When I was in college, I sometimes went to the library just to browse and learn. I might pick a book or journal off the shelf, read something, see a reference to something else, go read that, and so on.
From that sort of self-education perspective, the Internet is like that college library, only bigger and closer. I don’t have to go to the library–I just turn on my laptop or tablet. The contents are not confined by shelf space or budget. As an aside, there is multimedia (YouTube). Also, much more frequent updating.
One downside of the bigger, closer library is that it has many distractions. In college, the only competition for my attention was the sports section of the newspaper and the occasional girl I wanted to chat up. To play a game or get entertainment I had to go somewhere else. Now, the distractions are right in the library.
The bigger, closer library has to be an enormous boon to what Tyler Cowen calls infovores, particularly those for whom a traditional library was out of reach.
The question I have is how school as we know it relates to the bigger, closer library. Possibilities:
1. They are complements. You use the bigger, closer library more efficiently because of what takes place in school.
2. They are substitutes. Time you spend in school courses is wasted–you would be better off spending time in the bigger, closer library. But when you are distracted in the bigger, closer library, you would have been better off in school.
3. Schooling is not about learning. It is about socialization. Schools are in the process of shifting their focus to socialization, with the responsibility for learning shifting to the student and to the bigger, closer library.
On point (1), think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.
However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.
Here is the problem with classroom motivation that I rarely see anyone talk about. You are motivated for THAT test. In the library I am motivated by the meandering needs of my project. Ideally, the classroom learning is generalized enough that it seamlessly drops you off with just enough education to proceed with your project (or job). For this, a semester course may need to be broken into many different components. I may need to know one statistics method from a course but not the rest.
Only tangentially related, one problem with the bigger, closer library is the paywalls that keep lots of people without academic affiliations from having affordable access to published research and other scholarly references and data sets, and even those paid for almost entirely through public funding sources. Free and public archives, like SSRN or arXiv help, but plenty of important stuff requires a subscription.
Aaron Swartz infamously tried to break into MIT’s JSTOR server room in an effort to release that information illegally into the public domain, but it didn’t work out too well for him.
I am someone who likes to carefully scrutinize some prominent scientific or economic claims, but since I’m not currently affiliated with an Academic institution, when I hit the paywall, I give up, which is very frustrating and disappointing. And it’s usually an unjustifiable effort to try and do these things from a public library since that often involves a lot of distinct requests and lack of an ability to access the documents on my own computer.
Maybe I should find a way to buy 1-credit-hour worth of tuition at the cheapest institution possible that will also grant me full access to all these references from home. Or can anyone suggest a better approach?
+1. I’d be curious to know the best way to approach this as well. Getting behind the paywall can be a real dagger when you’re trying to figure something out.
Not all universities have all-access. I just skip papers I can’t get to if I need more than what I can scrounge on google. Talk to someone at the University library. They might know some options.
I would emphasize the role of distraction. The Net is more like cable TV than a library. Most people don’t DVR documentaries, even if infovores do; rather, they turn the TV on and let mindless entertainment wash over them. That’s how they use the Net, too.
Scheduled classes and discussions, libraries, and computer labs all strive to reduce distractions.
4. Schooling is not about learning. It is about testing. Schools are in the process of shifting their focus to testing, with the responsibility for learning shifting to the student and to the bigger, closer library.
Some part of school would seem to be about conveying a base of reliable knowlege to use in judging other information.
Consider the northwest tree octopus, which you can read all about here:
http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
Most of us instantly know it’s a joke/hoax. But there are periodic reports of various youth who don’t know enough reliable biology to recognize it for what it is.
So perhaps the real function of school/formal-ed is to enable people to wisely judge the material the find in the great close library.
Many of the well educated are innate autodidacts, or infovores to use Cowen’s term. This skews understanding on the importance of human coaching and encouragement for education at all levels. Even most college students at elite schools are on balance happy to learn class is cancelled.
So we have to disaggregate the population. Natural self-learners will find the closer better library invaluable (no surprise as a reader of this blog I’m in this group). They will seek out feedback as needed. For them the internet library is mostly a compliment, but if that went away and technology improves enough it could become a substitute (for example if you can’t afford college). In fact we may see an increase in prodigies with online education access making the pace of their learning more flexible and possible.
But that’s a small fraction of the population. For the large majority need coaching and human help to motivate. They need to be socialized into learning. So for most people I’m highly skeptical that a computer will be enough. For them the online learning is neither a substitute or a compliment. They need socialization (3) to help motivate them to learn, using either online or in school materials. Basically this is the Khan Academy “flipped classroom” model. So online is where you study, and in school is where you motivate and provide feedback. Online just helps this work better, but it doesn’t really change the fundamental human intensive nature of learning. That is, online library is not a game changer since human encouragement is the key ingredient to the puzzle, not access to books. Either off or online.
You ever seen a toddler who had to be socialized to learning?
The problem is that, 3rd grade, most kids have been socialized into passivity of learning, to waiting for the “sage on the stage” to tell them what to learn. What F.M. McMurry called “school helplessness” back in 1909 in ‘How to Study and Teaching How to Study’. The same conditioning was noted research cited by Charles H. Ham in ‘Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education’ published in 1886. This has also, in my opinion, contributed to the game show (isolated fact regurgitation) education we now have that is reinforced by non-essay testing. Real education requires thought, brooding, backtracking, seeking clarification.
But we should also note that we have all been tainted by the educational experience. What the new generation who will grow up with the bigger, closer library always at hand will do with that information is much different than those of us conditioned under the old system where the spark of study was extinguished by the time factor and difficulty of seeking out supplementary sources in study.
As for schooling, we’ve already seen the degradation of the university with all the distractions. In the past, the distractions were the odd intramural game, speaker, musical presentation. But today, even the classroom is not safe from distraction with Twitter and texting during the lecture. The “down time” in the past naturally got taken up by more intellectual discussions among classmates taking the same or similar material simply out of proximity.
I am skeptical of all just-so stories on education. The common fallback position is “they teach you how to think.” Then why is the major problem I have the same one I figured out I had in the 2nd or 3rd?
The education system is what it is, it does what it does. We don’t know. Now that technology is changing it will do the experiment for us.
The more a school emphasizes # 3 (socializing) the more it signals # 2 (self-education is a substitute for classroom education) .
Sounds a lot like 4 year college vs. community college to me.