It's good to know that the intellectual firewall our dominant
culture has created to enable us to believe in both social
learning and individual competence is being more widely
challenged. The firewall of course is necessitated by the
contradiction of schooling's institutional missions: education
vs. social-sorting. The first leads us to see that learning is
social, the second requires that assessment be individual. Our
rationalizations for seeing these as consistent with each other
sound fine until you start to interrogate their theoretical
underpinnings.
The experiments with live vs taped assessment interviews are
certainly relevant to our questions here lately about learning as
mediated by different technologies. I hope no one took my views
of the impending decline of live, bad, big lectures as denying
the magic of interactional synchrony, the 'dance' we do with each
other infrasemiotically as well as in recognizably meaningful
terms. It remains to be seen what level of interactive technology
will be needed to enable that outside the live context, and how
it will inevitably be different from what we've evolved doing. I
just don't think that magic is enough to offset the other likely,
relevant differences between a bad (or typical) live lecture and
a really good (and hopefully in some ways interactive and/or
individualizing) 'canned' media learning system that embeds some
superior lecturing (and a lot else in addition).
The relevant comparison, I think, is not the experimental
minimal-difference one (we're well outside the realm of
usefulness of cause-effect models here). It is the one between
what is now typical and the best we could realistically get at
the same price or cheaper, comparing whole 'packages' of
educational practices. The new package should certainly contain
some live 'quality time' with (scarce) mentors, and will
undoubtedly include both live peer interaction, and various sorts
of collaborative opportunities (live and tech-mediated). But if
it replaces most of the live lectures the present system delivers
with both canned 'great' lectures, and various other modes of
learning, I think most students will come out ahead (though there
will be sub/cultural differences in dispositions). JAY.
PS. Barbara Rogoff's plenary at AAAL was mainly about such
cultural differences. But in most places lecturers don't make
much accomodation to these, or know how to. The lecture itself
may not fit with many cultural dispositions. Infotech-mediated
learning systems at least offer in practice more customizability,
though clearly some cultural preferences will reject them. While
I respect these differences, the changes needed to accomodate
them in a mass educational system are far more radical than the
ones I'm envisioning (e.g. learning more by participation in
community activities, including technical and specialized ones,
than through formal schooling alone, however mediated).
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU