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From: joe j lazzaro <lazzaro@WORLD.STD.COM>
Subject:      Learning Unbound from Analog
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I'm posting this with permission of the author, Paul Levinson. This article
appeared in a recent issue of analog Science Fiction/Fact Magazine. This is
copyright Paul Levinson.


"Learning Unbound"


==========================================================================
Published in Analog, April 1997.
Copyright (c) 1997 by Paul Levinson


                         LEARNING UNBOUND:
               ONLINE EDUCATION AND THE MIND'S ACADEMY

                       by Dr. Paul Levinson

     Like most activities as old as humanity, the underlying
structures of education seem so obvious as to be taken for
granted. Formal learning requires a teacher, a student, a
subject to teach, and a place to teach it -- whether in the
personal tutor and small academies of the ancient world or the
clusters of buildings teeming with classrooms in the present
day.  The advent and evolution of writing, culminating in
mass-produced books, changed the equation a little, bringing
into play the notion of wisdom that could be at first engaged
and acquired outside of the classroom.  But even in education
mediated by books, the nub of the process -- the essence of the
education -- takes place in the physical classroom, the place to
which students bring back the lessons they've acquired in books,
for confirmation, clarification, and elaboration.
     When environments are as deeply ingrained in our culture as
the classroom, their limitations are difficult to see.  Thus,
most of us accept without much objection the fact that once the
physical classroom is vacated, the active dialogue of the class
is put on hold until the next class meeting. If obstacles of
time and/or geography prevent us from attending a specific
class, or taking a particular course, or, for that matter,
attending a university that's too far away, we tend to accept
that also as something that just flows from the very nature of
education -- much as we understand (though may not like) that a
book we want to read may be out of the library, or that we need
to stay silent when someone else is talking in a class because
of course two people cannot talk at the same time.
     But imagine a classroom equally available to anyone,
anywhere in the world -- or, for that matter, off -- with a personal
computer and connection to a phone system.  Think of a classroom
whose discussions, proceeding asynchronously, went on
continuously, 24-hours a day, with no limitation on how many
people could participate at any one time.  And picture yourself
with access to a library comprised of papers that could be read
by thousands of people, all at once, and yet these texts would
still be there for you whenever you wished.
     Such conditions are not only not imaginary, they are not
even near-future, in the sense of the ubiquitous TV-commercial
that says "you will".  In fact, these are the basic structures
of online education -- a radically new mode of learning that has
been quietly underway for more than a decade.

         A Thumbnail History of OnLine Communication and Education

     The advantages of a computer as a communications tool -- as
distinct from a programming instrument, data manager, or word
processor -- were first developed in various government and
corporate sites (such as Xerox's "PARC" in California) in the
1960s and 70s.  In those days, people used "dumb" terminals that
could do nothing other than connect to a central mainframe
computer, on which people could word process, send and receive
messages, and therein engage in all manner of discussion,
trivial and profound.
     By the early 1980s, the introduction of relatively
inexpensive personal computers and modems had given this process
a dramatic boost: people could now log on any time they pleased,
from their homes or places of business, provided only that they
had access to a telephone, which of course almost everyone did.
Commercial online networks like CompuServe and the Source (later
purchased by CompuServe) began flourishing.  The Western
Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1982 began offering a two-year
program of non-credit "executive strategy" seminars offered
completely online to busy CEOs and government officials, at a
cost of $25,000.  Two years later, the New York Institute of
Technology began offering a few courses for undergraduate credit
online at a more reasonable tuition.  And in the Fall of 1985,
Connected Education (the organization I founded and still
operate with my wife, Tina Vozick) began offering a series of
online graduate-level courses for credit granted by the New
School for Social Research in New York City.  By 1988, our
program had developed into a full-fledged Master of Arts
curriculum, with a specialization in Technology and Society --
offered entirely online.  More than 2,000 students from 40
states in the U.S. and 15 countries around the world including
China, Japan, Singapore, Senegal, The United Arab Emirates,
Colombia, and most countries in Europe have taken courses in our
program -- all without having to leave their families or means
of employment.
     Though modem transmission speeds have increased a hundred
fold since the mid-1980s -- from 300 to 28,800 bps -- and,
indeed, may soon be transformed and surpassed altogether with
the long-heralded arrival of  "modemless" ISDN lines, the
features of online education have remained pretty much the same
since its inception.  In that sense,  online education,
especially its general dependence on text rather than images,
icons, and graphic interfaces, serves as a middle- or even
low-tech oasis in an otherwise  galloping, high-tech computer
world.  This, as we'll see in more detail below, allows people
to participate with equipment costing hundreds rather than
thousands of dollars, and is also consonant with the traditional
image of the scholar in an environment somewhat removed from the
hustle-and-bustle of the beaten commercial track.
     Of course, advanced personal computer equipment is always
"downwardly compatible" with text modes, meaning that those who
have more expensive systems can take full advantage of online
education, and indeed retrieve its written lessons via icon
command, and read and write them via fancy fonts and windows, or
via speech synthesizer in some cases, and interspersed with all
manner of images if appropriate.  In some specialized courses --
say, a course on the poetics of relativity, where an equation or
two might be useful -- such specialized graphics might even be
recommended.  But even in these courses, the heart of online
education is the text.

