+OK 30142 octets Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu (maelstrom.stjohns.edu [149.68.1.24]) by mixer.visi.com (8.8.5/8.7.5) with ESMTP id JAA27457 for ; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 09:51:43 -0500 (CDT) Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu by maelstrom.stjohns.edu (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.C9E0BD87@maelstrom.stjohns.edu>; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:51:38 -1300 Received: from MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU by MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 3737569 for EASI@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:51:22 -0400 Received: from europe.std.com by maelstrom.stjohns.edu (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.6BF9281C@maelstrom.stjohns.edu>; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:49:00 -1300 Received: from world.std.com by europe.std.com (8.7.6/BZS-8-1.0) id KAA13315; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:48:59 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost by world.std.com (5.65c/Spike-2.0) id AA16294; Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:48:59 -0400 Posted-Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 09:51:43 -0500 (CDT) Received-Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 09:51:43 -0500 (CDT) Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:48:58 -0400 Reply-To: "Equal Access to Software & Information:---- web: http://www.rit.edu/~easi" Sender: "Equal Access to Software & Information:---- web: http://www.rit.edu/~easi" From: joe j lazzaro Subject: Learning Unbound from Analog To: EASI@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU In-Reply-To: <199704170449.AA21371@world.std.com> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'm posting this with permission of the author, Paul Levinson. This article appeared in a recent issue of analog Science Fiction/Fact Magazine. This is copyright Paul Levinson. "Learning Unbound" ========================================================================== Published in Analog, April 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by Paul Levinson LEARNING UNBOUND: ONLINE EDUCATION AND THE MIND'S ACADEMY by Dr. Paul Levinson Like most activities as old as humanity, the underlying structures of education seem so obvious as to be taken for granted. Formal learning requires a teacher, a student, a subject to teach, and a place to teach it -- whether in the personal tutor and small academies of the ancient world or the clusters of buildings teeming with classrooms in the present day. The advent and evolution of writing, culminating in mass-produced books, changed the equation a little, bringing into play the notion of wisdom that could be at first engaged and acquired outside of the classroom. But even in education mediated by books, the nub of the process -- the essence of the education -- takes place in the physical classroom, the place to which students bring back the lessons they've acquired in books, for confirmation, clarification, and elaboration. When environments are as deeply ingrained in our culture as the classroom, their limitations are difficult to see. Thus, most of us accept without much objection the fact that once the physical classroom is vacated, the active dialogue of the class is put on hold until the next class meeting. If obstacles of time and/or geography prevent us from attending a specific class, or taking a particular course, or, for that matter, attending a university that's too far away, we tend to accept that also as something that just flows from the very nature of education -- much as we understand (though may not like) that a book we want to read may be out of the library, or that we need to stay silent when someone else is talking in a class because of course two people cannot talk at the same time. But imagine a classroom equally available to anyone, anywhere in the world -- or, for that matter, off -- with a personal computer and connection to a phone system. Think of a classroom whose discussions, proceeding asynchronously, went on continuously, 24-hours a day, with no limitation on how many people could participate at any one time. And picture yourself with access to a library comprised of papers that could be read by thousands of people, all at once, and yet these texts would still be there for you whenever you wished. Such conditions are not only not imaginary, they are not even near-future, in the sense of the ubiquitous TV-commercial that says "you will". In fact, these are the basic structures of online education -- a radically new mode of learning that has been quietly underway for more than a decade. A Thumbnail History of OnLine Communication and Education The advantages of a computer as a communications tool -- as distinct from a programming instrument, data manager, or word processor -- were first developed in various government and corporate sites (such as Xerox's "PARC" in California) in the 1960s and 70s. In those days, people used "dumb" terminals that could do nothing other than connect to a central mainframe computer, on which people could word process, send and receive messages, and therein engage in all manner of discussion, trivial and profound. By the early 1980s, the introduction of relatively inexpensive personal computers and modems had given this process a dramatic boost: people could now log on any time they pleased, from their homes or places of business, provided only that they had access to a telephone, which of course almost everyone did. Commercial online networks like CompuServe and the Source (later purchased by CompuServe) began flourishing. The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1982 began offering a two-year program of non-credit "executive strategy" seminars offered completely online to busy CEOs and government officials, at a cost