Teaching to the World From Central New Jersey | Hacker News Reader

Teaching to the World From Central New Jersey

chronicle.com

70 pointssootzoo8 comments

I've beat this drum a few times here on HN, but this is the future. Despite having been around this cycle a few times, people still always conceptualize adding computers to some existing process as "The existing process, but on a computer!" Call it the BOAC! fallacy. But that is never how it goes. Once the basic mechanics are worked out, computers don't merely augment a field, they rewrite it. The same is going to happen to education. In 20 years, there will still be some things that resemble modern lectures, but they will merely be one aspect of a rich ecosystem. In 20 years the idea that the 20th century was some sort of golden age of education or the model of perfection, an idea floating around a lot of minds today at varying levels of conscious awareness, will be seen as utterly laughable.

Is there a bit of loss in this model vs. the current one? Sure. But what compared to what was taken, what was gained is much, much greater.

Yes, the basic mechanisms of social interaction are changing now, even if we are aware of not the new forms that are emerging, and had to happen to education itself. I was intrigued about the "BOAC! fallacy" you mentioned, what does it mean?

I just named it. It's easier to see if you look back into history and read about what people thought was coming. I think the clearest example is in online news. People in the 1980s tended to talk about receiving a newspaper on your computer, but it's hard from 2012 to really understand what they mean by that because we automatically fill in the blanks with what we know about how online news works. What they really saw was getting a newspaper online. Not even to the extent that you would use the New York Times website today; literally, conceptual screenshots of a computer screen picturing a newspaper, in a layout that we would dismiss in fractions of a second nowadays as worthless. The bolder of them imagined that you would be able to customize the newpaper's articles. Only a small handful of visionaries had even a sketch of what we actually have today.

Because instead what we got was RSS, Slashdot HN and Reddit, comments on newsites, partisan blogs and just blogs in general, aggregators and communities and yes, even some fairly newspapery sites that still have radically different layout and affordances.

But that's just one particular example from living memory. I remember seeing people hypothesize about playing board games like chess online, which is chess-by-mail, BOAC. Sure, we do that, but we also play Team Fortress 2. There's still a lot of people trying to make sure that television is just like cable television, BOAC, instead of embracing what computers can do, as Netflix is doing, let alone the many people who are actually using computers on a small scale to make movies that would blow the socks off of even a fairly well equipped home town TV studio fifteen years ago.

Just about the only domain I can think of that has immediately perceived and embraced computers as fundamentally transformative and revolutionary is the arts. The instant anything like a synthesizer appeared in the world, musicians were using them to make new sounds in every way they could think of. Computer special effects didn't go through a phase in which they were just used to replicate existing effects more cheaply until the mid-200xs, which seems to be over. The very first video game was immediately something that could not be replicated in the real world.

Not surprising, as Coursera in 2012 selects for a different cohort of student than a sociology course at Princeton does.

You mean, Coursera 2012 selects primarily for students who are intelligent and actually interested in learning?

There have always been two places where (young) people from different classes and backgrounds mixed in a country - drafted in the army or at university. Britain was seen as a much more integrated society after 20 years of conscription petered out in the 60s.

I am struck by the number of reports on moocs that talk of online friendships - and I suspect that the open replacement for facebook will come out / be integrated into of coursera or udacity or the like.

Resources like Coursera and Udacity are fantastic. They are how I got started on the path to becoming a professional software developer. They truly do a great job of democratizing education (at least to those with the resources to access the Internet).

I've mainly thought of free online education as impacting the lives of the thousands of students who yearn to learn, but do not have the opportunity to do so.

It's great to see that it's a two way street in terms of impact. Hopefully feedback from students who aren't traditional college students will help humanity broaden its understanding of the world and help us identify biases our academic disciplines may have. And we can all come out better for it.

I felt like reading about a particle collider, except this time it was education that was projected against the wall of habits.

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