Perhaps worth responding to a couple points.
It is very common these days to regard online models of education as
elitist (are there any models of education that are not? see below) on the
grounds that computers are expensive and mainly an upper middle class
luxury. People seem to imagine this situation is going to continue for a
long time (decades?).
I don't think such perspectives recognize the fairly strong economic trends
and interest-driven pressures of the current market. The key trend I am
thinking of here is usually called 'convergence', and it is fundamentally
the convergence of internet connectivity, cable TV, and phone service. It
is being planned and competed for right now, and once a dominant model
emerges, it will happen, I think, very rapidly. This is further fueled by
the holy grail of consumer capitalism: instant purchasing directly from ads
coupled to desirable content. Watch, See, Click-and-buy. Whether we are
talking broadcast television or interactive set-top-box WebTV (i.e. html
content), the enhanced desirability for sellers is enormous. This is a
trend toward the convergence of content-production, marketing, and direct
sales. We see it in media-product tie-ins (films and toys, etc.) and the
enormous economic efficiency (for producers) of selling without retail (or
even wholesale) distribution.
The bottom line: every TV sold in America will have the capacity to
interact over the net, and as a side-effect, to access WWW-like information
channels, including educational ones. Yes, the poor will be the last to get
this, but a large fraction of the working lower-middle class will have it
in 10 years or less, and so will their children. This is a short time-scale
if we are re-thinking basic educational system paradigms.
It is already the case that many students have better computer and web
access at home than at school, and I find that my own students, many of
whom are teachers, are increasingly wired (not necessarily with
state-of-the-art equipment, of course). It will soon be the case I think
that most secondary school teachers will find it well worth the cost to
have access from home to educational resources available on the net. Very
soon there are going to be a lot of USED computers on the market, and they
will be very powerful and versatile machines, certainly good enough for
basic web access and home applications, and probably selling for under
$500. Schools will be buying the hand-me-downs of businesses, teachers and
parents will be picking up cheap second-hand machines that are only 2-3
years old and better than what we are using now. When there is a mass
market for them, CD-ROMs cost can fall to as low as a few dollars each, if
the web does not make them entirely obsolete first by providing equivalent
content even more cheaply.
If the WebTV convergence arrives in the next 5-7 years, more and more
students will have better connectivity at home than they will in school. It
is not even clear that it is an efficient strategy for the long run for
schools to try to have a 1-1 or even a 2-1 pupil-machine ratio.
Multi-purpose, multi-user home machines may be more efficient in overall
social and economic terms than dedicated school-use machines. (And BTW it
is now becoming clear that we will have LANs at home: one main machine and
cpu, with several simultaneous screens for different users -- you will
definitely be able to watch a program on a screen in one room while someone
else surfs the web on another screen in another room, for the cost of one
central unit; systems to do this will be built and sold in the next 2 years
and will be standard, second-hand, cheap systems in 7-10 years.)
I well realize that technological change is not entirely predictable over
10 year spans or more, but I think that most likely trajectories will
support online education paradigms for a significant part of the population
in developed countries on that time scale. If we started tomorrow to plan
for such a future, educators would barely be ready in time for it.
Looked at historically, the technologies of mass production and
distribution, however much they have depersonalized working life and did
lead in the past to the exploitative conditions of factory/industrial
production, have still produced a wider economic distribution of many of
the basic commodities of daily life today than in pre-industrial times.
Every luxury from suits and shoes to cars, refrigerators, and TVs has
become available to nearly every fulltime worker; the quality of goods is
distinguished by options and status, but not generally by basic
functionality. If the consumer capitalist economy's interests favor it, the
same thing will happen to, if not computers as we understand them at the
moment, then to the WebTV convergence appliances of the very near future.
The infrastructure for online education will be there.
The other point concerns the inevitability of face-to-face communities as
the basis for virtual communities. I cannot think of convincing arguments
for this. It is the case today because most institutions and communities
inherit such a basis from earlier technological epochs. If you read the
literature on organization theory, you will find that economists and
managers are already exploring the probable characteristics of 'virtual
organizations', esp. economically productive ones, and that some such
organizations do already exist. I am not foreseeing in the short term a
withering away of FTF organizations, but rather their coexistence with
online organizations, and not just (or first) in education. Many
organizations will have a mixed character, as many already do. 'Intranets'
are the interactional infrastructure of many geographically distributed
enterprises today; the organization at larger spatial scale levels is held
together more by virtual, online interactions than by face-to-face
interactions. FTF is the glue on the local scale; CMC is the connectivity
for regional to global scales.
This is not some weird 'computer phenomenon' unnatural to human sociality.
I have previously mentioned Appadurai's work (and he cites many colleagues)
on global diasporic communities and the construction of identity, locality
(meaningfulness of place and connection to larger-scale social entities)
and loyalties among ethnic and religious affiliation groups that extend
beyond the spatial and economic units of particular nation states. Some of
them do use the internet to keep connected, but audio cassette tapes and
low-tech popular culture media such as magazines and newspapers, play a
significant role. People feel deep loyalties and affiliations to 'virtual
communities' on scales far larger than those local ones to which
face-to-face interaction connects them. While Appadurai's examples are
especially significant and convincing ones, once the principle is
recognized, it seems clear that much of what passes for the community of
even the traditional nation-state (national culture, loyalty, identities)
is virtually mediated and not the product of face-to-face interactions.
Or, to be more precise, FTF accounts for connectivity on smaller spatial
scales, but not on larger ones. And (mindful of the unfinished discussions
on spatial scales in social systems) it is not the case that either the
material or the meaning-carrying mediation over long distances can be
decomposed into chains of FTF interactions. When I listen to a cassette
recorded fundamentalist Islamic sermon in a New York taxicab, no chain of
people in FTF communication has passed its MEANING to me (though there is
such a chain, including nonhuman actants for the material cassette itself).
And when it is relayed by sattelite, or internet, the spatial scales are so
crossed and tangled that it seems meaningless to distinguish local from
global communication, or FTF from CMC purely on grounds of scale
(macro/micro). We must instead look either to specific features (e.g. the
proxemics of threat) which are absent or present to various degrees, or to
some other criteria to distinguish, say, individual vs. community-wide
beliefs and practices.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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