of $25,000. Two years later, the New York Institute of Technology began offering a few courses for undergraduate credit online at a more reasonable tuition. And in the Fall of 1985, Connected Education (the organization I founded and still operate with my wife, Tina Vozick) began offering a series of online graduate-level courses for credit granted by the New School for Social Research in New York City. By 1988, our program had developed into a full-fledged Master of Arts curriculum, with a specialization in Technology and Society -- offered entirely online. More than 2,000 students from 40 states in the U.S. and 15 countries around the world including China, Japan, Singapore, Senegal, The United Arab Emirates, Colombia, and most countries in Europe have taken courses in our program -- all without having to leave their families or means of employment. Though modem transmission speeds have increased a hundred fold since the mid-1980s -- from 300 to 28,800 bps -- and, indeed, may soon be transformed and surpassed altogether with the long-heralded arrival of "modemless" ISDN lines, the features of online education have remained pretty much the same since its inception. In that sense, online education, especially its general dependence on text rather than images, icons, and graphic interfaces, serves as a middle- or even low-tech oasis in an otherwise galloping, high-tech computer world. This, as we'll see in more detail below, allows people to participate with equipment costing hundreds rather than thousands of dollars, and is also consonant with the traditional image of the scholar in an environment somewhat removed from the hustle-and-bustle of the beaten commercial track. Of course, advanced personal computer equipment is always "downwardly compatible" with text modes, meaning that those who have more expensive systems can take full advantage of online education, and indeed retrieve its written lessons via icon command, and read and write them via fancy fonts and windows, or via speech synthesizer in some cases, and interspersed with all manner of images if appropriate. In some specialized courses -- say, a course on the poetics of relativity, where an equation or two might be useful -- such specialized graphics might even be recommended. But even in these courses, the heart of online education is the text. On the Inside of an OnLine Course The actual process of online education works much like e-mail, except rather than one person communicating to another or a group of people, we have many people communicating to many, with the central computer system playing the crucial role of keeping track of who in the group has read who else's messages. Here's how it works: I teach an online Masters level course called "Artificial Intelligence and Real Life." The course carries three graduate-level credits (awarded by our university partner), and takes place over a two-month period of time online. This time frame contrasts sharply with that of an equivalent "in-person" course, which would typically extend 3 and 1/2 months -- almost twice as long as the online course. Why is this? The answer lies in the intensity of learning that takes place in a course continuously in session online -- a course in which students can constantly log on with their thoughts, comments, and questions, and read not only what the faculty member has to say, but, in some ways even more valuable, what all the other students have to say as well. Prior to the start of the online course, I prepare an "Opener" (the equivalent of a first day's lecture in an in-person class), and a course outline. The Opener not only sketches out what the course will be about, but invites students to jump in immediately with questions about the course and brief descriptions of who they are. In an online course, participation in the form of entering messages into the course is essential. Unlike the in-person class, in which the teacher can have a sense of how well the class is following the curriculum just by looking at the expressions on the faces of students, the online class requires actual writing by students if they are to have any online identity and role in the course. Thus, a highly significant subsidiary benefit in taking any online course is that it sharpens the student's writing ability. My course outline, which will be posted along with my Opener on the first day of the online course, shows that the course will proceed very differently in each of its two months. The first month will entail students reading and discussing, with my input and guidance, basic texts in the field, including non-fiction works such as Bolter's _Turing's Man_ and relevant fiction like Asimov's robot series. This part of the course will be most like an in-person course, although the dynamics of the in-person classroom and out-of-class readings will be fused together and transformed into a much more fluid, steadily progressing dialogue online. The second part of the course will take advantage of the online environment in a more unique and unprecedented way: students will play roles in a mock trial, in which a space captain is accused a murdering a beautiful female android. In a classic "Twilight Zone" episode starring Jack Warden and Jean Marsh ("The Lonely," written by Rod Serling and first broadcast November 13, 1959), an innocent man (Warden) is found guilty of a heinous crime he didn't commit, and is sentenced to solitary life imprisonment on a barren asteroid. A Captain takes pity on him, believes in his innocence, and brings a beautiful android (Marsh) along on one on his stops, to serve as company for the prisoner. The prisoner at first rejects her, then falls in love in with her. The Captain returns the next year with good news: the prisoner's innocence has been established, and he can come home. But there's no room on the ship for the android, and the Captain eventually has to blow her head