Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.”
Walter Isaacson, in Steve Jobs
Some of my colleagues tell me that my head is in the sand over online learning. We should be teaching all our students through the internet, and reaching orders of magnitude more students than we currently do, they advise.These colleagues point to the online tutorials like the Khan Academy and Stanford’s experiment in teaching 35,000 students in a computer science class, and extol the virtues of those modalities. The best lecturers in the world should give the lectures in all our courses, while our students watch whenever and from wherever they are.
I look, and all I really see are video textbooks. These online lectures are sometimes fine ways of conveying information: interesting, engaging, and occasionally richly visual. But so is a good textbook. The lecture, as a pedagogical device, makes most sense when there is information to share that is difficult to share in a written form, such as when describing a process or a subtle idea requiring human body language or intonation, or when sharing information that is not easily found in written form, either because it is so fresh it has not been written in an accessible form, or when it is so scattered that the bringing together of the various strands is too complex for the novice scholar. In these cases, the lecturer is a curator or editor of ideas.
Where such lectures can be replaced with videos, go ahead. But we should critically examine first: could such lectures be better replaced with a written text? Compared to reading, listening is a very slow process. Indeed, when the UM Medical School started providing podcasts the medical students listened to them sped up by 3 times, in chipmunk mode, to hear the lecture at more efficient speed.
But the real problem with the online utopian vision of education is that it physically separates the students, from each other, and from the teacher. While online advocates enthuse on the virtues of online discussion and online community, these fail to replace the face-to-face human process of learning.
Silicon Valley is a physical place, it is not a virtual place. The Valley has two things: high tech companies, and venture capital firms. They don’t physically separate or do their business with each other online. The innovators in this ecosystem want to bump into each other in the coffee shops of Palo Alto. The investors want to go down the street and talk face-to-face with those in whom they invest. If the companies that are driving the internet -- Facebook, Google, YouTube, and others -- need face-to-face work, why should we expect that the even more social construct of learning would require any less?
Online learning makes sense only for the lowest levels of education – teaching facts to be used to pass a test. To teach creative thinking, self-reliance, and values, requires human interaction, face-to-face. It requires action and practice, and for young people it requires structure. Those who look to online lectures as the future of education are burying their heads in the sand. We should not be looking at how to enshrine the lecture as the video textbook – this is a harmless but non-adaptive strategy. Put em online, I don’t care. We should instead we working to develop education based on authentic creative effort, with students learning to work in teams and solve real problems in the face of insufficient information and critical choice.
"There is a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas."
Steve Jobs
