This paper was submitted as part of my Doctoral Comprehensive exams December 1995. All text is copywrite D. Jason Nolan. If you want to use it or quote from it, please contact me.

[Transformative and Holistic Learning | CMC: Over Schooled and Under Educated | MUDs: Research into Educational Computer Mediated Communication | Index]


Over Schooled and Under Educated

Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible, since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. (Rousseau, 1962, 364)

In defining educational technology, as it will be used in this paper, I want to refer to the Internet itself as a learning environment. I am not referring to a single application, or to any fee based services or software packages, but to the chaotic anarchy of 40 million users strung together on bits of copper and glass. This definition is in part to avoid replication between answers on these comps., and to broaden my focus to embrace the notion of sites or nodes of the Internet as curriculum communities. Ivan Illich's notion that we're over schooled and under educated (Cayley, 1992; Illich, 1970) has more truth about it now than it had in the early seventies. A fetishization of accreditation has replaced much of the learning that is the expressed goal of schools. The value of a piece of paper with the appropriate insignias, however, seems to outweigh what might be going on in the gray matter (Illich, 1970) .

This paper will consider some of the pros and cons of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) for learning, versus schooling; assess its possible positioning along side of a disestablished educational system; and the value of a curriculum of community, here a virtual community, as the locus for learning. Possible strategies for accreditation of learning that has not been given the nod by an educational bureaucracy will also be considered.

I have rarely been able to obtain a teaching position that was not in some way related to my knowledge of computers, despite my graduate level qualifications in English, and my teaching certification in E.S.L. and Environmental Science. The opportunities that computers have offered me leads directly to the tone taken in this paper. I acknowledge the limitations and possibilites with regards to learning and education that my perspective offers, however, at this time, my opportunities are tied with my support of computers in education.

Negative Impact: What is wrong with Computers and Learning

Computers and computer based learning probably deserves much of its negative press in the eyes of some of themore critical curriculum thinkers. Due to origins in Military and 'Big Business,' computers share the same legacy and potential for global nightmare with the 'Bomb.' And the new computer culture's technophillic positivist ideology looks to 'newer' and 'faster' without serious consideration of issues of power or politics. However, this "ideology shares with its rival, the bourgeois Enlightenment, a penchant to see only the mathematical dimensions of nature, to view "natural" environments as only raw materials for the production of machines, which in turn properly constitute the genuine environment within which synthetic interactions occur" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 192). This is beyond the notions of the "infinity of space and time and of scientific and technological possibility" (p. 192).

Computer Assisted Learning (CAL), Computer Based Instruction (CBI) and, to a much lesser extent, CMC often leads to thin conceptualizations of learning and education (Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1995) . This is in part due to the drive by apologists for acceptance. I have never seen a prospectus for a computer Education conference that included sessions that critically discuss issues of power, politics and knowledge construction, but hopefully they are on the horizon.

Computers are not neutral, though neither was vellum and quill or the printing press in the politics of Medieval Europe, but proponents do not often address claims that computers can be isolating, lead to mechanistic attitudes, and corporate interests. Educational computing tends to "underplay or to ignore the fundamental issue of power distribution.... that innovations become means of control and have differential results for different classes, racial groups, gender divisions, and so on. There is also sound historical evidence that schooling serves the needs of dominant groups within the work world" (Olson & Sullivan, 1993, p. 426) . Despite these facts, I think that an argument can still be made for socially conscious, politically aware contexts where computer can be empowering tools. Giroux accurately notes that "politics exists, but it is viewed as a massive obstacle to the creation of the electronically mediated community in which we are all digitally linked. The struggle for social power, having been rendered obsolete by the now realized dream of total individual autonomy made possible by the machine, may be conceived as an illusion" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, pp. 193-4) . However, Giroux does not speak to virtual communities, but rather to computers as isolated units, computers at their worst.