off, leaving her wires rudely dangling, to make his point. Here the "Twilight Zone" episode ends. Our online trial begins several years later, back on Earth, when the freed prisoner brings the Captain up on charges of murder. I play the freed prisoner, and the students play all other roles -- the Captain, Defense and Prosecuting Attorneys, Expert Witnesses of various sorts, and the Jury. In a class of 8-10 students, this works out perfectly. Since 1985, when I first began conducting this trial online, it's worked well with as few as five and as many as fifteen students. And these numbers are pretty much the limits for any successful online course taught by one teacher -- fewer leave an online discussion without sufficient critical mass, greater numbers can overwhelm any instructor's capacity to respond well to each of the students. So, on the first day of this online course, I post my Opener and outline. I live in New York, but that hardly matters -- I have on occasion started and conducted courses from Bath in England and numerous cities around the U.S. But let's say on this occasion I "upload" my opener and outline to the central course topic at 10 AM, EST, from New York. As soon as those messages have been entered, all registered students are admitted to the course topic. All students have access to our online campus and its campus-wide areas like the Connect Ed Library and the Connect Ed Cafe, but only students registered for a particular course have access to that online course. At 11:05 AM EST -- actually 4:05 PM London time -- John logs on from London, and "downloads" my message. Downloading means he has a copy of it now on his personal computer; he could also have printed it out at the time, or he may wish to print it later. He logged on using a local Internet provider he already had in England, but he could have just as easily used his CompuServe account to reach our system, or used a local public dialup number that also connects to our system through Sprintnet. Next, Laurie, an early riser out in San Francisco, logs on to our system at 11:20 AM EST, 8:20 Pacific time via a SprintNet node that's a local call for her, and similarly downloads my Opener and outline. But she has a few minutes, and is in a contemplative mood, so after logging off she writes (on her favorite word processor) a few paragraphs about who she is and why she's taking the course. And she also asks a question: What exactly is the difference between an android and a robot? She re-connects to our online campus, and uploads this text to our course topic at 8:55 AM her time, 11:55 AM New York time. Message 1 in the course is my Opener; Message 2 is my outline; Message 3 is Laurie's first note. Now Joichi logs on from Tokyo and reads these first three messages. He decides to enter a few lines about himself while still online, and also to answer Laurie's question. He types, "My understanding is that an android is a robot that looks like a human -- either has flesh and blood, or seems to." That's Message 4. Two hours later, John logs back on from London, and enters about six paragraphs of text explaining who he is -- he's a student completing his doctorate in evolutionary biology at Cambridge with a term off right now -- and why he's taking our course. I log back on now at 4:00 PM, NY time, and am delighted to find this multi-national dialogue already under way. Five more students located in various cities in the US and Canada have yet to log on, but I can see already that the course is off to a good start. Three students have already logged on. Further, one has posed a good question, and another has answered it. Students teaching each other is one of the prime dividends of online education. At the end of the month, when each student submits a midterm essay to me online, I will make them available to all other students in our course who have submitted essays. Students thus get the benefit not only of my comments on their essays, but the comments of their colleagues. By the time our online trial begins in the second month, a powerful online learning community will have coalesced in our course, with students who have never met each in person developing strong intellectual and often personal attachments -- as friends, and, on occasion, even more. And these will be strengthened further in the give-and-take of our online trial, as the adrenalin of role-playing leads students to log on four or five times a day to grapple with such issues as what constitutes life, intelligence, intelligent life? But for now, I give a big welcome to Laurie, Joichi, and John; express real pleasure at Laurie's question; compliment Joichi for an excellent answer; and go on to provide a little more context and background of my own -- going into a little detail on Capek's introduction of the word robot in _RUR_, etc. Our online course is well underway. Advantages of OnLine Education Edmund Carpenter, a colleague of Marshall McLuhan, observed that "Electricity makes angels of us all -- not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere."[1] The online student -- and teacher -- certainly partakes of intellect freed from the restraints of flesh, in a milieu in which obstacles of distance, time, and many other sorts are either completely eliminated or significantly reduced. We can make a list of these obstacles, and how online education overcomes them: _Obstacles of geography_: This is the most obvious impediment removed by online education. With information travelling to and from the central computer in seconds and minutes, even with slower modems, the online student who lives across the street from the central computer is no closer to the online course than the student who lives across the world. Indeed, with speed of light being the only ultimate underlying limitation on speed of online communication, students could easily take online courses from a space station or even a Mars environment with faculty back on Earth, and vice versa. _Obstacles of time_: One of the basic constraints of in-person education is not only that classes must meet at given places, but at given times. But at any particular time, either faculty or students might be ill, or plagued by subtler problems which make that time not the best for learning to take place. The problem rarely if ever arises in an online course, in which people are by and large able to log on at times of their own choosing. (The limit here would be that even an online course has a beginning and end, and a time for assignments to be completed and evaluated.) The result of such choice over when one participates in the online course means that all parties -- faculty and students -- tend to participate at their best, when they're likely to derive the most benefit from the experience. Further, the important thought that occurs to you after a vigorous in-person class session concludes is usually lost to that class; in contrast, in the online course, you can log on the next morning, or even in the middle of the night if that's when the thought occurs to you, and contribute it to the online discussion that is literally ongoing throughout the extent of the course. _Obstacles of retention_: As every student knows, taking notes in an in-person class is a highly inefficient method of storing information -- the act of taking the note usually renders you incapable of hearing what else is being said at that time. In contrast, everything that goes on in an online course is automatically and continuingly available. This intellectual safety net for ideas makes for a richer, more informed, educational experience. _Obstacles of economics_: This is closely related to the geography and time limitations of in-person education. For many people, the need to work for a living puts them in a place too far away to take a course; or perhaps renders them too fatigued to take a course during the evening when they are off work. Online education overcomes both such problems -- and greatly increases the number of people who can take part in what Comenius called the Great Dialogue. And this is why, to return to a point I made earlier, online education must be careful not to introduce economic restrictions of another kind, in the form requiring expensive equipment to participate, which would undo its natural democratizing tendencies. _Obstacles of teacher domination_: As indicated earlier, students learning from students is a basic dynamic of online education. This doesn't mean that online faculty abdicate their responsibility to teach; but it does mean that, rather then attempting to inject or spoonfeed information into passive student minds, the best online teacher is rather someone who attempts to elicit active student learning, in the tradition of such educational theorists as Montessori, Dewey, and Piaget.[2] _Obstacles of physical disability_: In spite of recent strides made in facilitating access of physically disabled students and faculty to in-person classrooms, such access is by no means easy or comprehensive. Access ramps at urban universities provide no help in getting wheelchairs through traffic-clogged streets that lead to the university. Further, impairments of hearing and seeing can make the in-person classroom a difficult place in which to learn, regardless of how easily one might be able to get there. The online class eliminates most of these impediments. One of Connect Ed's first students, in the mid-1980s, was someone who had been deaf since birth. I met him in one of my in-person undergraduate courses at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he struggled to keep up with the proceedings by tape recording my lectures, and discussions with the students, and having them transcribed for later reading. His capacity to contribute to the class via this second-hand participation was of course severely limited. But within days after he registered for his first online course, he was playing a leading role in online discussions: in an educational environment in which intellect was already freed from the flesh, his intellect was able to roam and create with the same verve as anyone else's online. Currently, one of our most dynamic online teachers, Tzipporah BenAvraham, conducts her "Technology and the Disabled" course from her wheelchair. She is legally blind. But voice synthesizers convey all the words on the screen to her. Just as lack of hearing was irrelevant to my online student in the 1980s, so lack of vision is irrelevant to Dr. BenAvraham when she teaches online. Or rather: lack of external vision is irrelevant, just as lack of the outer voice was to my student. What counts online is the inner voice and the inner vision. In view of the above advantages, we may wonder why online education hasn't taken the academic world by storm. Though many schools offer courses with some online adjunct, or a course or two offered entirely online, only a few schools -- such as The Bath College of Higher Education (England), University of Phoenix (San Francisco), Nova University (Orlando, Florida) -- offer anything approaching a full-scale online program. The reasons are two-fold. The first, and far less significant, has to do with some of the intrinsic limitations of online education. The second has to do with the resistance of the educational establishment. Drawbacks to OnLine Education: Intrinsic and Imposed The first and foremost limitation of online education that must be acknowledged is that it's not a panacea: if a person, for reasons having nothing to do with geographic location, time constraints, and the like, doesn't want to take part in a graduate level course and its requirements in terms of reading and writing, then no amount of flexibility in terms of time and place of access can give this person a successful online experience. Further, success in online education -- for