User:Kukkurovaca/Toward an ED156 Wiki

For Dewey, communication is a sort of religion. It is, he tells us, the essence of education, and it is the most purely human thing possible. Dewey seems to believe this to be the case regardless of the mechanism used: "A book or letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated by thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof." But this is at the very least a vast overstatement of the flexibility of language, or, rather, of the technologies and techniques that are used to produce language acts.

The capacities and incapacities, the range of what is possible for communication, associated with a book, on the one hand, and with the face-to-face intimacy of a shared home life are quite distinct, and while it may be sometimes be the case that some correspondence may create a more intimate association between some human beings than exists between some cohabitors (the "book" is more questionable than the "letter" on this point), this is not to say that the letter is equivalent to face-to-face communication, let alone superior to it, and I would wager that the most intimate experiences of direct contact will always supersede the most intimate of literary associations. A letter or a book cannot convey the living presence; it has not the tangibility of a real body.

And it is not merely the gross form of the technology that differentiates the forms of discourse which can be enacted with it; the specific configurations and usage practices--technique--are just as vital; the "book", probably the most important technological innovation to date in the field of communication, and one of the most flexible, can take a wide array of specific forms and be put to many uses. The calligrammatic poetry of Apollinaire and ee cummings requires only the same printing press that produces a Clive Cussler novel, but the techniques associated in production of such texts, and discursive possibilities resulting therefrom differ considerably.

With computers, this flexibility increases drastically; and thus the range of possible technique increases vastly. One of the perennial problems with the discussion of computers as educational technologies is a tendency to regard them as monolithic, and not to perceive the perhaps subtle but nonetheless sugnificant distinctions between the kinds of use to which a computer can be put. The computer has some sort of totemic, symbolic life of its own in the eyes of many teachers, and a corresponding opacity that is a barrier to innovation.

The most frequent computer-based innovation in post-secondary education to date (aside from electronic distribution of course materials like syllabi) is the use of asynchronous communication techniques like email lists, usenet, etc. to augment classroom discussion. Such discussion overcomes the essential problem of classroom discussion--that there is never enough time to follow every interesting or useful or valuable or important strand of the conversation.

Simone Weil said that "time is the "only thing that is tragic,"1 and that "All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time." This is certainly the case for a thriving classroom discussion, which lives out its existence under the baleful eye of the clock and the syllabus, so that no matter how compelling the conversation is, it is permitted only to strut and fret its fifty minutes on the stage. Or its hour and a half, or what have you. But the really important conversations in life are not to be had in any sane elapse of time; they are the stuff of whole days and nights, following the twists and turns, the forks and backtracks, through to their ends.

In considering the relative merits of different modalities of class participation, the temporal element is the most defining; what sets one apart from another is its distinctive pacing, its characteristic chronology. Asynchronous discussion methods seemingly overcome the limitations of face-to-face class discussion by making it chronologically open-ended; one can continue a discussion of indefinite length and volume via email or usenet. Like postal correspondence, it takes its form from actual conversation--it is addressed from one subject to one or more subjects, for example, and is turn-based.

The statements contained in individual messages are at once evanescent and eternal; that is, a message enters the flow of the conversation at one precise moment and is forever fixed (and forever referencable). The conversation as a whole evolves by adding new messages, and often by repeating portions of messages and coupling them with replies...