The use of virtual communities by feminists, ecologists, gay and lesbian rights activists, and animal rights proponents reveals the binding web of community that can mobilize a movement in hours. Witness the use of computers in the social struggles in Asia and eastern Europe. As well, the successful mobilization of online public opinion against wolf hunts in Alaska is a well know example of people using computers as positive social tools. Yes, computers can be, can be used as, a form of oppression, however compulsory education in which young people are kept in a holding pattern until society is or may be ready to accept them (Cayley, 1992; Illich, 1970) definately is a form of oppression. Characterization of socially positive manifestations of computers is a primary issue, since we must accept computer and CMC as a new part of our existence, just as Gutenberg's introduction of the Chinese technology of printing changed our world 500 years ago.

Positive Impact: What is good with Online Learning

Education becomes the nexus of the community turns if it reflects "playfulness, flexibility, openness to the alien, respect for what is different, empathetic understanding, trust, reasonableness, truthfulness, capacity for self-criticism". (Barnes, 1988, p. 24)

The positive aspects of CMC in education (EdCMC) are real. There are key empowering skills and attitudes that are more central to EdCMC (versus CAI, and CBI) than to contemporary classroom learning. These aspects: task dedication; self-motivation/direction; willingness to take risks, as well as share and support the learning of others, are not the goals of EdCMC, but necessary conditions for success. EdCMC does not work with students expecting/expected to be passive learners, who are unwilling to direct their own learning, while expecting transmitted knowledge. The successful online learner is characterized as willing to embark on "a voyage of discovery through the world of knowledge" (Harasim, et al., 1995, p. 193) . This description is problematic on a number of points, but it does reflect an attitude that should be important in all learning, especially when it is accompanied by a critical awareness of the politics involved with whose knowledge is being considered and for what purpose.

EdCMC removes the classroom as the locus of learning, instead placing a virtual space in which participation is the necessary condition leading to success. It is not an autonomous learning community, yet. It is, however, a forum that provides a dynamic learning environment that place the student(s) at the centre and the teacher/educational bureaucracy in the periphery. Harasim and her colleagues note that Distance Education, peer to peer learning, collaborative learning, access to resources, and the sharing of view/experiences replaces the teacher-centred modes of curriculum delivery. Harasim notes the findings in an earlier study of teachers using the Internet, that:

· The role of the teacher changes to that of facilitator and mentor.

· Students become active participants; discussions become more detailed and deeper.

· Learners become more independent.

· Access to teachers becomes equal and direct.

· Education becomes learner centred; learning becomes self-paced.

· Learning opportunities for all students are more equal; learner-learner group interactions are significantly increased.

· Personal communication among participants is increased.

· Teaching and learning is collaborative.

· There is more time to reflect on ideas; students can explore on the networks; exchanges of ideas and thoughts is expanded; the classroom becomes global.

· The teacher-learner hierarchy is broken down. Teachers become learners, and learners become teachers (Harasim, et al., 1995, pp. 14-15) .

Harasim's work does not critique the technology she studies, and this calls many of her findings into question, but the above generalizations can stand for this paper. The role of this de-localized teacher becomes that of the curriculum planner, a reflective participant and personal maker/sharer of meaning: "The world of the curriculum planner is a world of meanings. I take it as axiomatic that the primary responsibility of the curriculum worker is to assist teachers and students with the recognition, construction, and integration of different kinds of meaning" (Olson & Sullivan, 1993, p. 402) . The step from this electronic classroom to a true online learning community, empowered, socially focused, and self-directed, is still quite a conceptual leap. EdCMC has to abandon its positivist attitude, expensive proprietary hardware/software, and become available to all regardless of age and participation is a privileged social group. Projects on the Internet, such as the Freenet movements and the Free Software Foundation, that are not explicitly educational in nature are already filling this gap.

Possible Impact: What Online Learning should do

That "Every revolutionary project is, above all, an educational one" is equally true in reverse (Bookchin, 1989, p. 197).