                On the Inside of an OnLine Course

     The actual process of online education works much like e-mail,
except rather than one person communicating to another or a group of
people, we have many people communicating to many, with the central
computer system playing the crucial role of keeping track of who in
the group has read who else's messages.  Here's how it works:
     I teach an online Masters level course called "Artificial
Intelligence and Real Life."  The course carries three graduate-level
credits (awarded by our university partner), and takes place over a
two-month period of time online.  This time frame contrasts sharply
with that of an equivalent "in-person" course, which would typically
extend 3 and 1/2 months -- almost twice as long as the online course.
Why is this?  The answer lies in the intensity of learning that takes
place in a course continuously in session online -- a course in which
students can constantly log on with their thoughts, comments, and
questions, and read not only what the faculty member has to say, but,
in some ways even more valuable, what all the other students have to
say as well.
     Prior to the start of the online course, I prepare an "Opener"
(the equivalent of a first day's lecture in an in-person class), and
a course outline.  The Opener not only sketches out what the course
will be about, but invites students to jump in immediately with
questions about the course and brief descriptions of who they are. In
an online course, participation in the form of entering messages into
the course is essential. Unlike the in-person class, in which the
teacher can have a sense of how well the class is following the
curriculum just by looking at the expressions on the faces of
students, the online class requires actual writing by students if
they are to have any online identity and role in the course.  Thus, a
highly significant subsidiary benefit in taking any online course is
that it sharpens the student's writing ability.
     My course outline, which will be posted along with my Opener on
the first day of the online course, shows that the course will
proceed very differently in each of its two months.  The first month
will entail students reading and discussing, with my input and
guidance, basic texts in the field, including non-fiction works such
as Bolter's _Turing's Man_ and relevant fiction like Asimov's robot
series. This part of the course will be most like an in-person
course, although the dynamics of the in-person classroom and
out-of-class readings will be fused together and transformed into a
much more fluid, steadily progressing dialogue online.  The second
part of the course will take advantage of the online environment in a
more unique and  unprecedented way: students will play roles in a
mock trial, in which a  space captain is accused a murdering a
beautiful female android.
     In a classic "Twilight Zone" episode starring Jack Warden and
Jean Marsh ("The Lonely," written by Rod Serling and first broadcast
November 13, 1959), an innocent man (Warden) is found guilty of a
heinous crime he didn't commit, and is sentenced to solitary life
imprisonment on a barren asteroid.  A Captain takes pity on him,
believes in his innocence, and brings a beautiful android (Marsh)
along on one on his stops, to serve as company for the prisoner. The
prisoner at first rejects her, then falls in love in with her.  The
Captain returns the next year with good news: the prisoner's
innocence has been established, and he can come home. But there's no
room on the ship for the android, and the Captain eventually has to
blow her head off, leaving her wires rudely dangling, to make his
point.  Here the "Twilight Zone" episode ends. Our online trial
begins several years later, back on Earth, when the freed prisoner
brings the Captain up on charges of murder.  I play the freed
prisoner, and the students play all other roles -- the Captain,
Defense and Prosecuting Attorneys, Expert Witnesses of various sorts,
and the Jury.  In a class of 8-10 students, this works out perfectly.
     Since 1985, when I first began conducting this trial online,
it's worked well with as few as five and as many as fifteen students.
And these numbers are pretty much the limits for any successful
