My two cents on online courses: I would like to teach one sometime because I think that when you have only available to you the tools of the internet to communicate effectively, collaborate, and learn, you potentially learn more, or should I say, different — and more valuable — lessons and habits of mind than those that are usually emphasized in traditional classrooms today.
Imagine participating in the Flat Classroom Project. You have to make a video (or whatever) with people you’ve never met before, many of whom are from different cultures (and timezones). No matter WHAT you focus on, think about the “habits of mind” you learn: the classroom is no longer about merely the content or the grade, it’s now about learning about others and ourselves in order to find out what is meaningful to all parties, so that we can collaboratively construct something. It’s about considering their points of view alongside ours, even though they may be very different. Ultimately, it’s about learning that there are other ways to see the world.
If we’re reading Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (as they do in the FCP), for example, we learn that there are other ways to read this book. Which is not at all to say that people from different cultures experience reading differently in a cognitive sense (though they may), but rather that a person from the US and a person from India, for example, are likely to react in a completely different way to Friedman’s point that the flattening of the world is sending many jobs formerly done in the US to countries such as India, where labor is cheaper. From what I hear, many Indians are delighted to see their economy booming from this “flattening”; a lot of Americans, on the other hand, tend to complain about “outsourcing.” If you’re a highschooler who has only ever heard one side of this argument — on the radio and from your unemployed uncle who blames his situation on “outsourcing,” how eye-opening might it be to hear the perspective of someone from India that does not come to you pre-filtered through the lens of US economic interests?
Working with people we’ve never met before, people who we may be very different from, makes us much more keenly aware of ourselves, of how we look from outside, which, according to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, is a sign of intelligence (see their “6 facets of understanding“). The ability to scan our ideas and beliefs is what educational theorists and cognitive psychologists call “metacognition.” And teaching kids metacognition, or how to think about the way they think, is THE principal goal of all educators; teaching kids to think about how they think through reading and writing, the principal goal of literacy educators. For example, consider how the goal of writing instructors is to teach students not how to write about ______ topic or even how to write in ____ genre, but rather to understand their own process of writing….so that they can transfer that understanding to any new situation that they encounter OUTSIDE of their English class, be it to a paper for history class or a letter to their congressman.
Similarly with reading: our goal is to help students develop an understanding of understanding how they read, or, in other words, how to read different types of texts by practicing with a few in our classes (they will “transfer” their learning to all situations, presumably). For example, I want to teach kids to be able to anwer this question with confidence, the way we — their English teachers,and skilled readers all, can: When I encounter a very difficult text, how do I make sense of it? Like I say, as highly skilled readers, teachers tend to take this skill take for granted (if we even realize that we possess it).
But the skills of reading metacognitively (e.g., knowing that we need to stop periodically to paraphrase a difficult text, and perhaps read footnotes and look up challenging words or concepts) are what give us the confidence to tackle nearly any text we encounter. Building such well-founded confidence should be our goal for all of our students. And this focus on metacognition doesn’t happen only in English class: just as English teachers teach students how to think about how they think through reading and writing, I would imagine that biology teachers teach students how to think about their thinking about the natural world in terms of systems (bodies, symbiosis/parasiti, ecosystems, etc.). Math teachers, about the way numbers organize our world, etc.
And as we know, if we remember, say, Galileo, paradigm shifts, or different views of the same thing, are usually, when you get down to the place where beliefs begin to determine reality (and power and economics) are not politically neutral. Often there are whole institutions (like the Church in Galileo’s case) that are built upon maintaining a certain view, and people will often fight (sometimes violently) to ensure that their view remains the worldview or the “received” or “accepted” point of view.
A fancy word for describing all of this is “ideology.” We all have “ideologies” — or belief systems that we buy into; they manifest in our assumptions. Assumptions are beliefs that shape our thinking and world that we often are not aware of, and that we usually share in common with others in our “in-groups.” For example, if I host a Superbowl party where the guys watch the game and the gals serve the food and gather in the kitchen and nobody thinks twice about the situation (i.e., it seems “normal”), then we all buy into the same (sexist) ideology.
Taking stock of what we each think is “normal” and “abnormal” is usually a great way to begin getting to the bottom of what ideologies we ascribe to (or the belief systems that we buy into, systems that by their very nature, value one thing while devaluing another, thus giving power to one thing or group while disempowering or devaluing another).
And coming “face to face” with someone from a “foreign” culture — someone who has a completely different view of things, so that what seems “normal” to them might seem abnormal to us — is a great place from which to begin questioning our beliefs, especially when we begin to realize that they probably feel the same way how “weird” we are when they hearing what we believe.
This could be as seemingly innocent as Norwegians thinking that Americans are disgusting for liking peanut butter, which, I was surprised to learn on my first trip to Norway, is a distinctly American thing. On the other hand, I found their “normal” way of eating spaghetti back then (in the 1970s) – spaghetti noodles doused in ketchup — yuk! — to be certifiably gross. But these types of beliefs can also extend to the political. For example, it feels natural to believe that our views of, say, women’s rights are correct and that “the veil” that many women wear in Islamic cultures is oppressive. But what if they <i>choose</i> to wear their veil, even when they are given the option not to? Who are we to impose our views on them? On the other hand, think about what people from countries like Britain, Norway, Canada, France, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Guyana — all nations among the many more who have had female prime ministers (i.e., presidents) — think of the US given the fact that we’ve never had a woman in charge in the White House.
This is not to say that the goal of education is to get us to change all of our beliefs. Rather, it is to say that changing our beliefs can be a very good thing, and that one hallmark of a highly intelligent (and evolved) person is the openness to questioning their beliefs, and the willingness, upon realizing that there is a better way of seeing things, to change them.
And guess what that is called?
Yup. Learning.
I guess that in a nutshell I’m saying that whereas the physical space of many of today’s classrooms seem to emphasize mastery of ideas and information in a vacuum, the “space” of an online classroom seems like it could potentially be more conducive to learning in the sense of the term that I describe here. One important caveat though: this is only the case IF AND ONLY IF the learning environment is deliberately constructed to allow students to reflect upon their learning (i.e., focus on their thinking about thinking — and/or in an English classroom, their thinking about their learning and thinking through reflecting upon their reading and writing processes).
But metacognition is just one benefit of online classes. There are many others, which I’d be interested to hear you say more about.
And since online classes are quickly becoming a very popular way of delivering higher education, I suppose that it would be in my best interests to think about teaching one and soon! But I would never trade the environment of the physical classroom for an online one altogether. The palpable sense of community and presence that comes from creating a physical space together is irreplaceable. I’m just suggesting here that perhaps the online “extension” can help us reinvigorate and re-imagine those physical spaces. And perhaps that the online ones are not so devoid of the experiential qualities we are so quick to ascribe to the seemingly polar opposite of the physical classroom.
Food for thought…
[cross-posted on 21st-Century Literacies]
