Jay's quite right, of course, that many classrooms and teachers aren't even
as good as what even relatively crude instructional software and multimedia
environments can provide. But if we're talking about good solutions --
whereby technology will overcome the shortage of adequate teachers that Jay
refers to -- then we have to imagine programs that will respond to
students' attempts at, say, discourse analysis, literary criticism or
analysis of a set of historical documents.
It seems a significant consideration that it's in responding to students
that I often feel myself to be most creative as a teacher -- I say things
that I've never said or thought before, and that I could never have built
into a software package. Could a knowledge engineer observe me making
those responses over several months and extract the principles on which I
do it, and build them into an expert system? (don't know if I've got those
terms right.) I'd be surprised. Also, it seems to me that part of what I'm
teaching is me having those responses -- I'm a living experiential example
for the student of what it means to operate as an expert in the field, I
enact being the person who knows enough to be able to cash in that
knowledge and get some returns from it in terms of new ideas, I show what
it looks like to think creatively out of an understanding and developed
feel for the topic, I demonstrate what *judgement* in the field amounts to.
It's also, of course, a dramatic experience: existential leaps are made.
The student fires off her paper and doesn't know what to expect; I read it
and am similarly surprised, both by her and by my what it makes me do. So
something new happens, we push history forward and experience the freshness
and contingency and makeability of existence ... ! (Yes, OK, this doesn't
happen with quite every paper in the pile.)
The other way to address the teacher shortage problem, of course -- in
theory -- is to note that we have large numbers of unemployed people and a
shortage of teachers. We all know from experience that a lot of those
unemployed people are pretty bright, non-psychopathic and ok in most
respects as potential teachers. We should, by organising things better and
getting training right, be able to have really good teacher-student ratios.
However ...
Enough. Got to get back to the bloody marking.
Pete Medway
Peter Medway
Linguistics & Applied Language Studies
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa On K1S 5B6
Canada
Phone 613.520.2600 ext 2811
Fax 613.520.6641