online course taught by one teacher -- fewer leave an online
discussion without sufficient critical mass, greater numbers can
overwhelm any instructor's capacity to respond well to each of the
students.
     So, on the first day of this online course,  I post my Opener
and outline.  I live in New York, but that hardly matters -- I have
on occasion started and conducted courses from Bath in England and
numerous cities around the U.S.  But let's say on this occasion I
"upload" my opener and outline to the central course topic at 10 AM,
EST, from New York.  As soon as those messages have been entered, all
registered students are admitted to the course topic.  All students
have access to our online campus and its campus-wide areas like the
Connect Ed Library and the Connect Ed Cafe, but only students
registered for a particular course have access to that online course.
At 11:05 AM EST -- actually 4:05 PM London time -- John logs on from
London, and "downloads" my message.  Downloading means he has a copy
of it now on his personal computer; he could also have printed it out
at the time, or he may wish to print it later.  He logged on using a
local Internet provider he already had in England, but he could have
just as easily used his CompuServe account to reach our system, or
used a local public dialup number that also connects to our system
through Sprintnet.  Next, Laurie, an early riser out in San
Francisco, logs on to our system at 11:20 AM EST, 8:20 Pacific time
via a SprintNet node that's a local call for her,  and similarly
downloads my Opener and outline. But she has a few minutes, and is in
a contemplative mood, so  after logging off she writes (on her
favorite word processor) a few paragraphs about who she is and why
she's taking the course. And she also asks a question: What exactly
is the difference between an android and a robot?  She re-connects to
our online campus, and uploads this text to our course topic at 8:55
AM her time, 11:55 AM New York time.  Message 1 in the course is my
Opener; Message 2 is my outline; Message 3 is Laurie's first note.
Now Joichi logs on from Tokyo and reads these first three messages.
He decides to enter a few lines about himself while still online, and
also to answer Laurie's question. He types, "My understanding is that
an android is a robot that looks like a human -- either has flesh and
blood, or seems to." That's Message 4.  Two hours later, John logs
back on from London, and enters about six paragraphs of text
explaining who he is -- he's a student completing his doctorate in
evolutionary biology at Cambridge with a term off right now -- and
why he's taking our course.
     I log back on now at 4:00 PM, NY time, and am delighted to find
this multi-national dialogue already under way.  Five more students
located in various cities in the US and Canada have yet to log on,
but I can see already that the course is off to a good start.  Three
students have already logged on.  Further, one has posed a good
question, and another has answered it.  Students teaching each other
is one of the prime dividends of online education.  At the end of the
month, when each student submits a midterm essay to me online, I will
make them available to all other students in our course who have
submitted essays. Students thus get the benefit not only of my
comments on their essays, but the comments of their colleagues.  By
the time our online trial begins in the second month, a powerful
online learning community will have coalesced in our course, with
students who have never met each in person developing strong
intellectual and often personal attachments -- as friends, and, on
occasion, even more. And these will be strengthened further in the
give-and-take of our online trial, as the adrenalin of role-playing
leads students  to log on four or five times a day to grapple with
such issues as what constitutes life, intelligence, intelligent life?
     But for now, I give a big welcome to Laurie, Joichi, and John;
express real pleasure at Laurie's question; compliment Joichi for an
excellent answer; and go on to provide a little more context and
background of my own -- going into a little detail on Capek's
introduction of the word robot in _RUR_, etc. Our online course is
well underway.

