Boldly going where many have been before
A couple of weeks ago, The Australian's higher education section quoted Anant Agarwal, president of edX, saying that "education hadn't really changed for hundreds of years" (27 March 2013, p. 26). I don't know which schools and universities Agarwal has visited over the past two or three hundred years, but the statement drew my attention to a tried-and-true technique of would-be revolutionaries: deny that anything that happened before today was of any consequence.
For those dreaming of the day that computers revolutionise education, university lecturers are apparently still getting about in black robes and discussing the finer points of Galenic medicine in Latin with their exclusively white male students. It makes me wonder who's really out of touch here.
Of course modern schools and universities also continue some practices that would be familiar to their mediaeval forebears, including the human teachers and lecturing and tutoring that I take to be the subject of on-line educational scorn. But perhaps there's a reason for this continuity: it works. Would anyone suggest that the Roman alphabet is due for a shake-up just because "it hasn't really changed for hundreds of years"?
Writing about older computer workers' difficulties with finding employment in her book Cyberselfish, Paulina Borsook speculates that older workers might be disadvantaged by the lack of excitement they show when presented with a new buzzword that looks suspiciously like technology they worked with ten or twenty years ago. So we're using thin clients to access our data in the cloud now? Sounds rather like the dumb terminals and mainframes that we covered in the history of computing discussed in my operating systems class last week. Unhampered by any knowledge (or at least experience) of history, younger workers impress by the excitement they show when encountering an idea for the first time.
Similarly, massive open on-line courseware seems so much more exciting if one has never encountered — or makes a habit of ignoring — the textbooks, video lectures, educational software and on-line learning management systems that existed before it. And Heaven forbid that any of our ancestors ever had a good idea.
