something, when all they really provide is outdated or superficial junk. (Can you tell these people really bug me?)<\/p>\n

Here are a few of the more salient bits from the article:<\/p>\n

Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.<\/p>\n

Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.<\/p>\n

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher.<\/p>\n

It is as though elite educators, upon noticing that we can’t program a computer to discern what is on the mind of an undergraduate, decided to pretend that if we just let those seeking an education talk among themselves (in grammatically felicitous sentences), they will somehow come to express difficult ideas in persuasive arguments and arrive at coherent, important insights about society, politics, and culture.<\/p>\n

But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals. We will not make it significantly less time-consuming without sacrificing quality. And so, I am afraid, we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Here is the article in its entirety (done because I think this is a really good article, and stuff on the web can disappear suddenly):<\/p>\n

August 13, 2012<\/p>\n

Don’t Confuse Technology With College Teaching<\/h1>\n
\"Don't<\/p>\n
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Stuart Bradford for The Chronicle<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Enlarge Image<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By Pamela Hieronymi<\/p>\n

This spring, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $60-million venture to offer free classes online. Just last month the University of California at Berkeley said it would also join the effort. John Hennessy, president of Stanford, recently predicted that a technology “tsunami” is about to hit higher education. When justifying their decision to remove Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, the Board of Visitors cited, in part, the need to ride this wave.<\/p>\n

As we think about the future of education, we need to sharpen our understanding of what education is and what educators do. Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error.<\/p>\n

Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.<\/p>\n

Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.<\/p>\n

Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.<\/p>\n

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher. Every age has its autodidacts, gifted people able to teach themselves with only their books. Woe unto us if we require all citizens to manifest that ability.<\/p>\n

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Related Content<\/h3>\n