                       Advantages of OnLine Education

     Edmund Carpenter, a colleague of Marshall McLuhan, observed
that "Electricity makes angels of us all -- not angels in the
Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit
freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere."[1]
The online student -- and teacher -- certainly partakes of
intellect freed from the restraints of flesh, in a milieu in
which obstacles of distance, time, and many other sorts are
either completely eliminated or significantly reduced.
     We can make a list of these obstacles, and how online
education overcomes them:
     _Obstacles of geography_: This is the most obvious
impediment removed by online education.  With information
travelling to and from the central computer in seconds and
minutes, even with slower modems, the online student who lives
across the street from the central computer is no closer to the
online course than the student who lives across the world.
Indeed, with speed of light being the only ultimate underlying
limitation on speed of online communication, students could
easily take online courses from a space station or even a Mars
environment with faculty back on Earth, and vice versa.
     _Obstacles of time_:  One of the basic constraints of
in-person education is not only that classes must meet at given
places, but at given times.  But at any particular time, either
faculty or students might be ill, or plagued by subtler problems
which make that time not the best for learning to take place.
The problem rarely if ever arises in an online course, in which
people are by and large able to log on at times of their own
choosing.  (The limit here would be that even an online course
has a beginning and end, and a time for assignments to be
completed and evaluated.)  The result of such choice over when
one participates in the online course means that all parties --
faculty and students -- tend to participate at their best, when
they're likely to derive the most benefit from the experience.
Further, the important thought that occurs to you after a
vigorous in-person class session concludes is usually lost to
that class;  in contrast, in the online course, you can log on
the next morning, or even in the middle of the night if that's
when the thought occurs to you, and contribute it to the online
discussion that is literally ongoing throughout the extent of
the course.
     _Obstacles of retention_:  As every student knows, taking
notes in an in-person class is a highly inefficient method of
storing information -- the act of taking the note usually
renders you incapable of hearing what else is being said at that
time.  In contrast, everything that goes on in an online course
is automatically and continuingly available. This intellectual
safety net for ideas makes for a richer, more informed,
educational experience.
     _Obstacles of economics_: This is closely related to the
geography and time limitations of in-person education.  For many
people, the need to work for a living puts them in a place too
far away to take a course; or perhaps renders them too fatigued
to take a course during the evening when they are off work.
Online education overcomes both such problems -- and greatly
increases the number of people who can take part in what
Comenius called the Great Dialogue.  And this is why, to return
to a point I made earlier, online education must be careful not
to introduce economic restrictions of another kind, in the form
requiring expensive equipment to participate, which would undo
its natural democratizing tendencies.
     _Obstacles of teacher domination_:  As indicated earlier,
students learning from students is a basic dynamic of online
education.  This doesn't mean that online faculty abdicate their
responsibility to teach; but it does mean that, rather then
attempting to inject or spoonfeed information into passive
student minds, the best online teacher is rather someone who
attempts to elicit active student learning, in the tradition of
such educational theorists as Montessori, Dewey, and Piaget.[2]
     _Obstacles of physical disability_: In spite of recent
strides made in facilitating access of physically disabled
students and faculty to in-person classrooms, such access is by
no means easy or comprehensive.  Access ramps at urban
universities provide no help in getting wheelchairs through
traffic-clogged streets that lead to the university.  Further,
impairments of hearing and seeing can make the in-person
classroom a difficult place in which to learn, regardless of how
easily one might be able to get there.  The online class
eliminates most of these impediments.  One of Connect Ed's first
students, in the mid-1980s, was someone who had been deaf since
birth.  I met him in one of my in-person undergraduate courses
at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he struggled to keep up
with the proceedings by tape recording my lectures, and
discussions with the students, and having them transcribed for
later reading. His capacity to contribute to the class via this
second-hand participation was of course severely limited.  But
within days after he registered for his first online course, he
was playing a leading role in online discussions: in an
educational environment in which intellect was already freed
from the flesh, his intellect was able to roam and create with
the same verve as anyone else's online. Currently, one of our
most dynamic online teachers, Tzipporah BenAvraham, conducts her
"Technology and the Disabled" course from her wheelchair. She is
legally blind.  But voice synthesizers convey all the words on
the screen to her.  Just as lack of hearing was irrelevant to my
online student in the 1980s, so lack of vision is irrelevant to
Dr. BenAvraham when she teaches online.  Or rather: lack of
external vision is irrelevant, just as lack of the outer voice
was to my student. What counts online is the inner voice and the
inner vision.
     In view of the above advantages, we may wonder why online
education hasn't taken the academic world by storm.  Though many
schools offer courses with some online adjunct, or a course or
two offered entirely online, only a few schools -- such as The
Bath College of Higher Education (England), University of
Phoenix (San Francisco), Nova University (Orlando, Florida)
-- offer anything approaching a full-scale online program.  The
reasons are two-fold.  The first, and far less significant, has to
do with some of the intrinsic limitations of online education.
The second has to do with the resistance of the educational
establishment.

