Distance Educating Ourselves to Death

It may appear that I have been neglecting my project, the BAAC blog. This is not the case. I actually started a post about mid November, published the work in progress for a few days in anticipation of returning to finish it when I was more inclined, but then never got around to completing my inspired post. So, one day I changed the status of that post back to draft, and I recently used the content from that post as the basis of one of my recent essays. Now that is what I call repurposing text. The completed essay was significantly different than my vision for my blog post, and it is possible that I might one day complete the entry.

I came up with several excellent ideas for blog posts recently, but until today I haven't had the inclination to compose anything. Perhaps over the Christmas holidays I will stockpile a set of posts so you, my dedicated blog audience, will not be without reading material for such extended periods of time ever again. But on to the content of today's post.

I was browsing the online journal Radical Pedagogy earlier this week and came across a few articles of interest. I was particularly intrigued by Are We Distance Educating Our Students to Death? Some Reflections on the Educational Assumptions of Distance Learning. article by Stephen Greenwald and David Rosner published in Radical Pedagogy's Spring 2003 Volume 5 Issue 1. I was interested not only because the BAAC program is primarily a DL program, but also because the article relates to Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business which I have recently read. Read the article if you have time... It might be some fun holiday reading for some of you, the loyal BAAC blog audience.

Greenwald and Rosner state the following in their introduction:

Distance learning is a topic to which scholars have recently devoted a great deal of attention. In our view, a crucial but neglected question about online education is raised, albeit implicitly, in Neil Postman’s work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). According to Postman, television, an image-based medium, necessarily imposes an entertainment modality upon cultural institutions, including educational ones. This is neither a conscious process nor one with sinister motivations. Rather it is a problem built into the very structure of image-based technology institutions, and the cognitive assumptions people hold when they encounter these institutions. This paper argues that the practice of using the computer as the main instructional medium in distance learning courses may similarly have the unintended consequence of reducing academic content to the level of mere entertainment. While Postman’s objections are not leveled specifically against online learning, we believe many of his criticisms regarding the use of television as an instructional source apply to the use of computers in distance education ventures as well.

Is that what we expect from the online component of our program... to be entertained? Have we just replaced our televisions with computer screens? Thanks to the influence of television, are we more willing to sit in front of our computers reading the posts in the discussion groups if only the content is short, snappy, and entertaining? The major complaint concerning our weekly discussions in our first DL course was that there were too many posts... too much to read. "Keep things succinct!" we cried, "If posts are too long I'm not going to read them." As Greenwald and Rosner state, if anything is perceived to be the slightest bit boring, then, one can change the channels without even getting off the couch... or in the case of us in the online learning environment, without leaving our computer chairs. Has the television remote been replaced by the computer mouse?

Will shorter, snappier blog entries increase the BAAC blog readership?