A pencil is a tool. It can be used for good (taking notes, doodling in your margins, shading in all the o's in a handout) or evil (stabbing your classmate.... Don't laugh, this happened to a student in one of my mom's 4th grade classes).
Online and computer-oriented pedagogical tools are tools as well. They are as good or evil as the pedagogy and thought put behind their use. Admittedly, it's harder to stab your classmate in a sensitive region with a power-point slide, but their use to convey information is limited mainly by the imagination and time of the slide-show creator.
I'll admit to being vaguely annoyed by what I see as the technological bias of power-point. Most of the preset backgrounds are vaguely techy looking. This annoyance is largely because my main use for powerpoint comes in classes titled things like "The Manuscript Book" and "Travel Narratives of the Renaissance." There are few preset background and color-combinations that truly evoke manuscript books, with the possible exception of the marble-background and the one which somewhat awkwardly resembles a wooden desk. Since I mainly tend to use this software to display comparative images of pages (as in "here you may see f.21r and f.21v, with the show-through of the verdigris pigment..."), what I need is a software that allows me to put two images side by side in a temporal sequence, and honestly, PowerPoint does that quite well. I think Edward Tufte's objections should not necessarily rest soley on the shoulders of PowerPoint, but on all the instructors and employers who threw the neophyte in the ocean and said, "I want a PowerPoint by Friday. Go." Without instruction, the unimaginative, rushed, and just plain bad PowerPoint Presentation is to be expected. At some point in the educational process, it would behoove us to tell students how to use this tool, just like at some point in our ancient past someone told us how to hold a pencil.
Distance or Online instruction, likewise, constitutes a set of tools which can be used well or ill, depending on teh pedagogy behind the tool. Some tools are useful for providing a basic background understanding to a range of users. My current favorite example is the Moma's What is a Print flash animation. It conveys a fairly simple definition of several artistic techniques in a way which is moderately interactive. It will not teach you to make beautiful etchings on your own, but this is not it's purpose. And this, I suppose, is the real annoyance David Noble is trying to get at -- by comparing Online classes to oldfashioned mail-order diploma mills -- that these online tools are misrepresenting themselves as the equivalent of an in-person education with a dedicated instructor.
Because without the directed pedagogy of an instructor, these tools cannot be as responsive to student needs as a class run by a competent pedagogue. Standardized content cannot adjust to the pace of the student. It cannot slow down when a class "isn't getting it." It cannot speed up when things are going smoothly. Standardization can't jive with responsiveness, the two qualities are antithetical. This doesn't mean that online classwork cannot supplement learning at a distance.
I recently found a really neat class website for an interdisciplinary class at the University of Texas. I found this tool through a google search, while I was looking for a basic definition of "sublime poetry." This tool, however, provides a greater context that I had anticipated for this term, and I like the juxtaposition of genres and disciplines it proposes. I might find a way to incorporate this into my own pedagogy at some point in the future. Do I think I get the same experience from exploring this website as someone who has taken Dr. Lisa L. Moore's class? No. But I do think it adds to my understanding of the period from 1700 to 1832 that it covers, and thus is educational for me.
I do wonder what we should make of the fine-print on the website, from a pedagogical point of view: "This site was created by Lisa L. Moore, Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin . It is for use by University of Texas students and scholars and is password-protected. Please do not reproduce material from this site without permission." I feel ok posting the link to it here on this blog, as I am a "scholar," albeit one no longer associated with UT (does being an alumna count?) and I'm not, technically, reproducing any of the material. I can't for the life of me figure out what she means by "password protected" as I can see most of the site without problems... I think there's one or two dead links. Is this just a covering-the-butt-note? How much does one expose oneself legally when one is pedagogical online?
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