             Drawbacks to OnLine Education: Intrinsic and Imposed

     The first and foremost limitation of online education that
must be acknowledged is that it's not a panacea: if a person,
for reasons having  nothing to do with geographic location, time
constraints, and the like, doesn't want to take part in a
graduate level course and its requirements in terms of reading
and writing, then no amount of flexibility in terms of time and
place of access can give this person a successful online
experience.  Further, success in online education -- for faculty
as well as students -- obviously presupposes a facility, even a
pleasure, in the written mode.   My colleagues know me to be
equally garrulous in speech and writing; but many faculty are
more comfortable with the spoken than the written word, and the
same is true of some students.  Of course, participation in an
online course can elicit and sharpen a student's written skills
-- some of our most successful students have been dyslexic --
but there has to be an underlying joy in text as a mode of
expression even in that case, waiting to be tapped.
     And not all subjects can be taught with equal facility
online.  Certainly the liberal arts and humanities, the
theoretical aspects of the sciences, and professions like the
law are very well suited for the online curriculum.  But other
areas are inextricably in need of hands-on tutoring.  Were I to
require brain surgery -- and many people in the academic world
no doubt think that I do -- I would prefer to be operated upon
by a surgeon who was not exclusively educated in an online
program, thank you.  Of course, new imaging available on the
most sophisticated online systems, with the resolution of video,
can convey many kinaesthetic facets of the surgical experience.
But I would still prefer a surgeon who had been trained at least
partially in-person -- certainly in terms of what is available
in online education today.
     So the intrinsic limitations to online education are
substantial.  Yet they by and large do not account for the very
slow growth of this new mode, especially surprising in the areas
mentioned above for which it is so well suited.  No: that slow
growth is more likely due to the resistance of many faculty and
administrators in the academic world.
     As an example, consider the views of Neil Postman, a
leading professor of communication at New York University, who
as recently as 1994 opined that computers in general, and online
education in particular, were just glorified forms of
television, with the same inconsequential or even actively
destructive impact for literacy and education.[3]  The swipe
against television aside (which is unfair in its own right),
Postman overlooks completely the extent to which the computer
functions not like a television, but a book, and an interactive
book at that.  Computers undeniably do traffic in screens --
and, with the advent of the Web and Windows -- with all manner
of colorful pictures, graphics, and icons on those screens.  But
the essential currency of all serious online communication,
whether on public commercial services like CompuServe and
America Online, or in online courses such as Connected
Education's, remains the written word, the text, and all its
power for communicating highly complex and abstract ideas.  When
we add to this power the capacity of online participants to
question the written words, to shape them in dialogue, we get a
medium having almost nothing in common with television and its
one-way communication of pictures and sounds. Socrates' yearning
for an "intelligent writing" -- one which responded to questions
put to it, as in a dialogue, rather than preserving a "solemn
silence" -- is fulfilled online.[4]

                             The Human Option

     The above rejoinder to unfounded criticisms and distrust of
online education is logical; but the distrust is more deeply
rooted, and flows from the plain comfort people have with the
media that brought them to the positions of power that they
occupy.  All of us, and educators are no exception, tend to
gravitate towards that which we know best.
     We of course know best our in-person environments -- from
our family lives, the classrooms we attend as a children, the
people most of us work with on a daily basis.  From such a
vantage point, the prospect of an online community -- of people
getting to know each other online, learning from each other,
even caring about each other -- may seem far-fetched.  The
computer, after all, for much of its still brief tenure in our
popular culture, has been assigned the role of a cold,
impersonal, programming instrument.
     But the reality of online communities and online education
is different. Students in online courses become good friends,
visit each other in diverse cities years after their online
courses are over. Online education, while not satisfying every
educational or human need, is in fact an intensely warm and
humanly interactive option.
     There are obviously some human things that can't be done
well or at all in cyberspace -- walking hand-in-hand on a
windswept September beach, dining in a fine restaurant with wine
and candlelight...
     But education, the realm of human activity that deals with
the life of the mind par excellence, isn't one of them.  My
expectation is that we'll a find an increasing number of peaks
of that kind of experience online in the next century.

                              Notes

     1. Edmund Carpenter, _Oh, What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me!_
(New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 3.
     2. See Henry Perkinson, "Education and Learning from our
Mistakes" in Paul Levinson, ed. _In Pursuit of Truth_ (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 126-153, for a
thorough discussion of the student as an active learner, and the
champions of this educational philosophy.
     3. Neil Postman, The John Culkin Memorial Lecture given at
The New School for Social Research, 16 February 1994.
     4. Plato, _Phaedrus_, secs. 275-276.

                Further Reading About OnLine Education

Harasim, Linda, ed. (1990) _OnLine Education: Perspectives of a
     New Environment_. New York: Praeger.
Levinson, Paul (1995) _Learning Cyberspace_.  San Francisco, CA:
     Anamnesis Press.
Levinson, Paul (1997) _The Soft Edge: A Natural History and
     Future of the Information Revolution_.  London: Routledge
     (in press).
===========================================================================





Joseph J. Lazzaro
Freelance Writer

Adapting PC's For Disabilities
Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

.

