The economies of scale and scarcity in education have changed.
Why should there be classes of 25-35 students if they are not all
studying the same things at the same time? Why should _all_
collaborative learning be done in face-to-face groups when a lot
of it does not actually require co-presence? Why shouldn't people
have access to a whole cohort of mentors, of different ages and
levels of expertise, available on different degrees of notice and
for different types of needs, sometimes face-to-face, sometimes
by teleconference, sometimes by email? Why shouldn't study groups
form, dissolve, and reform, and sometimes be FTF and othertimes
otherwise mediated?
What _all_ students _need_ to learn, all students will learn, but
because you really do need these things to do what else you want
to do, not because someone has decided it is good for you or for
society to force you to learn them. I imagine nearly everyone
will learn basic reading and writing skills (more advanced such
being specialized and distributed accordingly), basic internet
skills (access, search, navigation, interface use, etc.), and
common life skills (of the sort often not covered in schools
anyway). Some texts will be more often and widely read than
others, but this will fall out as it may, not by central
decision. Groups that form will learn the value of shared
reference points, as well as of diversity, and will either form
only when enough is shared to make things work, or will develop
shared resources over time.
On a smaller curricular scale, there would be 'canned'
introductions or guides to a vast variety of topics, to be
studied individually or in groups (FTF or not), and interactively
(activities integrated into hypermedia courseware), and with
enough intelligence in these tutoring programs to individualize
interactions to a (cumulative) user profile. There would be
choices for many of these and ways to sample them before
committing time to them.
There would be feedback aplenty, including evaluation and
anonymous comparison against selected reference groups, at the
user's request (or perhaps automatically, depending on guideware
style). But evaluations would be as sealed as the confessional
(or lawyer-client privilege), both automated ones and those by
human mentors (users could perhaps release data to selected
mentors). A hyperportfolio of work and accomplishments (including
participation in live enterprises) would accumulate, and subsets
of it could be offered up for re-evaluation by the criteria of
potential collaborators, mentors, investors, employers, etc, each
of whom would have established their own criteria to be applied
to the portfolio.
The work of educational institutions would be co-ordinative, to
ensure that resources were available for anticipatable and unique
needs, to help smooth the process of access and integration of
different aspects of what people chose to do, to function as
brokers for the formation of groups, negotiators for
opportunities, intermediaries with mentors. As much as possible,
the material activity of education would be exported to the
institutional settings where what is being learned occurs in its
full normal context. Some sorts of preliminary learning of skills
and techniques with specialized equipment would have to be
arranged for.
People in such an open-ended, open-access educational process
would fashion trajectories of learning as diverse as people
themselves are. Coercion would not be absent from their lives,
but only, to the extent possible, from their access to and use of
educational resources. As they discover our social order's other
constraints and coercions, their trajectories _may_ bend in
compliance, but the net diversity of what educated people would
know would support a correspondingly more diverse potential
economy of production (of smaller, more decentralized working
units), and perhaps even a less coercive one.
Don't expect such optimism from me very often! JAY.
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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