First, I will look at what online learning will do, and then describe what an electronic learning community might look like. An Internet learning node/site/community should ideally form, not out of a classroom based decision to get involved with a specific project or issue, but rather be developed through the coming together of like-minded individuals around a mutually agreed upon issue, topic, or theme. Initially some learning about the medium is necessary for new participants (called Newbies), and the thrill of getting online is what gets people over the learning curve, along with the help of experienced users (which I've heard referred to as grandparents). But the formation of groups based on interests and the various forms of interactions possible. These interactions typically include (at present) spaces to work independently, meet in synchronous communication in large/small groups for discussion/socialization, and to have a forum in which to 'publish' findings, opinions, and ideas for scrutiny, reaction and interaction by other members of the community. Opportunities for face to face interactions also seem to be important in the formation of online communities. As John P. Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Well community member realized, "you aren't really a community until you have a funeral" (Reingold, 1993, p. 37) . The Well became a community when a member wrote a program that erased every word he had ever written on the Well before committing suicide. Validation of community, knowledge, learning, and experience comes from within the group, not from some external authority or administration.

In this sense, virtual interaction "allows people to 'synthesize' a visual sense of multiple viewpoints which intern animates meaning" (De Kerckhove, 1995, p. 76) . However, it is "...a deficient concept of what it is to be human... renders our schools increasingly anachronistic as we approach the twenty-first century" (Olson & Sullivan, 1993, p. 402) . And to me it is important to see education as an experience of growth and development, and to divorce it from its present reality as a process of "indoctrination of individuals into mechanistic moldings according to theories of experiential learning borrowed from science" (Kolb, 1984, p. 21) . The movement from "Homo theoreticus" to "Homo participans" (De Kerckhove, 1995, p. 49) is as much fundamental to my understanding of what learning should be as to what makes EdCMC and online communities work. As Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier points out "the essence of virtual reality is what that it shares" (1995, p. 46) , and this stands in contrast to the findings of Michael Fullan (1981) (Olson, 1993, p. 435) "that the large percentage of students who find school boring, are in fact finding it meaningless. This is problematic, since it may be their capacity to make meaning, or the material that is meaningless." This too is problematic, since it may be their capacity to make meaning that is impaired or that there is an inherent meaninglessness in the curriculum for many students. Either way, a solution is necessary.


Online experiences and access to resources give individuals and groups every opportunity to find situations that speak to any issue. Even at this early stage of the Internet, the access to diverse viewpoints is astounding, and far exceeds anything that could ever be available in a classroom. Aside from elements under the purview of established learning institutes, such as OISE or the New School for Social Research, which offer courses and resources online, alternative avenues for experience, learning, and meaning making are growing exponentially. Sites that are created by Aboriginal, environmental, social development and change groups offer students first hand, unmediated access to real cultural issues/learning that can only be modeled in the classroom (Cummins & Sayers, 1995) . Students can actually participate in discussions and workshops that lead to policy and actions on local, national, and bioregional levels. This development of support community, long term access to learning environments, groups, and educators (of any age or accreditation) creates a sense of participation in society and learning that is both real and long term. This is life long learning. The question of curriculum is a question of environment, an environment that includes the individual, the social community and the physical external biosphere (Berry, 1988; Miller, 1992; Miller, 1993; Miller, Cassie, & Drake, 1990; Sullivan, 1994; Swimme & Berry, 1992) . Aspects of our world that cannot be fit in are hostile.

Characterizing what an online learning community might look like is necessarily visionary. It must consider issues like access to technology, who is going to pay the teacher, and evaluation and accreditation of learning. Other issues such as the useful role for classroom and schools, and the need for the development of social skills IRL need to be addressed. This would require more space than is available for this paper. In short, however, in response to the question of where are students going to learn the IRL skills that schools were also supposed to teach, I would suggest that they do it IRL. We don't need a $60K teacher to teach social skills that should be learned in the community, religious organization, Guides/Scouts, YMCA, through having a job or spending time with parents. I am not taking responsibility, here, for the baggage that comes along with these assertions, aside from saying that schools have never lived up to the responsibility that they were unfairly given of being all things.

Who's going to pay the teacher? Chris Teplovs' paper "Economic Granularity and Information on the Internet: Implications for Educators" (1995) describes on possible outcome of consumers turning into prosumers (De Kerckhove, 1995) . We will be paid for what is used that we have created, and we will pay for what we use that has been created by others. If I run a seminar or facilitate learning through curriculum on my World Wide Web page, then I will be paid for it.

Relocalizing education into this new context would require the redirection of funding dollars from schools to enable individuals to access technology. New technologies such as the World Wide Web & Netscape®, Sun Microsystems'® Hot Java and their anticipated $500 Internet access tool (replacing computers) will continue to bring costs and access down (Teplovs, 1995) to levels that will remove most barriers to access. The international Freenet movement and Telecommunities Canada are already putting Internet access in public places such as coffee shops, Seniors' Residences, shelters, and public libraries. Freenets also have the self-defined mandate to focus on access to local community information and resources, as well as basic training-all done by volunteers like me. And with Internet access expected to drop to less than $40 per month for 24 hour access from the cable companies, a slight reduction in school taxes could account for access to all members of society, if the social will exists. There is no reason to assume that access to online learning communities must be restricted to economically advantaged groups. Compared to access to quality education in our schools, there is a greater possibility for parity on the Internet.

How does the disestablishment of schools as the locus of education and learning serve the learner, community and society?

Living in the information environment means at least two things. First, we are all becoming beacons of information. Second, so much can be known, and made known, that there is no where to hide (De Kerckhove, 1995, p. 72) .

Evaluation and accreditation would take many forms. Present experience at the post-secondary level with distance education will be helpful in providing models and experience. School boards may still have a role in assessing skills for local accreditation in certain fields, but drawing on Illich's suggestion that schools, like gasses, expand to fill all available space: "Not only education but social reality itself has become schooled (Illich, 1970, p. 3) . I would rather consider alternatives or modified traditional methods of accreditation through Apprenticeships up to Magistrals in fields. Significant online or IRL projects, especially community focused, would be ideal forms for the presentation of learning for accreditation by local communities in accordance with communally developed and defined needs/standards.

I think that existing models of real life and virtual community groups provide the best examples of what virtual education communities might look like. Consensus based programs and curricula could be developed by learner and presented for debate. Time lines and outcomes could be developed in light of past experience and with the assistance of established persons in the field. With participation by choice and mutual agreements, learners would have to find their own solutions, and resources for the completion of their curriculum, and present the results to their virtual or IRL community which would come to a consensus on what work needed to be done in order for the project to be considered compete.

Some virtual projects such as Diversity University, EcoMoo, and BioMoo are dedicated to the form of learning described in this paper. They provide examples of post-secondary level humanities and science curricula in virtual settings that are open to the general Internet community. Projects like Schoolnet, Moose Crossing, and Academy One are example of how curricula for younger students might look (Cummins & Sayers, 1995; Riel & Harasim, 1994) .

The Internet is Education Having an Identity Crisis

"Nonfulfilment of a self in the act of a performance of an act is a moral evil" Pope John Paul II (Olson & Sullivan, 1993)

Listening to Howard Reingold on the TV, while writing this paper, I realized that the net may still go bad despite our communities and positive interactions, but it will go bad if we are not making it an effective force for community and democracy. What we do not understand about Cyberspace will hurt us, as the 'big guns' force their way in. Curriculum of the Virtual Community must be addressed if we are to maximize it as a force for social change.

Learning and education must reinvent itself, and continue to do so indefinitely. It is no longer enough for young people to grow up in the 'prison' of the classroom and the educational bureaucracy that administers it. It is unaffordable in terms of individual and social growth, as well as financially. It is time for a new experiment in social education, as the world of Dewey and educators like Matthew Arnold the century before is no longer ours. Equally valid rethinkings/recontextualizings of learning that disestablishes schools as the locus of learning and accreditation that do not include CMC should also be investigated and explored. I would not doubt however, that many of the ideas presented in this paper would appear there as well.

References

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