Does the Digital Classrooom Enfeeble the Mind?
Go up to any adult with a good life, no matter what his or her station, and ask if a teacher made a difference, and you’ll always see a face light up. The human element, a magical connection, is at the heart of successful education, and you can’t bottle it.
If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. This hypnotic idea of omniscience could kill the magic of teaching, because of the intimacy with which we let computers guide our brains.
At schools, standardized testing rules. Outside school, something similar happens. Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption.
We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. The problem is that student could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.
To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension. Learning at its truest is a leap into the unknown.
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joshuahale said:
I am taking a couple of online classes, as well as my first face-to-face class this semester. It is amazing how much is lost online, how learning becomes self-guided and teacher direction/interaction is near nill!
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tragos said:
i obsess over these cultural knots myself. post-modernism had a funny way of biting back didn’t it?
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