faculty as well as students -- obviously presupposes a facility, even a pleasure, in the written mode. My colleagues know me to be equally garrulous in speech and writing; but many faculty are more comfortable with the spoken than the written word, and the same is true of some students. Of course, participation in an online course can elicit and sharpen a student's written skills -- some of our most successful students have been dyslexic -- but there has to be an underlying joy in text as a mode of expression even in that case, waiting to be tapped. And not all subjects can be taught with equal facility online. Certainly the liberal arts and humanities, the theoretical aspects of the sciences, and professions like the law are very well suited for the online curriculum. But other areas are inextricably in need of hands-on tutoring. Were I to require brain surgery -- and many people in the academic world no doubt think that I do -- I would prefer to be operated upon by a surgeon who was not exclusively educated in an online program, thank you. Of course, new imaging available on the most sophisticated online systems, with the resolution of video, can convey many kinaesthetic facets of the surgical experience. But I would still prefer a surgeon who had been trained at least partially in-person -- certainly in terms of what is available in online education today. So the intrinsic limitations to online education are substantial. Yet they by and large do not account for the very slow growth of this new mode, especially surprising in the areas mentioned above for which it is so well suited. No: that slow growth is more likely due to the resistance of many faculty and administrators in the academic world. As an example, consider the views of Neil Postman, a leading professor of communication at New York University, who as recently as 1994 opined that computers in general, and online education in particular, were just glorified forms of television, with the same inconsequential or even actively destructive impact for literacy and education.[3] The swipe against television aside (which is unfair in its own right), Postman overlooks completely the extent to which the computer functions not like a television, but a book, and an interactive book at that. Computers undeniably do traffic in screens -- and, with the advent of the Web and Windows -- with all manner of colorful pictures, graphics, and icons on those screens. But the essential currency of all serious online communication, whether on public commercial services like CompuServe and America Online, or in online courses such as Connected Education's, remains the written word, the text, and all its power for communicating highly complex and abstract ideas. When we add to this power the capacity of online participants to question the written words, to shape them in dialogue, we get a medium having almost nothing in common with television and its one-way communication of pictures and sounds. Socrates' yearning for an "intelligent writing" -- one which responded to questions put to it, as in a dialogue, rather than preserving a "solemn silence" -- is fulfilled online.[4] The Human Option The above rejoinder to unfounded criticisms and distrust of online education is logical; but the distrust is more deeply rooted, and flows from the plain comfort people have with the media that brought them to the positions of power that they occupy. All of us, and educators are no exception, tend to gravitate towards that which we know best. We of course know best our in-person environments -- from our family lives, the classrooms we attend as a children, the people most of us work with on a daily basis. From such a vantage point, the prospect of an online community -- of people getting to know each other online, learning from each other, even caring about each other -- may seem far-fetched. The computer, after all, for much of its still brief tenure in our popular culture, has been assigned the role of a cold, impersonal, programming instrument. But the reality of online communities and online education is different. Students in online courses become good friends, visit each other in diverse cities years after their online courses are over. Online education, while not satisfying every educational or human need, is in fact an intensely warm and humanly interactive option. There are obviously some human things that can't be done well or at all in cyberspace -- walking hand-in-hand on a windswept September beach, dining in a fine restaurant with wine and candlelight... But education, the realm of human activity that deals with the life of the mind par excellence, isn't one of them. My expectation is that we'll a find an increasing number of peaks of that kind of experience online in the next century. Notes 1. Edmund Carpenter, _Oh, What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me!_ (New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 3. 2. See Henry Perkinson, "Education and Learning from our Mistakes" in Paul Levinson, ed. _In Pursuit of Truth_ (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 126-153, for a thorough discussion of the student as an active learner, and the champions of this educational philosophy. 3. Neil Postman, The John Culkin Memorial Lecture given at The New School for Social Research, 16 February 1994. 4. Plato, _Phaedrus_, secs. 275-276. Further Reading About OnLine Education Harasim, Linda, ed. (1990) _OnLine Education: Perspectives of a New Environment_. New York: Praeger. Levinson, Paul (1995) _Learning Cyberspace_. San Francisco, CA: Anamnesis Press. Levinson, Paul (1997) _The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution_. London: Routledge (in press). =========================================================================== Joseph J. Lazzaro Freelance Writer Adapting PC's For Disabilities Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. .