The book by Losh, The War on Learning, is in many
ways a terrifying tale of today’s higher education. It is a well told and
structure narrative that presents to the reader what can and is happening as
technology is “introduced” or penetrates the “classes” of education. She
presents this in an exceptionally clear and well documented manner and for
anyone who has memories of the “old days” of higher education, to paraphrase
Dante, “abandon all hope ye who enter” the new hallowed halls. The
explosion of iPhone and instant capture and exposition of events in the class,
the use of anonymous and derogatory Twitter accounts and commentary, crowd
events to create chaos, are all elements that thwart modern education.
One must imagine what it must be like to teach under the
constant recording eyes and ears of today’s technology equipped and entitled
students. There appears in Losh’s student base to be a total lack of “standards”
in deportment in class and that in fact there appears to be an ongoing battle between
student and instructor, and in many cases the instructor may very well have
been the implementer or facilitator.
Losh focuses on several key areas:
1. The almost ubiquitous explosion of recording methods and
the subsequent public display of what has been recorded along with an
exposition of the various “social media” outlets. She discusses the recording
of some professor whose behavior, albeit well from the norm, would in bygone
days become some tale told at reunions, but in today’s world it becomes a
memorialized video record of an individual disgraced. This memorialized record
is then spread worldwide. Thus anyone who is involved in teaching enters a
class in total fear of what slips they may make and thus appear to a world
audience as some fool. One wonders how the Feynman lectures would have gone
over in such a world.
2. The Open Course ware movement and the MOOCs are delved
into in some detail. Losh is clearly no dreamer who looks at these as the
salvation for education. In fact Losh does a highly credible job on the MOOC
issues in examining the human side of them and what they do and frankly what
they do not do. As one who has examined well over a two dozen of them, I have seen
but one which is truly laudable, that of Lander at MIT, while the others range
from acceptable to incredibly useless. The low completion rate should be
reflective of something. In addition Losh does reflect upon the ambiguity of
expectations that the MOOCs can present, where the student may think they are
getting say an MIT education but in reality they are getting a canned videotape
lecture at best.
3. The issue of the honor code is well presented as well.
One element Losh examines and one which I am often concerned about is Peer
Grading and Coursera seems most attuned to that approach. First it is a term which
often has no meaning in environments such as MOOCs. There are no peers, namely
there are no intellectual equals. Instruction and questions are given in
English and half the students are less than proficient in English yet they
proceed to use their biases to grade others. One may ask why not just have the
proverbial million monkeys grade the papers and take the average! Peer grading
is useless. It is a way to pretend that the student is getting fair treatment.
Instead it just further facilitates the ranting of anonymous online voices to
present their own world views. The second point that Losh discusses is the use
of computers to examine for plagiarism. She does a superb job in presenting the
many dangers of such a process. For example, if one quotes someone then all too
often that quote is marked as plagiarism. In reality it is just a quote, it may
have been footnoted, put in quotes italicized, and yet the software will pick
it up and list the paper as plagiarized. The weaknesses of many computer based
educational tools are all too often exemplified by the blatant weaknesses in
these systems. Then there is what appears to be the issue of contracts by
adhesion that many students enter into whereby they give up their copyright
rights to their writings in order for them to be graded by some of these
systems.
4. Education as a product is an excellent discussion
section. However it may be useful to recall a quote from Drucker relating his
interaction with McLuhan:
"Did I hear you right," asked one of the
professors in the audience, "that you think that printing influenced the
courses that the university taught and the role of university all
together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence;
printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going
to be considered knowledge."
The change in technology changed not the way things were
presented but the very understanding of knowledge, namely what was true. Thus
if one follows Losh and the McLuhan view, the technologies that have been let
loose in the classrooms may very well be changing what we consider knowledge,
and that may be for good or ill.
5. Gaming is a new paradigm to engage the student. One
assumes the assumption is that if students can get involved in games than to
engage students in education one must turn it also into a game. However Losh
seems to explode that myth as well. She does so with many great examples of how
it become frivolous, useless and counter the original intent. Heidegger has a
concept called "throwness", part of being-in-itself. We know
something only by being “thrown” or involved in it. We know what a radiologist
does with an image and how he manipulates it for understanding by doing the
process ourselves. Meaning is obtained in dialog, in a conversational fashion,
with the ability to meet consensus. Gadamer and Heidegger both relate meaning
to the social process of communicating. Both also relate the evolution of
meaning to the ongoing set of discourses. But communications and throwness is
not what we see in gaming. In fact much of gaming is isolation and is the
antithesis of conversation. To that end Losh does a highly commendable job.
Overall Losh has written a commendable expose of the less
that laudable introductions of technologies into education and the potentials
for abuse and misuse. This book is a must read for any academic or those
interested in the future of the academy.
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